Goodby, Back Yard--Hello, VLH

Watching your own city change is like studying your face each morning in the mirror. Things happen so slowly that you tend to miss the important stuff. For example, take the arrival of the Very Large House in Los Angeles.

You know what I mean by Very Large House, right? Not the mansions of Bel-Air or Hancock Park. This is the new stuff that first appeared in the early 1980s. The stuff that started showing up in neighborhoods that never had mansions or anything like them.

Someone would tear down a standard, Life-of-Riley house in Santa Monica or Westwood and replace it with something that stretched from property line to property line. Two stories, four baths, and a bedroom upstairs that would have delighted a Nicaraguan banana king.

At first they seemed curiosities. But no more. The VLH is everywhere now. In the Hollywood Hills, builders seem incapable of putting up anything else.

The other day I was driving through a San Fernando neighborhood of the type that is populated by dusty ranchettes and swamp coolers. There, at the end of the block, was a brand-new, splendid house big enough to house a YMCA.

And some neighborhoods have been nearly taken over. There are blocks of Encino where VLHs have become the majority, and they rule like pashas over the older homes. You figure it won’t be long until the holdouts are gone.

You could rail over the Very Large House for a number of reasons. Why, for example, are houses getting bigger as families get smaller? And so forth.

But that is not my intent today. The VLH is more interesting than that. I believe its arrival and subsequent success means that one cultural epoch is ending in Los Angeles, albeit slowly, and another beginning.

Because, more than anything else, what the Very Large House represents is a rejection of the old way of life in Los Angeles. Which is to say, life in the back yard.

By “back yard,” I mean the whole shebang made famous here in the ‘40s and ‘50s: the pool, the BBQ, the lanai, the kiddie swings, and all that went with a life lived in the back yard. A life where you moved inside and outside the house almost without noticing.

The success of the VLH suggests that the appeal of the back-yard life has gone into serious decline. These new houses offer very little in the way of back yard. In fact, their builders have made the conscious choice to sacrifice the outside and convert it to more bedrooms, more baths.

You may still get a pool with a VLH, and you may still get a BBQ. But these are vestiges, mere gestures to the past. The pools function largely as decoration and yards are reduced to landscaping strips. In a VLH, the real life takes place within its walls. The concept of Los Angeles as a city of private gardens has been rejected in favor of bricks and mortar.

But just why is not so clear. I have a friend who lives on a pleasant street in Encino and now finds himself surrounded by VLHs. You can sit in his back yard--the last real back yard on the street--and feel the sense of enclosure.

It’s the Middle Easterners, he says. Their notions of private property usually entail a protected space and in Los Angeles the closest version of that notion is a house that goes two stories up and occupys all of the lot.

Maybe. But it does not explain why so many red-blooded Americans are making the same choices. There is something else happening and it could be this: The VLH is one more sign of a city that has become a dramatically more hostile place. A place where the back yard no longer obtains.

In truth, most back yards are now places under frequent if not continuous assault from one or more symbols of the age: leaf blowers, large and small trucks, chain saws, the neighborhood rock ‘n’ roller, aircraft flyovers, motorcycle drive-bys.

And so the back yard is progressively abandoned. And in its stead comes the VLH.

But that’s just a theory, of course. The truth is that no one really understands the message of the VLH, why it came to Los Angeles and why it triumphed over the house-and-garden. All we know is that it came, flourished, and a part of Los Angeles died with it.