Urban Living, Fully Activated: Stanwood Avenue

Urban residential sites rarely offer excess. More often, they demand restraint, clarity, and a willingness to extract value from every square foot. Stanwood Avenue was conceived with that reality front and center.

Located in Mar Vista, this compact property presented a familiar challenge: limited lot area, close adjacencies, and a brief calling for meaningful outdoor living across multiple uses — family life, entertaining, privacy, and flexibility — without visual clutter or wasted space.

Rather than treating the site as a series of isolated yards, we approached it as a single, interconnected exterior system, where each space serves a purpose and contributes to the whole.

Designing within Constraint

From the outset, the project required careful coordination between program, code, and experience. Fire separation requirements, structural limitations, and privacy considerations shaped the design, not as obstacles, but as parameters.

The solution was not to add more, but to organize better — stacking uses vertically, clarifying circulation, and ensuring that every exterior surface performed more than one role.

The ADU AS A LIFESTYLE ASSET

• • • At the rear of the property, a compact ADU anchors the outdoor experience. Designed early in the process, the structure functions as a guesthouse, pool cabana, and workspace, opening fully to the adjacent yard through a wide accordion door system.

      Extensive glazing and skylights bring natural light deep into the interior while meeting California Title 24 energy requirements. A planted green roof integrates the structure into the landscape, softening views from above and reinforcing privacy and continuity.

      Despite its modest footprint, the ADU reads as open, bright, and highly livable — proof that thoughtful planning often matters more than size.

Rear Yard Living: EVERYDAY AND ENTERTAINING

The rear yard is organized around a refined pool and spa composition, with a focal water feature introducing sound and movement. Built-in seating, integrated fire elements, and a reworked dining terrace support both daily use and larger gatherings.

An overhead trellis structure provides shade and intimacy while maintaining clear visual connections between the main house, ADU, and pool terrace.

Side Yard as Social Circulation

A wood plank pathway along the side yard creates a clear and welcoming route from front to rear, accommodating guests while preserving privacy. Dense planting, layered screening, and subtle lighting transform what is often a residual space into a purposeful garden passage.

A tucked banquette nook overlooking this garden offers a quiet counterpoint to the more social zones elsewhere on the property.

ROoftop Living Above the City

Accessed directly from the primary bedroom, the rooftop was reimagined as a fully programmed outdoor room. Structural upgrades allowed this previously underutilized space to support lounge seating, dining, and fire features, while redesigned railings provide privacy from neighboring properties.

The roof of the ADU below functions as a lushly planted garden plane, visually and experientially extending the landscape upward and strengthening the indoor–outdoor relationship at the upper level.

Interior furnishings and amenity coordination for the rooftop space were developed in collaboration with Linette Dai Design, whose scope was limited to this specific area of the project.

A Fully Integrated Exterior Environment

From front yard arrival to rooftop retreat, Stanwood Avenue demonstrates how disciplined landscape architecture can unlock meaningful outdoor living in dense urban conditions. By prioritizing organization, flexibility, and experience, the project transforms constraint into opportunity — proving that even modest sites can support rich, layered environments when designed with intention.

Looking Ahead

Stanwood reinforces an essential truth: great outdoor spaces are not defined by scale, but by clarity of thinking. When every element is purposeful, the landscape becomes not just an amenity, but an extension of how people live.

TAKE A LOOK AT ALL OF THE COMPLETED AND CONCEPT PROPERTY PHOTOS.