Carla Ridge Residence by Montalba Architects

Designed in the modernist style by Santa Monica-based Montalba Architects, Carla Ridge Residence in Beverly Hills, California, serves as a muted overture to the verdant bluffs, basins and cityscape beyond.

Montalba Architects’ Carla Ridge Residence maintains a minimalist expression through clean lines, luminous courtyards and a palette inspired by nature. As practice founder David Montalba explains, the intent was to create a home that would be both an escape from the city and hold a mirror to the California landscape. “We wanted to create a much-needed reprieve from the hectic Los Angeles lifestyle and celebrate the idea of peace and recovery,” he says. “Our focus was creating an integrated home with expansive connections to the gardens and landscape which take advantage of the unique southern Californian climate and the home’s westward position. Using this [as our seed point], we integrated a series of volumes and courtyards that serve as transitions between the public and private zones while creating poetic focal moments throughout the house.”

The interior treatments echo the landscape by way of rough-hewn plaster walls, limestone flooring and unpolished elements riddled with deliberate imperfections.

The practice employed a program of varying architectural proportions, alternately minimising and maximising scale and light to create moments of wonder. Intertwining courtyards and overlapping rooflines combine to form an intersecting leitmotif while simultaneously acting to augment spatial volumes. One intervention of note is the elevated roofline in the living area, which makes room for a row of clerestory windows that bring in additional light. Another sleight of hand in the same space is the custom architectural glass that serves as an invisible demarcation between indoors and outdoors. The home’s modernist identity is offset through organic textures, layers and materials that lend it a distinct sense of warmth. At the same time, the interior treatments echo the landscape by way of rough-hewn plaster walls, limestone flooring and unpolished elements riddled with deliberate imperfections.

To overcome neighbourhood design regulations — which specified a maximum building height of 4.2 metres — the architect developed the blueprint horizontally rather than vertically, introducing a sequence of internal and external garden courtyards that help double the light and dissipate the abiding horizontality. “We wanted to maintain expansions of space on the site while creating variations in the transitions between rooms,” Montalba says. To optimise the single-storey structure, the practice created a subterranean system for utilities which, in turn, set the stage for a sunken great room, living room and primary bedroom. The remaining spaces, meanwhile, were crowned with 3.9-metre ceilings.

Montalba Architects espoused an approach that leaned equally inward and outward. “The design began with three courtyards and the home’s interaction with each,” Montalba says of the outdoor realms, which are populated by a combination of native plants, Japanese maples and Aleppo pines. With retractable doors that slide all the way open, the home seems like another natural addition to the landscape.

Architecture and interior design by Montalba Architects. Build by Hill Construction Co. Landscape design by Stephen Billings Landscape Architecture.