these are your private spaces
What Private Spaces Actually Means
Where we live our lives.
A neighbor’s way of thinking about the property you already own — and the life it could be holding.
IWhat Private Spaces Are
Private spaces are where you actually live your life. They’re where the hours of your life are spent — bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, the room where the TV sits, some favorite chair, some place to read. They are the rooms that hold you. And if you don’t have a private space beyond your bedroom, your bathroom, and a place for a TV, you probably should. A place away from devices and doomscrolling. A place to just be. A comfortable private space is quiet, daily medicine — when the room around you is calm, you are calmer in it.
A private space is not a hillside idea. You can make one anywhere — even in the tract neighborhoods most of Southern California built in the fifties and sixties. What changes on the hillside is the math. In a tract neighborhood there is a ceiling: build past your block and you won’t get the money back. Up here, where every property is its own custom estate and the zoning welcomes what you build, there is no ceiling — your home is worth what the land and what you’ve made of it will carry, and there is always something finer a short walk up the slope. So if you live below the hill, build a private space anyway, for the quality of life — just build it conservatively. And if you live up here, with the will and the means: build it well. Spend the days you have making the property hold more of your life — the indoors reaching out, the outdoors invited in, one secured layer at a time.
On a hillside acre, most of the footprint is unaccounted for. You bought it for the life it promised. You don’t need to be sold anything here. The private spaces are already on your land, in the ninety percent you rarely step into — they only need to be seen, and then finished.
“Spend the days you have making the property hold more of your life.”
IIThe Master Bedroom, Pushed Outward
Take the most private room you have — your master bedroom — and push it outward. The private space of the bedroom reaches through the French doors into a welcoming, secure space — and every space you add this way adds a layer. Wrought iron at its edge. Modern 4K cameras watching the fence line — cameras intelligent enough to tell a person from an animal, feeding the iPad at your bedside and the screen in your bedroom with a single touch. This is what layering buys you: a burglar, a home invader, even a coyote is noticed out at the new outer edge, long before anything can get near the bedroom. You are not surprised. You are warned, with time to spare — and the bedroom stays what it should be: the place you safely sleep, with added layers of personal security.
— Designer’s rendering, scaled to the property’s actual footprint and terrain.
What you get from that is the kind of confidence that changes how you use the property. Your puppy walks out and you stay seated with your book. Your three-year-old granddaughter wanders out while your daughter and son-in-law are at a wedding reception across town. You’re watching her — through the window, or on the iPad at the kitchen counter, four views of the protected space at once or the single one you favor — not chasing her across a hillside. The space is pet-secure. It is coyote-resistant. It is safe, secure, and beautiful, and it builds equity. It is your extended quality of life. It is your extended private space.
And here is what may surprise you. Those same private spaces — the ones the whole family comes to love and keeps coming back for — are also what the property is worth. They pay you twice: once in the life they give back, and again in what an appraiser will someday write down. A tract home has a ceiling — build past your block and you won’t get the money back, because your home is priced against the four other models on the street. La Habra Heights has no such ceiling. Nearly every home here is a custom estate — built for one original owner by a hand-picked architect and a roster of engineers, and walked through months of planning review: Los Angeles County before the city incorporated in 1978, the La Habra Heights planning and building department ever since — and no two sit close enough to set each other’s price. Send a drone up a hundred and thirty feet over your house and turn it slow through a full circle: you will find a home worth twice yours, and one worth ten times it, and the vegetation in between. That is the room you have. Build well, build in keeping with the hillside, and the property carries the value upward with you.
“Build it for the life you live in it today. It will pay you back the day you hand it on.”
— Photograph, La Habra Heights east side.
IIIThe Gated Path to the Outbuilding
Once the master suite has its secured outdoor space — just ground, some seating, some accoutrements that make the space lovely — you can choose to go further. Another gate. Another secure path. It can open into that third of an acre that is now just a triangle that requires brush clearing each April. Quality, estate-enriching fencing is not cheap; fencing is an investment. You can fence the full destination, or you can fence just the pathway and let the path itself be the security.
An intentional safe pathway can be low-key but still safe and secure — lighting, fencing, cameras, Wi-Fi, electricity, water. It can lead to an outbuilding. That outbuilding can be a YouTube studio. A telehealth center for a therapist’s clients. The reading room for a surgeon catching up on reports and scheduling the next round of surgeries. For a lawyer post-COVID, it can be the office that doesn’t need to be downtown anymore — the office your clients think is your office, but the gate to it doesn’t pass through your house. It goes around. You can also reach it from the master bedroom at 3 a.m. when you can’t sleep, and you can sit in the big leather recliner that your clients believe is an office chair.
And put a real bed in it. Not a guest room — a quiet option, held in reserve. There are nights a couple is better off sleeping apart: a stubborn cough, a late deadline, a short illness nobody should have to share. Instead of the couch, there is a proper room down a lit, level path — a path as clean and tended as the hallway outside your bedroom door. You can walk it barefoot. Your clients believe that building is your office. You know it is also the quietest, safest room you own.
A path as clean and tended as the hallway outside your bedroom door.
Epilogue
The Oasis Above Sixteen Million People
For all the talk of fencing and cameras, this was never really about security. It was about getting back outdoors — and about what “outdoors” meant before the suburb shrank it. Most of us are a generation or two from a farm or a ranch: grandparents with a horse, a few goats and sheep, chickens in the yard, a rooster keeping time. The tract neighborhood zoned all of that out. An acre in La Habra Heights zones it back in.
You don’t have to fill the place with livestock. But the room is there for an animal or two — a pony a small grandchild can pet, a horse to watch over a fence — for a season or for years. And the keeping of it can cost almost nothing. Along the concrete riverbeds that carry the San Gabriel snowmelt to the sea, under the power lines, people pay to board horses on bare rented ground. Offer one a stall on your hillside and that owner will gladly drive up, clean it, and care for the animal — just for the space.
This is the part no appraisal measures. Done with care, your acre becomes the reason a family gathers — the place your grown children bring their children, back to where they grew up, to Mom and Dad’s oasis in the hills above sixteen million people.
Private Spaces · La Habra Heights · by referral and invitation
This is what we mean by Private Spaces.