A Walled House of Yore in a City of High-Tech Security

It is 2 in the morning and another false alarm is wailing from the home security system. What is setting it off this time? A bug in the smoke detector? Wind rattling a window sensor? If only you could remember the four-digit override code that shuts the thing off. Is it the birth date of your firstborn? The jangled mind does not compute quickly. Meanwhile, dogs are barking and neighbors are cursing.

Is this the peace of mind that a $10,000 state-of-the-art security system is supposed to buy? It’s enough to make you dream of moats and turrets and castle walls crowned with iron spikes.

In Los Angeles, fantasies sometimes come to life just around the corner. Such is the case on a street in Hollywood where the security of one home has not been left to the vagaries of electronic bells and whistles. Instead of high-tech gadgetry, there is a wall, high and thick and bristling with shards of broken glass embedded in the stucco.

There is no printed warning of what will happen if you try to breach this security system. There isn’t one of those blue and yellow lollipop-shaped signs poking out of a flower bed advising intruders that they might run into an armed rent-a-cop. No need for any of that here. The wall rises from the sidewalk without vines or shrubs to soften its rough countenance. High above, the row of jagged glass glints like sharks’ teeth.

A place like this can look pretty strange on a typical Los Angeles street. Although the wall forms one side of the house, there are no windows from which to see in or out. In a city that loves to show off, this is an architectural anomaly, a place that seems to have turned its back on the world.

The walled house stirs mixed emotions. People are dismayed by the fierce facade. Does the walled house stand for an embattled city of the future where everyone has retreated to isolated enclaves segregated by class and race, protected by guards and gates, razor wire and chunks of broken glass?

But a person can stand and stare at the place and think other thoughts as well. Isn’t it possible that inside, barely a step away from the busy street, someone has created a different world, safe but exotic like the treehouse in “Swiss Family Robinson”?

Madelleine Gallay bought the property behind the wall with the broken glass in Hollywood because she wanted safety and privacy to re-create her own life after a divorce. She did not construct the wall nor does she know who built it, but she was instantly attracted.

“I was moving into the city, and I wanted a house that was vulgarly strong but also one where I could be myself and indulge my own imagination,” she said. “I didn’t want a front yard, or a picture window or a lot of the things that go with a normal house. I didn’t want the world looking in on me.”

Gallay spent four years working on her new home--actually two houses on a double lot behind the fortified wall.

Inside, she let her imagination run free. In a play on a Persian rug, she painted a floor to look like the original design on a pack of Camel cigarettes. A bedroom is decorated for the tropics with bamboo furniture and mosquito netting. Elsewhere, rough-hewn wooden furniture, a free-form fireplace gouged out of the wall and cabinets daubed with brown and white spots like cowhide are part of Gallay’s whimsical interpretation of a Tuscan farmhouse.

The exterior remains what it was four years ago with two disordered frame bungalows built into a fortified masonry wall--a poker face staring balefully at the street.

“I’d always had this dream of living in a way-back shack, and I found it, of all places, in the middle of the city,” Gallay said.

Images of life in walled societies hold a fascination for many Americans accustomed to the democratic architecture of open spaces, easy access and unobstructed views. Away from home, we are drawn to the labyrinthine world of the casbah, to the walled Italian hill town or to Mexican villages such as Patzcuaro and San Miguel de Allende with their arcades and courtyards. The domestic architecture of ancient Greece was like that--its best face turned inward--and some architects believe that society was better off for it.

“A single-family house isolates you more than a walled compound,” said Stefanos Polyzoides, a Los Angeles architect who grew up in a walled city in Greece. “You are closer to people within the walls, and as a result you build up a greater sense of community.”

With friends and family living with her behind her wall, Gallay has created her own small community. Yet, she is aware that a place such as hers can have a far different connotation in the modern world. In many Third World cities, homes surrounded by high walls and broken glass are symbols of feudal privilege. They protect the oppressors.

She admits that visitors are often taken aback by the wall and its accessories.

“People are like, ‘Oh, my God!’ blown apart by it.”

But she does not apologize for it.

“I don’t know if I could like living anywhere as much as I do here. I know I wouldn’t feel as safe.”