An inner sanctum, out under the sky

Whether there are four guests or 24, backyard barbecues at the Hollywood home of Bryan Graybill and Moises Esquenazi have a comforting sense of déjà vu. Cocktails on the deck, dinner at tables in the garden, after-dinner conversation around the homemade fire pit. Sooner or later, everyone is lounging on the enormous daybed in a breezy, outdoor, redwood living room with built-in sconces and a roof made of bamboo poles

“We can’t get them out until 2:30 in the morning, and even then we have to turn a hose on them,” says the jocular Georgia transplant Graybill, a mortgage broker who spends workweek evenings “decompressing” in the open-air sanctuary.

Come on in — or rather out — to the newest addition to the great American homestead: the outdoor room. There’s no need to wipe your feet, since there probably isn’t a welcome mat, much less a traditional door, and the floors are likely made of stone or wooden slats. If you track in dirt, no problem; even the furniture and upholstery can be cleaned with a spray of a garden hose.

Thrust into the role of the latest status symbol for the house-proud, the outdoor room has become an icon of the year-round, Southern California lifestyle — wired for light and sound, outfitted for gourmet cooking, and even hooked up to the plumbing for a midnight shower under the stars. Adding even greater value to pumped-up real estate prices, the outdoor room has also been embraced across the U.S. as part of the nesting phenomenon sent into overdrive by recent global events.

The August issue of Sunset trumpets outdoor kitchens with “great ideas for every budget” including a simple built-in barbecue for $2,475 and a Tuscan kitchen just over 1,000 square feet (including a bath and sauna) that was built for around a cool quarter-million.

“If it gives homeowners that much more usable square footage and is the most fun room in the house, why not do it?” asks Ron Safran of Victory Furniture, a Los Angeles outdoor retailer since 1945. In the last five years, he notes, sales of outdoor living-room pieces such as sofas and club chairs have begun to rival those of sun chaises and dining sets. “Now, the term patio furniture doesn’t do it justice. Quality wise, it’s all that indoor furniture would be, and the outdoor living room, which was once an afterthought in the design community, has become an integral part of any decorator’s project,” Safran says.

Indeed, industry analysts predict that Americans will spend more than $40 billion this year on outdoor spaces. In 2003, sales of outdoor furniture increased almost 10% due to improved, lightweight, fade-proof, weather-resistant products. Outdoor spaces have become so important, they say, that done right they can increase a home’s value by as much as 30%.

Major manufacturers such as Brown Jordan and Laneventure have turned branded collections by Venice surfer “Cabana Joe” O’Brien, wallpaper designer Raymond Waites and fashion’s fictional banana republican Tommy Bahama into household names alongside lines by such outdoorsmen icons as Ernest Hemingway and Eddie Bauer.

California’s mild climate has always made the outdoor room a possibility, but innovations in building design and materials, along with technological advances such as wireless electronics and comfortable, all-weather furniture and fabrics have helped make it a reality.

Of course, there have been open-air rooms in Southern California since Greene & Greene incorporated sleeping porches into their Arts and Crafts bungalows in Pasadena. And Los Angeles homes and yards have long imitated the structures found in classical English and Southern gardens.

But the new outdoor room is not your Aunt Pittypat’s porch, nor your grandmother’s gazebo. Quaint Ivory Merchant looks are out; exotic modernism is in. Referencing both indigenous dwellings and open-air resort lounges in Mexico, Hawaii and the South Pacific, the 21st century California outdoor room finally eradicates the line between indoors and out that 20th century Los Angeles modernist architects sought to erase.

“Where I was born, you couldn’t possibly do this,” says Kai Loebach, a caterer and event designer from Germany, who six years ago designed and built a 250-square-foot poolside kitchen with a “Provence feel” for preparing hors d’oeuvres at his Hollywood home. “Not in your wildest dreams could you imagine dining outside for three-fourths of the year.

“When I entertain, I don’t want to run back inside the house, so it’s very convenient. It’s always airy, you don’t sweat, and it has the feel of going back to the way people used to cook. And when you don’t feel like cleaning up, the animals will eat the rest.”

The outdoor galley and another dining area outside his indoor kitchen “combines my two most precious hobbies — cooking and gardening,” says Loebach. Though his outdoor kitchen is outfitted in stainless steel and has sandstone flooring decorated with wrought-iron found objects, Turkish and Moroccan pots and scented geraniums, the dining room is “more Zen,” says Loebach. It has a steel-trawled stucco fireplace and a table for 20 that sits on decompressed granite amid olive trees and a koi pond. “It’s all about outdoor dining,” he says. “That’s the California feel at its best.”

For Gail Dodge Altman and Charles Boswell, the outdoor room serves as a sort of love shrine. Twelve years ago, shortly after they fell in love, the couple stumbled across an intriguing piece of furniture labeled “made in Guatemala,” in a Main Street shop in Santa Monica. Off they went to visit Boswell’s missionary uncle, only to become smitten with Guatemala and its artisans.

Soon they were bringing back furniture and selling it out of their 1920s Mediterranean home in Hollywood. “Before we knew it,” Boswell recalls, “our yard was filled with furniture covered in blue plastic tarps.” Eventually, they ran out of yard and built a covered area in “a garden that didn’t have enough sun” between their garage and their neighbors. When they opened an L.A. outlet for their furniture business, they turned the storage space into an outdoor living and dining room.

Inspired by typical outdoor rooms they’d seen on their visits to the hotel La Quinta de las Flores in Antiqua, Guatemala, they installed Spanish colonial arches in the front opening and added a corrugated metal roof painted red. They distressed the painted, concrete floor with muriatic acid and filled the 500-square-foot space with travel treasures, some of which date to the 1700s.

Despite the value of the furnishings, the room is not precious. Vines grow up walls hung with painted doors, santos figurines and the wooden boxes that hold them. There are visible electric conduits, which provide juice for two enormous iron chandeliers and lamps made from Spanish olive jars. The furniture is hefty, with chairs from churches and tables from farmhouses, including one painted a weathered green.

In the house, the primitive stuff looks a little rough, Altman admits. “Here you can really use it. You can put your feet up on it without worrying.” While the room reflects the couple’s passion for their collection, it is also a refuge from their everyday existence.

“I wanted a place to sit that was shady and calm and pretty,” Altman explains, “a different kind of area, not just sitting on the grass.” It has become much more than that. “It is where we entertain and have all our holiday meals.”

As an in-demand landscape designer, Jay Griffith has witnessed the explosion of the outdoor room. “Most people are too uptight to get it,” he says of a particular type of status-seeking potential client. “They might want it but they have a hard time fully embracing it and before you know it, they have a room that’s fully enclosed with a Subzero refrigerator.”

Growing up in Southern California with a photographer father who had a glass-walled, natural light studio in the garden, Griffith draws a line in the sand when it comes to the outdoor room. “It has to have at least some open roof, at least one completely open wall,” he says. “It has to be made of humble materials.”

While his weekend getaway is an elaborate, 5,000-square-foot 1954 ranch house on six acres, he spends much of his time there in an outdoor room that is more Pacific Coast Zen than Malibu Barbie and Ken. “My favorite structures are shacks,” he says. One of his shacks is an outdoor shower set in a grove of oaks. “I hose off after coming back from the beach in a galvanized water trough for cattle, and if I have to wash my mitts, there’s a cement bowl for a sink.”

Griffith designed his outdoor living room, which he calls “the Oracle” and had it built, he says, from “Douglas fir, plywood, spit and chewing gum.” The interior is decorated with a chic, but spare sensibility, floor cushions, a low hacienda chair and what Griffith calls a “fainting couch where I go to contemplate my navel” covered in upholstered pillows. “We have classic salons there,” he says of evenings spent with friends.

He is equally content to be there alone. In a town like Los Angeles, where people have “a lifestyle but not a life,” Griffith says his outdoor room is grounding. “It’s all about stepping out of your man-made world, drinking in the senses and the magic and wonderment of nature, observing the birds and animals. It’s not about sitting on your patio slathered in suntan oil, talking on the cellphone and listening to wireless stereo speakers pumping rock ‘n’ roll.”

“The view from this room is very magical, very soothing,” Griffith says. “You go up there to draw breath. I don’t have television; the sky is my screen.”

Graybill and Esquenazi feel much the same. “It has replaced television,” Graybill says of their outdoor room. “We read, maybe check e-mail, and just relax.” If they want a little sun, they have a deck with chaises and a hot tub that overlooks the once-unused portion of the yard that became their outdoor living room.

At first, they just wanted to fill that dead space in the garden. They thought about adding to the stand of bamboo, agapanthus and delphiniums. “It would be pretty, but serve no purpose,” says Esquenazi, a photographer who works at home. Instead, the former architecture student, who grew up on the South American coast where cushioned benches by the water are commonplace, designed an outdoor lounge. A handyman put it together for a little more than $2,000. “We spent almost that much on the cushions,” he says of the mattresses upholstered in a blue Sunbrella that match the surrounding blossoms.

He can hang out there all day if he likes, working on a wireless laptop. But when Graybill gets home from work, Esquenazi has to be willing to share their fortress of solitude. “We’re only four houses from Sunset Boulevard, but it feels so separated from everything that’s going on in town.”

“It’s my therapy,” he confesses. “I have a therapist too, but this is supplemental.”