Her life wide open

Chan Luu had no need of a house 14 months ago. She and her husband had built their own modern house in Rustic Canyon, and it suited them just fine. But on their way home from breakfast one weekend, they stopped to check out a new home in Pacific Palisades. “I walked in and I could not speak,” Luu recalls. “The house took my breath away.”

She had no idea that she would need the house so much and so soon.

The whitewashed loft-like space has walls of glass that slide away, leaving it literally suspended in open air above Santa Monica Canyon. Luu can feel the breeze, smell the ocean, watch the birds fly by (and sometimes through) her living room.

“Although I am inside, I am really outside in this place” the fashion and jewelry designer says, as she shows a guest around. “I’ve always said I’d rather live outdoors than in. Now I can.”

Even in a city where so many houses are perched on hills, with jaw dropping views, Luu’s jewel box of a dwelling is a rarity. Snuggled high into the canyon wall, it is an unusual abstract shape inside and out, with tilting walls, sloping ceilings, windows in unexpected places and an interior bathed in luminescent light that bounces off the white walls.

There are none of the usual balconies or decks to give a sense of where the dwelling ends and the rest of the world begins. Nothing but a 3-foot-high glass balustrade around the edge of the main floor separates Luu from the great beyond.

The architects named the dwelling Hill House but Luu has since renamed it Heal House because of its healing effects.

LIKE many L.A. stories, Luu’s is a saga of love intertwined with land. “This house is very sexy, very happy, very young and fun,” says Luu, dressed in brown silk and tennis shoes.

The main floor, with 9-foot-tall sliding glass walls, has a high, sloping, ceiling with skylights over a 50-foot span of wide open space for living and dining. The upstairs library and office is an open gallery that overlooks the main floor and offers a slightly different perspective of the awe-inspiring view.

Down a few whitewashed steel stairs, the master suite also faces the canyon. It is an upbeat, fluid floor plan that makes the 3,600-square-foot house feel compact and cozy -- the exact opposite, Luu says, of the “very luxurious, serious, modern” home that she and her husband had built together.

It was a project that brought them stress and stretched their relationship to its breaking point. As an unmarried couple who’d lived together for 10 years, they had developed two successful fashion businesses, his and hers.

“We worked so well together; we are both creative, with strong personalities. We helped each other to succeed,” Luu says. Then they bought land, hired an architect and decided to marry before they embarked on building a house that would be “very beautiful and very Zen.”

It all seemed so perfect, she says. But the construction process caused them to clash on all sorts of house-related issues. Even after their house was finished and they had moved in, Luu says, she was content to relax and enjoy it, but her husband wasn’t.

“I loved the house the way it was. But John kept wanting to change things. He continuously wanted change, change, change -- the structure, the furniture, everything. I go to work in the morning, and want to come home to a peaceful environment. I don’t want to come home to all this construction and disruption going on after the house is already finished.”

Finally, Luu says, she started thinking: “John, you should have this house for yourself. You should own it and do it your way ‘cause I don’t want to come home to more mess after we’ve gone through two years of it.”

In a sense, Luu says, “you could say that building the house brought us closer together, when we married. And building that house is what tore us apart.”

On Dec. 12, 2004, the couple walked into Hill House as looky-loos. On Dec. 26, they had what Luu calls “a huge and final falling out.” By the new year, she had made an offer and opened escrow on the Hill House. “That was it. I never even looked at another house; I had zero hesitation in my heart that this house should be mine,” she says.

The pair separated permanently and amicably, she says. And Luu’s life in her new house began.

If ever a house and a human could be called soul mates, Luu and her house would qualify. It’s not just a case of love at first sight, of a person who’s found an ideal space in which to live. It goes beyond appreciation of fine architecture or amenities. It is a case of complete communion between a person and a place.

The athletic Luu, who hikes, bikes, skis and scuba dives, has always wanted to live with nature and has finally found a way to do it. “When I’m inside, I’m actually outside. This is the most comfortable, friendly, happy house I’ve ever been in. When I come home, I feel its soothing effects. It heals me from my travels, from my breakup, from everything. In winter, it’s warm. I rarely have to turn on the heat. In summer it’s cool, with a gentle breeze. I don’t need air conditioning. It’s big -- but because it’s stacked vertically, it feels cozy.”

Luu, 55, moved in with little furniture and has filled the house slowly with what she calls “some basics”--a pale wood dining table, black leather dining chairs, a fuchsia credenza and a white sofa -- all from Cappellini, a Milan-based furniture company. A constant traveler to Asia, India and Europe, Luu collects art objects and displays them in her all-white house, which could easily double as a gallery.

“I could live in this house with nothing but a bed and a chair,” she says. “It is just that welcoming and comfortable.”

The decor is modern, minimal and eclectic reflecting Luu’s life. She left Vietnam in the early 1970s for Boston University where she earned a business degree, she says, to please her parents. Then she followed her creative heart to Los Angeles where she fulfilled her own goal of becoming a designer by studying at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. She became a fashion buyer for a store in Redondo Beach, then had her own little boutique in Rancho Palos Verdes where she began designing jewelry. When the jewelry business started going well, she gave up her boutique and focused on that. She eventually started designing clothes. Today, Luu has a store on Robertson Boulevard and an international clientele.

She says her new house is the perfect place for entertaining. This month she hosted three chamber music concerts in one weekend, with 70 guests at each. She also showed her fall collection at the house during L.A. Fashion Week.

One night, she and some friends turned out the lights, lighted candles and hunkered down under blankets to watch the fog roll through the canyon, into the house and over them. “An awesome experience,” says Luu who awakens each day to a wide-angle view of sky above, lush greenery below.

She is a short walk from the beach, and from dozens of nearby hiking trails. “In 10 minutes I can be worlds away, with nothing around me but ocean or mountains.” In 10 minutes she can also walk to the Pacific Palisades village.

The house has also brought some new interests and new friends, she says. Hill House architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (of Johnston Marklee & Associates) are among them. The three recently went on vacation to Hawaii together.

From Lee’s perspective, Luu knew what she wanted, didn’t hesitate and has a lifestyle appropriate for a house such as this. “Let’s face it, a family with little kids would not buy a place like this.”

It was a Venice couple who originally bought the property and asked Lee’s firm to design a spec house for it, which they planned to sell. Lee says it was “the last virgin lot” on Chautauqua Boulevard, and when the couple backed out, Lee got a group of investors to buy the property so his firm could build on it.

Lee and his partner Johnston, (who is also his wife), immediately confronted obvious problems. The lot had never been built on, Lee says, because it was too steep and its slope too uneven. Many architects had done plans, but none had materialized.

Most perplexing to deal with was the hillside zoning ordinance established by the city around 1992 -- a series of rules and restrictions regarding building height and setbacks that limit the size and footprint of houses built in the hills.

“We studied all hillside houses built since 1992 and realized this is a landscape of conflict and compromise,” Lee says. “Conflict between what the city wants and what each individual owner wants. Perhaps an owner wants a big Tudor or a Mediterranean house. The city wants to limit the size and scope of the project. A struggle ensues, resulting in compromise. We didn’t want that. We decided instead of fighting the ordinance, why not use it as a design opportunity to create a new form of hillside house,” one that embraces the ordinance instead of struggling against it.

“We basically took all the rules stipulated by the ordinance, we three-dimensionalized and modeled them in the computer and we massaged it all until we came up with the form for the maximum buildable envelope for that piece of land.”

Lee says the project was bigger than just that one house. It was an opportunity to reconsider all hillside building in Los Angeles. “There will come a time when horizontal growth will reach a critical mass. People will have to build on unused hillsides. We thought our project might just have some impact on what is to be built and how.”

For the house on Chautauqua, he says, “we adopted a very small footprint (1,847 square feet), because what costs the most are the foundations. If we have a smaller footprint, we need fewer caissons.” Only nine caissons, ranging in depth from 30 to 45 feet into the hillside, were used for Hill House, he says. A previous discarded plan by another architect for the property would have required 23 caissons. The cost would have been prohibitive.

The lack of exterior decks was not a design strategy but a necessity, Lee says. “Because we’d built to the maximum buildable envelope, we couldn’t extend a deck beyond the walls. As compensation, we exaggerated the size of the openings wherever the house faced a view. That’s how we came up with a room full of sliding glass walls that is just like an outdoor gazebo.”

Luu has her favorite perches from which she observes canyon life.

Sometimes she sits on the outside ledge of her bedroom window, and soon she’ll have an outdoor area built below the house, an edge-of-the-precipice vantage point to watch flora and fauna below.

“I like everything wild and natural and free. I don’t like phony. I don’t like gated communities. I like everything green -- trees and flowers that grow free.” She has developed detente even with the snakes that slither onto trails during her morning hikes, she says. Her two small dogs, Benjie and Henry, have learned to tolerate them too.

Luu is sitting at her dining room table, beneath a piece of artwork that functions as a light: a huge silver cylinder inside of which sits an old-fashioned crystal chandelier.

“To me, the beauty of a life like this is the freedom. And freedom means everything to me. I started my jewelry business in a garage in Rancho Palos Verdes, where I made everything myself. I was not trained to make jewelry, but I’m a quick learner. And this is America, after all, where a person is free to succeed. You go out, you get a book that teaches how to get better at what you do. And if you have the passion, in America you are free to succeed.”

Times staff writer Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.Levine@latimes.com