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For them, the second home comes first

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Times Staff Writer

YOU might call them nomads. People like Linda Taalman and Alan Koch, who rent a small apartment in L.A. and are building their home deep in the desert, three hours away. Or Liza and Blu Atwood, who rent a tiny apartment in town but just bought their dream house two hours away in Ojai. Both couples have babies and both belong to a new breed of urban pioneers who’ve bought or built what some might call second homes even before getting their first ones.

To understand their goals, you have to engage in some transformational thinking. A dream house, for them, is an inspirational place -- an ideal that tolerates little compromise.

In the case of Taalman and Koch, married architects with an 11-week-old daughter, that ideal house is small, elegant and green. It’s a glass-walled cabin they designed themselves, which they planned to set on land that would nourish their desire to be surrounded by nature. A simple quest, but difficult to achieve these days in L.A. So they’ve toppled tradition, stretched the concept of home, altered their definition of it.

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For most people, home is the place you return to every night, the place you leave when you want to get away. But for this creative, high-energy group, home is the place you drive to on weekends. It’s where you feel at home, rather than where you actually live during the week simply to be near your office.

LIKE most L.A. residents, Taalman and Koch started out wanting their home in the city. “We love the culture of L.A., and it’s where we have our business,” says Taalman, 32, who moved from New York with Koch four years ago, and married him a year later. After they’d designed their 1,000-square-foot house, they needed land on which to build it. “We looked all over town, but soon saw that land here is too expensive for such a modest-size house. The cost of real estate and taxes requires you to maximize your investment,” says Koch, 41.

In other words, they’d have to build big. And they didn’t want to.

“We like small. We didn’t want a giant stucco box that made financial sense,” Koch says. They started looking for land within a two- to-four hour drive from the city, where he and his wife share a one-bedroom Echo Park apartment ($1,500 a month) and a nearby office. They checked out Paso Robles near the coast, Three Rivers in the Central Valley and the Joshua Tree area in the desert. They fell in love with a 5-acre spread in Pioneertown, near Yucca Valley, for which they paid $65,000. But the reasonable price wasn’t all that enticed them.

“We found what we think is the same kind of retreat that Malibu must have been in the 1930s for people who lived in L.A.,” Koch says. “It’s a kind of frontier town, very sparsely populated, with one-room cabins, no stores, dirt roads and absolutely incredible natural beauty. By going that far away, you wind up in some extraordinary scenic surroundings, which makes the lengthy trip worthwhile. It’s not a bedroom community or a suburb, but an actual retreat.”

The couple started camping out on weekends as they put together their hilltop desert house. It’s a prefabricated kit house, which they plan to eventually market to others on the same aesthetic wavelength: walls of glass, a steel decking roof and, in their case, an endless view of desert flora and rock formations that look prehistoric. There’s not another house in sight when they look out over the landscape.

“We’ll keep our little apartment in the city for most weekdays,” Koch says, “but we’ll spend lots of time out here. It’s our home.”

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Liza and Blu Atwood were both renting small Santa Monica apartments when they decided to marry. She moved into his place. It was only three miles from the Internet firm where Blu works as director of business development. “He used to ride his bike to work every day,” says Liza, 37, who owns two Internet flower-importing businesses that she runs from home. Both are based in Ecuador, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer, and where she is working to set up an orphanage. When their daughter was born 16 months ago, the couple started a yearlong search for a house that would be within easy driving distance of Blu’s office.

“We looked everywhere, from Beverlywood to the ocean,” says Blu, 35. Their budget was up to $1 million, and they did find suitable places. “We put bids on two of them, and lost them both,” he says. Liza, less enthusiastic, says the homes were fine, but on small lots. None touched her heart, her preference for simplicity or her desire to feel at one with the land.

The couple decided to look in Ojai, where Blu had proposed to Liza. “The minute I walked in here, I knew this was it,” she says of the 1940s house they bought for about $1 million and which they moved into three months ago. At 1,700 square feet, it had everything she’d dreamed of: Mission-style windows with the original glass, high ceilings and the Craftsman feel of a shelter built by humans rather than machines.

What’s more, it sits on an unmanicured 1.5 acres with orange and oak trees, a stable and corral, and a rectangular swimming pool. “We’re not horse people,” she says, “so we’ll do something else with that area.”

They rent a small apartment in Brentwood, where Blu now spends two or three nights a week to avoid the commute. “He’s gone from a 10-minute commute to two hours,” Liza says. Both still love the city and say they’ll spend nights there when they go to the theater or other events. Liza hasn’t left L.A. behind in her daily life either.

Every Monday she drives with her daughter to Brentwood, where she has lunch with friends and goes to the Mommy & Me class she belonged to before the move. “They’re a great group of women, and I don’t want to lose that connection,” she says.

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But what the Atwoods found in Ojai, they say, they couldn’t find in the city. “Here, we can expand our house as we expand our family,” Liza says. “Look at those trees and that view,” she says, pointing toward the huge ancient oaks and the mountains behind them, silhouetted against the sky.

YES, it’s perfect -- for those willing to make trade-offs, enduring travel and split households to gain access to what they believe is essential, says Jennifer Wolch, director of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities. “They want both nature and culture. And they use two locations instead of one to get the whole package.”

New Yorkers have been doing something like this for years. But the lifestyle isn’t likely to become huge here, Wolch says. “To live that kind of life, you need a certain kind of income, a certain kind of household flexibility.” You also need to be in a job that allows you to work from multiple locations using technology. “That only occurs in a certain demographic.”

Stephanie Smith is in that group. With a Harvard degree in architecture, she has a resume that includes work for Rem Koolhaas and corporate clients such as Nike and Motorola.

She runs her design marketing firm from an office near the small Hollywood apartment (500 square feet) that she has rented for 10 years. Smith, 39, prefers to live in small spaces and says she has never been tempted to buy or build a sizable house. “It’s not a cost issue. It’s a lifestyle preference. I am committed to living in L.A.; I love the cultural opportunities, the spirit of the city. But I don’t like the drama of setting up a home in such a dense urban environment. And I do love nature.”

Smith was driving to a design job in the desert about five years ago when she saw a one-room homesteader cabin priced at $10,000. It had electricity but no plumbing. She bought it and set up a design lab on the 7-acre property, and when a more traditional 900-square-foot house across the road became available, she bought that too. She now spends about four days a week in L.A., and three days in Joshua Tree, where she lives in the house.

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“The area is a mix of small Western town and spiritual natural landscape. It’s totally different than L.A., and living out there has an enormous positive influence on my work. But don’t get me wrong. If the right, very small house came up in a place like Beachwood Canyon, I’d grab it in a minute.”

bettijane.levine@latimes.com

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