Highlands: Planned to the Inch, and Miles From the Urban Throb
Whatever else you can say about the Westside, it is not suburban, at least not in a Steven Spielberg-”Leave It to Beaver”-Orange County kind of way.
On the Westside, you would be hard-pressed to find an expanse of cul-de-sacs with rows of garage doors standing watch over streets that are as clean as they are empty, while nearby shopping malls and faraway offices pulse with all the activity missing from these safely serene streets.
That is not the world of the Westside--except in the Pacific Palisades Highlands. There, surrounded by the Santa Monica Mountains and isolated from the rest of the world except for a two-mile, curving access road, is a perfectly planned community of townhomes, condominiums and massive houses separated from each other only by the few feet mandated by city fire codes.
Of course, this is still the Westside of Los Angeles, so these tract homes and units start somewhere above $300,000 and move up to the multimillion-dollar price range, but the Highland’s appearance is still like the suburbia we know from television. It is a world where all streets curve, both to mask the gridded regularity of the subdivision and to follow the contours of the land. There are no stores, schools or civic buildings. You passed those back at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Palisades Drive on your way into the complex.
Almost every building, whether a single-family house, a condominium or a townhome, is clad in a grade of brown, tan, pink or mauve stucco, usually accented with wood trim and surmounted by a sloping roof of either Spanish tile or shingle. The front doors, when they are present, are crowded out by the rows of garage doors.
What is most astounding is the density of the place: Giant Tudor castles nestle right up to Spanish haciendas, and, in the condominiums, the master bedroom often looks out across 10 feet of common space at the next slice of privacy.
The Pacific Highlands area is the largest planned community of its kind in the area. Developed by the Sunset Petroleum Co. in the late 1960s, it takes up a large chunk of Santa Ynez Canyon. The last part of the development, the Summit, is now filling up with homes that use the steep slopes and proximity of the ocean to create view lots in an abundance not found anywhere else on the Westside.
The location combines with the fact that there is only one access road so that affluent inhabitants feel safe from assumed urban, if not natural, predators. This has made the Highlands one of the most desirable communities in Los Angeles. Every inhabitant I spoke to loves the security, the closeness to nature, the views and the homogeneity of the population. This is a little bit of suburban heaven dropped into the pressure cooker of the Westside.
The Highlands is so successful because of its timing (these days, you could never get away with developing a section of the Santa Monica Mountains like this); its planning, which included some innovative uses of communal driveways and shared alleys to maximize the developable space, and the fact that it offers all the bland, empty and private appropriation of nature for which suburbia is famous. The Highlands has it all--if you can afford it and don’t mind living with the ghosts of what was lost to create this little Xanadu.
