GRAPHĒ: Architect Clive Wilkinson’s L.A. Home Perches Over a Commanding View

An architect draws on the best of L.A. living for his family’s new home.

In the conventional reading of the Los Angeles landscape, there’s the beach, there’s the hills, and there’s the flatlands: three of the city’s four "ecologies," as the critic Reyner Banham famously called them—each with its own brand of domestic architecture. So what happens when these ecologies meet?

On a hillside in Los Angeles, architect Clive Wilkinson created a three-story home for himself, his wife, Elisabeth, and their children.

Photo by Laure Joliet

One architect got to find out when it came time to choose a site for his own family’s home. "It’s a complete anomaly—perched on a hill about eighty feet up, absolutely flat below."

"Many of Los Angeles’s iconic modern houses float above the city like tethered spaceships on stilts," says Clive. "I had always yearned for the opportunity to design my own floating home." Custom black zinc panels and sandblasted concrete form the exterior.

Photo by Laure Joliet

That’s Clive Wilkinson speaking—the South African–born designer of some of the most innovative office spaces in America, favorite of clients from start-ups to blue chips, from Barclays to Lululemon—who had the good fortune after nearly 30 years in L.A. to happen upon a place he had never seen.