Five projects. Five ways we dissolved the boundary between inside and out.

The most consequential decision in coastal architecture is rarely the one that shows up on a mood board. It isn’t the stone selection or the cabinetry finish. It’s the opening — where it goes, how large it is, and what it asks of the landscape on the other side. Over thirty years of designing along the California coast and hillside, this question has shaped our practice more than any other. Five projects from our portfolio say it differently. Each one found its own answer.

Sea Level, Malibu

The Wall That Retracts

The original 1988 post-modern beach house didn’t trust the ocean. Compartmentalized rooms, fixed windows, a Pacific view that felt like a backdrop rather than an environment. Our remodel had one central move: expansive sliding glass doors spanning the rear of the living volume, opening fully to the beachfront terrace. When they retract, there is no inside and no outside — just the room and the ocean. Nathan Turner’s interiors reinforced the logic: soft blues, seafoam, sandy neutrals drawn directly from the shore so the transition from interior to terrace happens chromatically as well as spatially. A new rooftop deck adds a third level of living entirely.

Interiors by Nathan Turner.  Featured in Coastal Living, Summer 2022.

Cliffside, Point Dume

A Sequence of Thresholds

Rather than one grand gesture, Cliffside unfolds as a series of interconnected Balinese-inspired pavilions — each oriented toward a specific view or garden courtyard, each with its own threshold. A louvered passage here, a ridge skylight pulling sky into the kitchen there. You never stop being aware of the outside without ever feeling exposed to it.

Interiors by Martyn Lawrence Bullard. Featured in Traditional Home, September 2012, and Decor, Fall-Winter 2013.

Malibu Bluff Estate

Architecture as Landscape Extension

On a site this spectacular, a conventional window would have felt like an apology. Our response was to design the arrival sequence as the first act of dissolution: tranquil reflecting pools flank the entry courtyard, carrying the architecture out into the landscape before you’ve stepped inside a single room. From every principal space, expansive glass sliding doors frame uninterrupted ocean vistas. As Elle Decor noted in their November 2014 feature, the home feels less like a structure on a cliff than an extension of the cliff itself.

Interiors by Martyn Lawrence Bullard.  Featured in Elle Decor, November 2014.

Encinal Bluff, Malibu

The Garage Door That Changed Everything

Sometimes the most transformative move is also the most unexpected. At this mid-century modern remodel, the dining room had a conventional wall facing the ocean. We replaced it with a full metal and glass garage door. Open, the dining room ceases to be a room — it becomes a covered terrace, a loggia, a space that belongs to neither interior nor exterior but occupies the most interesting territory in between. The raw metal and stainless steel give the gesture a muscular character: not a concession to the view, but an architectural declaration of it.

Interiors by Hayne Interior Design.

Ridgehouse, Calabasas

Glass in the Mountains

Not every project looks to the Pacific. At Ridgehouse — our 2025 AIA San Fernando Valley Honor Award recipient — the view is canyon, chaparral, and the golden-hour light that moves through Southern California’s interior hills. Large glass openings frame sweeping canyon views from a vaulted great room defined by heavy timber and exposed ceilings. The materials — reclaimed wood siding, Durango Noce limestone, green slate roof — read as one more layer of the hillside rather than a structure imposed upon it. The glass openings are not punctures in a wall. They are places where the wall steps aside and the ridge continues, uninterrupted, into the room.

Landscape Design by D. Turner Landscape Architecture.  Staging by Meridith Baer Home.  2025 AIA SFV Honor Award recipient.

Five homes. A beachfront retreat, a Balinese-inspired estate, a blufftop pavilion, an industrial remodel, and a mountain retreat — each one a different answer to the same question. Where does the wall end, and where does the world begin? The answer, when arrived at with care for the site and the light and the life that will be lived there, becomes the most important line in the design.