A Space Odyssey: Redefining Privacy

Call it the Latinization of L.A.’s private space. No wait, better make that the Japanization. Or would you even believe the Hollandization?

Actually, no sociological shorthand can easily sum up the dramatic revisions in the way Southern Californians today are creating and experiencing privacy in their homes. In this region of explosive population growth, shrinking residential lots, multiplying nonnuclear families, rising home-based employment and, above all, a housing boom driven by a red-hot economy, many traditional assumptions about privacy and private space are going the way of Ozzie and Harriet.

And not just in our own backyard. As America begins to fill in and fill up and “sprawl” becomes a political issue, the traditional two-story saltbox or ranch house set on an acre-sized lot with a picket fence is yielding to some very different paradigms of domestic seclusion. Many American homes now hide their treasures behind fortress-like walls such as you’d see in Madrid or Mexico City. Urbanites seem willing to live stacked like Tokyo commuters just to obtain a partial waterfront view. Family life has turned inward, focusing its energies on cavernous “great rooms” and “media rooms” that are to the old-fashioned Victorian parlor what a DVD is to a Victrola. Perhaps not since the Holland’s 17th century golden age has a middle-class been so obsessed with the twin passions of home design and scientific advancement.

Domestic privacy is being redefined even in suburbia, once touted as a haven from cities’ teeming humanity but now itself convulsed by NIMBY feuds and traffic jams. Small wonder the so-called “new urbanists” are trying to revive turn-of-the-century spatial values in an increasingly claustrophobic nation. “You can see that a lot of people are trying to grab the tree of nostalgia in the winds of change,” says Santa Barbara architect Barry Berkus.

In Southern California, whose population is projected to swell 43% over the next 20 years, the clash between past ideals of private space and present-day realities may be sharper than ever. From the gentrifying bohemian enclave of the Venice Beach area to Pacoima garages serving as makeshift immigrant living quarters, from Orange County’s low-income-housing crisis to a budding culture war between horse-fanciers and helicopters in Glendale’s Rancho neighborhood, Southern Californians are struggling to make do with less space than their forbears enjoyed.

Former residential frontiers like Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County have seen their average lot sizes drop 50% in the last 30 years. “I’m showing homes in the $400,000, $500,000 range, and you walk into that backyard, you can’t take 10 paces,” says real estate agent Jerry Moloughney.

Lacking the Manhattanites’ “don’t tread on me” stare, Angelenos have always relied on wide-open spaces to soothe their psyches and keep peace among a changing population. But the region’s shift from a loose constellation of small cities and tract-house archipelagoes to a high-density metropolis is proving awkward in what cultural analyst William Alexander McClung calls “the world capital of the detached private house.”

“People feel the only direction for improvement in their lives is to increase their amount of private space, but there’s got to be a natural limit to that,” says McClung, an English professor at Mississippi State University and author of the recently published “Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles” (University of California Press). “Huge as L.A. is, there isn’t enough space for everybody to have that kind of space. And now people are rubbing against that, and they’re not sure how to deal with it.”

The rift between the idealized SoCal landscape of Crusoe-esque seclusion and the densely built, smoggy desert we actually inhabit, says McClung, is rooted in a historic fissure between two mythical ideals: Southern California as a boundless, unspoiled natural Eden and Southern California as the dynamic, futuristic uber-town that its boosters like to tout as “the city of the 21st century.” Caught between competing visions--one Arcadian, the other utopian--”the mentality of Los Angeles is trapped in anxious aspirations simultaneously striving to go forward and to turn back,” McClung writes.

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In few parts of L.A. is this conflict more pronounced than Venice Beach. While still a hangout for bodybuilders and incense peddlers, the once funky but increasingly fashionable community is feuding over public access to its precious sand and surf. Megan, who works in the film industry and asked that her real name not be used in this story, has watched tensions mount over the issue since she and her husband built their 6,500-square-foot contemporaryhome three years ago.

Unlike most of their neighbors, Megan says, she and her husband favor extending a partially built public sidewalk south from Venice Pier to the Marina del Rey channel, even though it would mean giving up a section of the pathway that now functions as their de facto private patio. “My husband’s a New Yorker, he loves the beach, he loves the human tide--as long as it’s not staring right in our windows. The beach is such a limited resource. We’re so privileged to be able to have this ground that it seems unfair that we should not share it with others.”

Concepts of privacy and domestic space in Southern California have been continually reshaped by a wide variety of sometimes contradictory influences, beginning with our “Spanish colonial” and Mexican heritage. As British architectural historian Reyner Banham pointed out in his seminal 1971 study, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” (Penguin Press), the region’s dwellings periodically erupt with private verandas, arcaded courtyards and other echoes of this partly real, partly imagined “Mediterranean” legacy.

Later, in the 1920s through the 1950s, European internationalists like Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra and home-grown modernists like Charles and Ray Eames united glass walls, “flexible” multipurpose rooms and abundant natural light in what has become the area’s signature open-air “indoor-outdoor” aesthetic.

Gradually, these domestic privacy models challenged the spatial values imported to L.A. by transplanted Midwesterners, with their wraparound green lawns and exposed front porches--hybrid spaces that hinted at neighborliness but also kept a proprietary distance from passersby. “I think the Anglo sense of privacy has always suffered from a contradiction that the Mediterranean has not suffered from,” observes McClung. “To me, the core of this lies in this Anglo desire to project the house and to show it, hoping that there will be an invisible wall to protect it. And in L.A., faith in that invisible wall has disintegrated.”

Even for the affluent, privacy is being further eroded by the tendency to build homes right up to the edge of property lines. “People would rather build to the lot line than worry about their neighbor,” says John Shumway, president of Market Profiles, a Costa Mesa real estate research consulting firm. Some see the construction of gigantic homes with cathedral-scale foyers and master bedroom suites as big as baseball diamonds to be an illusionistic response to smaller lot sizes.

“The sizes [of homes] appear to be much larger than they really are,” says Realtor Moloughney. “But the developers say, ‘Well, if I used to be able to put four homes on a square acre, but now I can put six or eight homes on a square acre, why not?’ ” In the current seller’s market, Moloughney says, developers also feel less obligated to provide traditional privacy buffers such as walls, fencing or protective landscaping as part of a new home’s purchase price. Construction of gated communities, expensive to operate and often perceived as culturally sterile, also has slowed in recent years. And while a few years ago the city of Los Angeles raised the maximum allowable height for side and rear fences in flatlands areas from 6 to 8 feet, other regional municipalities haven’t all followed suit.

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With older homes, traditional buffers can still work wonders. Listening to a small fountain’s musical gurgle and a horse’s contented snort, you wouldn’t suspect that Joanne Hedge’s Glendale garden was a middle-class paradise imperiled. Then your ears pick up I-5’s muffled thunder. The scream of jets turning east from Burbank Airport. The flutter of helicopter skycams rushing toward the latest high-speed calamity. “It sounds like Vietnam sometimes,” Hedge says with a rueful laugh.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the 57-year-old ad graphics agent moved to the equestrian-friendly Rancho neighborhood four years ago, she was eager to trade the Hollywood Hills’ sophisticated eclecticism for low-key suburban-style repose. Yet despite the intrusions, Hedge has secured a separate peace for herself and her half-dozen cats. Graceful ficus trees shield her garden from prying eyes. A radio swaths the outdoor patio in classical white noise. A 7-foot wooden fence helps hold the commuter drone at bay. “This is my super-sanctuary,” she says, “and I do feel like I have a great deal of privacy here.”

Radical changes in the post-1970s American family also have redrawn privacy lines: fewer children, more single adults living alone, high rates of divorce, more women working outside the home and an increase in tandem property ownership by two unrelated people. When escalating rents drove Lorna Sloan out of the South Bay last spring, the 33-year-old single mom decided to take a roommate for the first time in her life. Since June, she and her 7-year-old son, Deshawn, have shared a two-bedroom Huntington Beach apartment with another single mother and her two young daughters.

While the arrangement has its drawbacks, Sloan says, it’s helping her save money until she and her boyfriend can marry next year. In the relatively brief time she and Deshawn spend at home, Sloan says, she finds privacy in a small patio off her room. “I don’t really use it, but it just kind of gives you that sense of extra space. I can have my sliding glass door open and take in the fresh air.”

Another demographic factor in rearranging private space is the Internet-fed surge in the number of adults working at home (now an estimated 20 million Americans). But Jim Tolpin, author of “The New Family Home” (Taunton Books), says working at home shouldn’t entail monastic seclusion, particularly if you’re a parent with young children. “They don’t leave you alone if you’re secluded,” he says. “They leave you alone if they can see you.”

Indeed, many intimate aspects of family life are coming out of the closet, so to speak. Bedrooms are more likely to include PCs or other entertainment equipment. Bathrooms are less likely to be shunted out of visitors’ sight lines.

In his catalog essay for last summer’s exhibition “The Un-Private House” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, curator Terence Riley wrote of “the increased fluidity in the concept of privacy.” Describing one recent architectural project in which a Dutch systems analyst connected six cameras and various appliances in his house to the Internet, Riley asked rhetorically whether the Dutch, who “practically invented the notion of domestic privacy are now the least compelled by it?”

Critics who berate voyeuristic “reality TV” shows like “Big Brother” (originally developed in the Netherlands) may be missing what such shows have to say about contemporary tensions between privacy versus community. That debate is at the heart of our changing ideas about domestic space.

Anne Voorhies, a Ventura County architectural contract administrator, has experienced privacy in several different communities. Raised in Sacramento by parents who spent summer evenings socializing on their front porch, she later lived in a San Luis Obispo neighborhood so closely bound that residents would throw nightly cocktail and dinner parties for each other. Today she makes her home in a 1,300-square-foot condo where she barely sees her neighbors unless they’re out washing their cars.

Like the rest of us, she’s trying to balance the urges for tranquillity and society. “I don’t have any objection to people wanting so much privacy, but [not] if we’re doing it to the extent that we become a bunch of hermits,” Voorhies says. “I want privacy in my bedroom. I don’t necessarily want privacy in my frontyard.”

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