Two examples of an architectural battle fought on the streets of Valley Village.
On the left, a home sensitively remodeled in the Mission style with a nicely scaled porch and a stone base with a historic light. Colors on the windows and the siding are harmonious.
On the right, a synthetic, lowbred, grotesque clod with a three story tall living room and security camera mounted on the side. Nothing is proportioned, everything screams for attention. It is unneighborly, gross and cheap.
The home on the the left, respectful of the street and kind to the passerby. The home on the right, hostile, ostentatious and totally out of place.
Block by block, the older streets of the San Fernando Valley are a war zone where the vulgar, appalling and tasteless are invading what was once the domain of the quiet, well mannered and gracious home.
Here in Van Nuys 
slightlyslack,
I really hope you did not mean exactly that anti-mansionization causes sprawl. There is a myriad of reasons sprawling continues that I believe you do see. What’s being discussed here is a design issue at the residential unit scale, not in support of NIMBYsm. You overlooked the intent of demanding good design and equated that to simplistic growth restriction.
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What is objectionable about this house is not the size. It’s the proportions. There are ways to build a large home and still create something aesthetic. Witold Rybczynski explains how in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2133029/).
The major driver of sprawl in Santa Clarita is hardly a “prohibition” on McMansions. It’s the fact that people could once find affordable housing here. But those days are over.
Maybe no vistas are ruined on the flat lands of Valley Village, but this area is a unique and older community of 1940’s ranch homes where people walk and take nice care of their gardens. There are also quite a few large homes in Valley Village, and the signpost of LA importance, The Celebrity, is in abundance here.
Ironically, the reason the area is worth so much, and the McMansion builder erected his blob on this block, is exactly because the street is charming and not full of stucco clad linebackers.
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1. That’s not really a three-story living room–it’s a two-story one with a window designed to provide the illusion of it being higher. Very common among suburban McMansions.
2. Is any real harm occurring other than the fact that the thing is ugly? This is in Valley Village, so I know that no million-dollar vistas are being destroyed. I somehow doubt privacy is an issue, either.
The “anti-mansionization” laws in the city of Los Angeles are a major driver of sprawl. Why put up with neighborhood activists who oppose anything bigger than WWII-era “minimum housing” (read Greg Hise’s Magnetic Los Angeles if you don’t know what I mean) when you can just build in Santa Clarita instead? Sure, you’ll have a longer commute, but you also can have modern insulation and wiring, a kitchen bigger than a submarine galley, bedrooms that actually fit a king-sized bed, and enough storage space that you can use your garage to store cars.
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Andrew,
Mr. Yezerkian was very glad to have met you. He hopes to hang sometimes in the future like if you are on one of those regional site reconnaissance and keep your eyes on the monster homes lurking to mushroom around the corner.
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