Perched high on a bluff above the ocean in Palos Verdes, CA, KAA Design Group reimagines this contemporary home as a site-driven transformation that reconnects architecture, landscape, and horizon.
Once a dark and inward-facing 1970s ranch-style residence, the home has been carefully remodeled and expanded to reengage its dramatic coastal setting, preserving the original courtyard organization while dissolving barriers between indoors and out.
Photography above by Roger Davies.
From the outset, the redesign is rooted in the site’s topography and exposure.
Elevated above the Pacific, the home is oriented to capture expansive northerly ocean views while maintaining a sense of enclosure and privacy within its interior landscape.
Rather than restructuring the plan entirely, KAA Design Group retained the home’s central courtyard and used it as a spatial and environmental anchor—an open-air room around which daily life unfolds.
This inward focus establishes calm and orientation before the architecture opens outward toward the horizon.
Landscape plays a defining role in shaping circulation and experience.
Covered loggias and exterior corridors frame the courtyard, creating a sequence of shaded thresholds where light, shadow, and planting register the passage of time.
These in-between spaces blur distinctions between indoor and outdoor living, transforming circulation into inhabitable territory.
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Existing site elements are carefully integrated rather than overwritten.
Within the courtyard, a 130-year-old olive tree becomes a focal point, its sculptural trunk and silvery canopy set against white plaster walls and operable metal louvers that modulate light and privacy.
Here, landscape is not ornamental—it is structural, anchoring the architecture both visually and experientially.
The home’s outdoor spaces are calibrated to accommodate varying scales of occupation.
Large openings allow communal interior spaces, including the dining area, to extend seamlessly into the courtyard, supporting gatherings that unfold fluidly between inside and out.
More intimate moments are found along the edges of the plan, where guest suites open directly onto a citrus garden. Dense planting, gravel paths, and seating areas create a quieter, more enclosed counterpoint to the openness of the courtyard and ocean-facing terraces.
At the bluff’s edge, the project reaches its most restrained and powerful expression.
A firepit terrace engages the vast coastal landscape directly, with low seating and controlled planting maintaining clear sightlines to the sea and coastline below.
Here, architecture recedes, allowing exposure, horizon, and atmosphere to define the experience.
Founded in Los Angeles, KAA Design Group is known for its rigorous, site-driven approach to residential architecture, where landscape, materiality, and environmental performance are integral to the design process.
Across its body of work, the firm prioritizes clarity of planning, restrained detailing, and a strong dialogue between built form and natural context.
This philosophy is evident in the careful preservation and reinterpretation of existing site structures, the seamless integration of outdoor rooms, and the nuanced handling of light, views, and circulation.
Architecture by: KAA Design Group (Grant Kirkpatrick)
Landscape Architecture by: KAA Design Group
Interior Design by: Clements Design
Photography by: Roger Davies
