Designing for Indoor-Outdoor Living: A Los Angeles Architect’s Approach

There is a moment in almost every early client conversation when the outside comes up.

It used to happen gradually. We would mention the loggia, or ask about entertaining, and the idea would grow from there. Now clients arrive with it already on their list, alongside the great room and the primary suite. They want to know how the kitchen connects to the terrace. They want to understand where the pool sits relative to the main living space. The outside is not an afterthought. It is part of the brief.

In Los Angeles, this makes particular sense. The climate is one of the great design assets on the planet. When a home is designed well, the boundary between inside and outside does not disappear. It becomes intentional. Every threshold, every material transition, every degree of orientation is a decision. The homes we are most proud of are the ones where those decisions feel inevitable.

Most people think about indoor-outdoor living in terms of what they can see: big glass walls, a covered terrace, a kitchen with a pass-through window. Those are all real. But the design conversation starts earlier, at the threshold itself.

The threshold is the moment where inside becomes outside. In homes where this transition is handled well, you often cannot point to exactly where it happens. The flooring material continues from the interior through the door opening onto the terrace. The ceiling plane extends beyond the glass. The change in temperature or light is gradual rather than abrupt.

When a threshold is handled poorly, you feel it immediately. You step down. The materials change abruptly. The proportions shift. The two spaces feel like they belong to different projects.

We pay close attention to this from the beginning of the design process. The conversation about indoor-outdoor connection is not a conversation about doors and windows. It is a conversation about how a home is organized, how materials flow through it, and what relationship the building has to its site.

Los Angeles gives us an extraordinary range of sites. Coastal lots in Malibu or Marina del Rey have a different relationship to sun and breeze than a hillside property in the Bird Streets or Bel Air. A flat urban lot in West Hollywood presents different opportunities than an expansive estate in a canyon.

On a new build, orientation is one of the most consequential decisions we make: which direction the primary living spaces face, where the glass is concentrated, how the roof line manages shade in summer and admits light in winter. Get it right and the house feels bright and temperate through every season without mechanical systems working against you. Get it wrong and no amount of beautiful finish work will fix it. On an existing home, orientation is fixed. But the question we ask is different, not lesser: where does the light already enter well, and how do we design the indoor-outdoor connection around what the house is already doing right?

For indoor-outdoor design specifically, orientation determines which rooms earn a direct outdoor connection and which do not. Not every room should open to the outside. The homes that feel most coherent are the ones where the outdoor spaces extend from the rooms that anchor daily life: the kitchen, the main living area, the primary suite. Not applied evenly around the perimeter, but placed where they are actually used.

Southern California’s prevailing afternoon breeze also matters more than most clients initially expect. A home that captures the breeze naturally becomes one that its owners actually want to open. That is when indoor-outdoor design becomes a lived experience rather than a selling point.

One of the main advantages of using renderings in our design meetings is that they provide clients with a clear and accurate representation of the project. This is particularly important when the design is complex or unconventional, making it difficult for clients to visualize the finished product. With renderings, clients can see the design from every angle, including the interior and exterior, and even the planned views, which helps them get a better understanding of the project as a whole.

The Macapa Drive project, the Flying Wing house originally designed by Harry Gesner in 1974, is one we return to often when talking about how indoor and outdoor space relate to each other.

The site is a hillside lot with commanding views. Rather than treating the pool as a separate amenity tucked to one side, we placed it on axis with the house, extending the geometry of the architecture out into the landscape. Retaining walls expanded the usable yard. The result is a relationship between the built structure and the ground plane that reads as one continuous composition rather than a house with a pool attached to it.

That is the goal on every project. The outdoor space should feel like it was always meant to be there.

This is one of the most common questions we receive from clients on canyon or hillside lots. The answer is yes, but it requires a different approach than a flat property. On challenging topography, the outdoor connection often happens vertically as much as horizontally. A terrace cantilevered from the living level, a roof deck that captures the view, or a loggia that bridges two levels of the home can all create genuine outdoor living space without requiring a large flat yard. The constraint is often what makes the solution interesting.

The key is circulation. When a home is designed for entertaining with indoor-outdoor flow in mind, guests move naturally between the two spaces without being directed. The kitchen, the main living area, and the outdoor dining or lounge zone are organized so the path between them is wide, intuitive, and consistent in material and level. Pocket doors or large sliding systems that disappear into the wall are part of it, but the organization of the plan is what makes the experience feel easy rather than choreographed.

Yes, and frankly some of our most considered indoor-outdoor work has happened on urban lots precisely because the constraints are real. Privacy from neighbors, street noise, and a smaller footprint all have to be part of the design response. We use brise soleil, strategic landscaping, water features, and orientation to create outdoor spaces that feel genuinely private and quiet even in dense settings. The goal is not to ignore the context but to design within it

Indoor-outdoor living in Los Angeles is not a style. It is a fundamental question about how a home relates to its site, its climate, and the way its owners actually live. We ask that question at the start of every project, before any drawings exist.

The answer is different every time. That is what makes it worth asking.

Dean Larkin Design was established in Los Angeles in 1999 and this modern architecture firm maximizes the intrinsic potential of a location, including its available natural light sources. Dean Larkin is very familiar with both historical and contemporary design in the entire Los Angeles area, and the firm endeavors to achieve a complexity that is multi-layered with an effortless elegance. For a design that is modern and innovative, unlocks your location’s innate potential by making specific use of light, views and more, and uniquely designed for the way you live, contact Dean Larkin for a consultation.