Montalba Architects Threads Garden Courtyards Through a Single-Story Beverly Hills House Under Layered Rooflines

The hills above Beverly Hills are crowded with houses that treat the view as the whole program: a glass box, a pool edge, a city grid below, and little else. Montalba Architects had every excuse to build another one at Carla Ridge. The site looks across the hillside, the valley and the city beyond, and the 7,000 ft² brief sits on a single level. Completed in 2023, the house could easily have become one long viewing gallery.

What makes Carla Ridge House worth your attention is that it resists that temptation. The plan is broken up by several courtyards that cut into the interior, so many rooms look inward to gardens before they look outward to the valley. Overlapping horizontal rooflines with deep overhangs, plus a raised section lined with clerestory windows, do most of the climatic work. The result is a hillside house organized around shade, filtered light and planting, with the panorama treated as a reward at the end of the sequence rather than the starting point.

An Entry Built From Screens and Shadows

The arrival is quiet. A pivoting door of vertical timber boards sits beside a slatted screen, and ferns and broad-leaf plants crowd the foreground. Sunlight passes through the slats and lays stripes across the ground, so the threshold reads as a play of shadow before it reads as architecture.

The square opening to the sky above the entry court matters. It establishes the house's main idea at the front door: outdoor rooms carved into the building mass, open overhead and closed at eye level. You enter through a garden before you enter the house, and the view to the valley stays hidden for now.

Living Rooms Under a Timber Lid

Once inside, the wood plank ceiling sets the tone. It carries the horizontal line of the roof straight through the living room and out past the glass, so the overhang and the interior ceiling read as one continuous plane. Floor-to-ceiling glazing frames misty hills, but the low, heavy lid keeps the room grounded. It feels like a shelter that happens to have a view, not a viewing deck with furniture.

The fireplace is handled with similar restraint. A floating stone hearth with a linear firebox sits beneath a pale marbled panel, flanked by woven lounge chairs on a walnut floor. It anchors the room without competing with the glass wall, and it gives the space an inward focus for evenings when the hills disappear into fog.

Clerestories and the Problem of the Deep Plan

Any single-story house of this size has a daylight problem at its center. Montalba's answer is the raised roof section with clerestory windows, which sits over the long oak dining table and washes the timber ceiling in even light. In the kitchen, a white skylight shaft pulls light down onto the stone-topped island, while a band of windows at counter height catches glimpses of the garden.

The dining and living zones are divided by a low oak shelving unit rather than a wall, and a cedar panel adds a second wood tone to the mix. Plaster and custom millwork run throughout. The palette stays layered and textured without falling back on the decorative mannerisms common in high-end Los Angeles interiors. Lighting designer Sean O'Connor's contribution is easy to miss, and that is probably the point: the pendants over the table are the only fixtures that announce themselves.

Rooms That Borrow a Garden

The courtyard strategy pays off most clearly in the secondary rooms. A corner window in the oak kitchen frames a red-leaved maple, which gives the cook a seasonal view that has nothing to do with the city below. The study, with its curved walnut desk and cream leather chair, is a small, enclosed room. It works because it does not try to compete with the main living spaces.

Press coverage notes that the primary bathroom overlooks a private courtyard designed in the manner of a Japanese garden, with natural stone and slatted wood inside. This is a case for planning a large house as a set of discrete outlooks rather than a single dramatic one. Each room gets its own garden, its own light and its own reason to exist.

Bedrooms That Slide Open to the Deck

At the rear, the house opens toward outdoor living. A bedroom with a wood ceiling and built-in shelving has its glass wall slid fully open to the pool deck, and a sitting room turns a corner of glazing toward layered hills at dusk. These are the moments when the house finally gives in to the view, and they land harder because the rest of the plan has held back.

Privacy is managed through placement rather than screening. The planter beds, the deck edges and the overhangs shield the glazed walls from neighbors and frame the long view. When the terrace lights up at dusk, the house reads as a series of glowing, roof-sheltered rooms rather than a single illuminated box.

A Pool Deck That Works in Any Weather

The pool and deck are the most photographed parts of the house, and in clear weather they look exactly as you would expect in Beverly Hills: timber decking, lounge chairs, water edge, hazy hills. Seen through the glass-walled pavilion, the grand piano gives the composition a domestic scale that most pool shots lack.

The fog image is the more convincing one. Under a deep wood-lined overhang, the loungers and water sit in a soft gray, and the roof becomes the main event. This is where the overlapping rooflines prove their value. They shade the glass in summer, they shelter the terrace in marine layer, and they give the house a strong horizontal silhouette that holds up even when the view is gone.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan clarifies what the photographs only suggest. Garden courtyards sit between the bedroom wings, and arrows mark the axial views that run through the house toward the valley terrace. Courtyards break up the depth of the single story, give individual rooms their own outdoor space, and set up sightlines that end at the distant view.

The building section is where the environmental thinking becomes explicit. It traces the roof overhang against the sun path and adds numbered notes on cooling, ventilation and solar panels. With Solargy, Inc. listed as energy consultant, the drawing shows that the long eaves were planned as performance devices, not just a stylistic nod to mid-century California.

Why This Project Matters

Carla Ridge House is a reminder that the best hillside houses are often the ones that hold the view back. By weaving courtyards through a single-story plan and letting overlapping roofs set the character, Montalba Architects has made a large luxury residence that feels calm, shaded and inward when it needs to be, and fully open when the moment is right. Each room gets its own garden and its own light, and the house never relies on a single trick.

For designers working on large, single-level homes, the lessons are practical. Use the roof as a climatic tool, cut the plan with outdoor rooms to bring light into the core, and treat the panorama as one outlook among many. Published technical detail is thin, so we cannot judge how the house performs over time. As a spatial argument, though, it makes a strong case that restraint and shade age better than glass alone.

Carla Ridge House by Montalba Architects. Beverly Hills, United States. Approximately 7,000 ft². Completed 2023. Photography by Kevin Scott.

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