Designing in the Beverly Hills Flats: Where Design Has to Earn Everything

Most of the design moves architects reach for instinctively do not exist in the Beverly Hills Flats. There is no canyon to provide privacy, no ridge to create drama, no topography doing any of the atmospheric work. What you have instead is a flat grid of large, close lots on tree-lined streets, in one of the most recognizable neighborhoods in the world, and the design opportunity of making a home feel private, generous, and genuinely Californian on a site that does not hand those qualities to you automatically.

We think of the Beverly Hills Flats as one of the more interesting architectural challenges in Los Angeles. Not the most visually dramatic, and not the most technically complex, but the one that asks the most of the design itself, because the site asks the least. For a detailed look at The Flats as a real estate market, including its architectural history and what drives long-term value there, Joyce Rey’s recent piece on the neighborhood is worth reading.

Lots in the Beverly Hills Flats are large by any standard. In the 700 and 800 blocks approaching Sunset Boulevard, they run 25,000 to 30,000 square feet, and because the terrain is flat, every square foot of that is usable. No retaining walls eating into the footprint, no driveway switchbacks, no structural complications from grade change. On a hillside, you can spend a significant portion of a budget and a lot before a foundation is even poured. In The Flats, you start from level ground and you build.

The constraint is that a flat, open, fully usable lot is also a fully visible one. Neighbors are close on both sides. Streets are active and walkable in a way that hillside canyon roads are not. The site does not provide natural enclosure the way a canyon wall does, or natural privacy the way elevation does, and the expectation from clients in this neighborhood is the same one they would have anywhere else in Beverly Hills: a home that feels private, expansive, and connected to the outdoors in the way that California architecture is supposed to feel.

That gap, between what the site provides and what the client expects, is where the design work lives.

The most common question we work through in the Beverly Hills Flats is how to create genuine enclosure on a site that has no natural walls. In a canyon, you get privacy almost for free. The topography reads as a boundary, the mature vegetation follows the slope, and even a home with significant glazing can feel removed from its neighbors. In The Flats, you have to design that enclosure deliberately, from the ground up, as part of the architectural program rather than as a landscaping afterthought.

Three moves tend to do the most work here. The first is wall and screen placement, which means thinking carefully from the earliest sketches about where solid walls face the street and neighboring properties, and where glass faces inward toward the courtyard or garden. The orientation of the home is not just about capturing views or maximizing light; it is about deciding what the house presents to the outside world and what it keeps for the people inside.

The second is treating the lot as a series of rooms rather than a single open plane. A flat property of 20,000 or 25,000 square feet, if you organize it as one undifferentiated expanse, will feel exposed and large in an uncomfortable way. If you break it into a front arrival zone, a central garden or pool courtyard, and a more private rear area, you get a sequence of spaces that feels contained and considered even without a single fence or hedge visible from the street.

The third is pool and water feature placement. In a canyon home, the pool often sits at the edge of the site to capture the view below. In The Flats, we tend to bring the pool closer to the house and orient it as a courtyard feature rather than a backyard amenity, so that the outdoor living area reads as a continuation of the interior rather than a separate space at the back of the property. The result is a home that feels like it turns inward, in the best sense of that phrase, creating its own world rather than performing for its setting.

Privacy has a cost in The Flats, and it tends to surprise people. The usual answer to close neighbors and active streets is a privacy hedge, and in this neighborhood those hedges can rise as much as twenty feet. They do their job. They also make it difficult to get light into the house, particularly because most of these homes sit on streets that run north and south.

South-facing sun has no way to penetrate a wall of green that tall, which leaves some of the darkest rooms, ironically, on the south side of the house, the side that ought to be the brightest. A large, flat, open lot sounds like it would be full of light. The hedge that makes it private can be exactly what keeps the light out.

We start by studying the angles of the sun on the specific lot. From there, light courtyards let us scoop light into the house and distribute it throughout, including to the rooms that would otherwise sit in shade. A courtyard cut into the plan where the sun can reach it catches what the hedge would block and carries it inward. Because the courtyard is enclosed by the house itself, the light arrives without giving up the privacy the hedge was there to protect.

The California indoor/outdoor expectation does not disappear in The Flats. If anything, clients in this neighborhood expect it more than most. But the execution is different from what we do on a hillside or a coastal site, where the landscape and the view do the connecting work and the architecture mostly gets out of the way.

In The Flats, you have to design the outdoor destination. The landscape, the pool, the covered loggia or terrace, the planting, these are not amenities you add once the building design is resolved. They are part of the spatial organization from the first site plan, because they are doing structural work that the terrain is not. A well-placed garden between the main living space and a property line can read as a private courtyard rather than a side yard. A covered outdoor dining area positioned correctly becomes a room, not a patio.

This is also where materiality becomes especially important on a flat lot. When you are not relying on elevation or topography to create a sense of arrival, the materials at grade carry more of the atmospheric weight. The stone paving at the entry, the wood of a covered terrace ceiling, the planting that screens a boundary without making the property feel walled off, all of it works together to create the interiority and warmth that the site does not provide on its own. The organic modern palette that we have been drawn to in our recent work applies directly here: warm, natural materials that make a flat lot feel grounded and specific to its place rather than simply expensive.

One thing a flat lot can do that a hillside often cannot: go big inside. No slope constraints on the foundation, no structural complications from grade change, no ceiling heights dictated by the topography of the site. In The Flats, you can design the vertical experience of a home with very few of the limitations that hillside work imposes.

Double-height volumes, light wells, clerestory windows high on a wall that faces a neighbor rather than a view, ceiling heights that change as you move from public to private spaces, these become the tools that create drama and arrival when the site itself provides none. A home in The Flats can have a two-story foyer that makes arrival feel significant even though you stepped off a flat sidewalk and walked through a front door at grade. It can have a great room where the ceiling rises to twenty feet and the light comes from above, reading as generous and open even though the glass wall faces a garden rather than a canyon.

We think about this as designing the vertical dimension of a home when the horizontal is already given. The lot is large and flat. That is settled before we arrive. The question is what kind of experience you build within it, and a flat lot with height, light, and material warmth can feel as dramatic and considered as anything we have done on a hillside site.

The Beverly Hills Flats is not the easiest place to design a home. It rewards architects who are willing to do the work the site does not do for them, and who understand that the particular challenges of a flat, close lot in a dense, celebrated neighborhood are worth approaching with intention rather than answering with a tall hedge and accepting the dark rooms that come with it.

We have found that clients in the Beverly Hills Flats often arrive with a clearer sense of what they want than clients on more dramatic sites, because the setting does not distract the conversation. There is no view to argue about, no canyon to position the living room toward. What they want is a home that feels private without feeling closed, luxurious without feeling showy, and connected to the outdoors in a way that is particular to their lot and how their household actually lives. Those are the best design conversations, and The Flats tends to produce them.

If you are considering a project in Beverly Hills, whether a new build on an existing lot, a full rebuild, or a renovation of a home that has not kept pace with how you want to live in it, we are glad to talk through what the site asks for.