PROPERTY; THE STUFF OF DREAMS

OF ALL the bizarre episodes in the history of Los Angeles, the most surreal must have been in the early Forties, the worst of time for most of Europe, but probably secretly the best for all the pointy-headed intellectuals who fled from Hitler and discovered what Californians mean by fun. Then Schoenberg dallied with Shirley Temple in Beverly Hills, and Aleister Crowley bought Coke floats for Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley on La Cienega Boulevard. And with them came a dour huddle of Modernist architects and designers, who blinked in the blinding light and realised that here, finally, were people as much in love with the future as themselves - but rich.

Thus was born the quintessential Los Angeles house, a beguilingly plain glass box in the Hollywood Hills, teetering like a drunk teen at a pool party above the world's most expensive scrubland. Sadly, like so many teens, it turned out too unreliable and demanding for all but the truly infatuated, but it was, and remains, a seductive image. Once a statement on the moral imperative of functional Modernism, within 10 years it was just another style option.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War all kinds of new building materials and production techniques had been developed and glass-box ideology encouraged what was supposed to be a very practical experiment in community building. A local architectural magazine set up a project called the Case Study House Program, to use these materials and techniques in mass-production dream homes for an aesthetically and socially transfigured people. Wrong city. Wrong dream. The 45 prototypes were built, and many of them survive, tended in their dotage by loyal owners, but the mass-production thing never happened. These days, insulation and earthquake-proofing proscribe glass-box construction, but it's more than that. The notion of mass anything is anathema to LA. Nobody wants to share a thing, not even building materials. Nobody wants to blend in. The word in this town is "signature", unique.

The best way to find out what living in Los Angeles is really about is to drive from one end of Olympic Boulevard to the other - 20 something miles - staring at the surface of the road. You will notice astonishing variations in quality and finish. In certain parts - near downtown, on the edges of South Central and Crenshaw - a heedless pedestrian could walk into a pothole and disappear for ever. In other places - let us say, Beverly Hills - the road has the unblemished gloss of a roller rink. You may catch in your peripheral vision the additional clue that the hydrants in Beverley Hills are silver. Paint, true, not solid, but impressive at 45 miles per hour.

What does this mean? It means that when people say Los Angeles is not one place but a series of places, they don't mean the sort of peer-to- peer joshing that in London opposes Camden and Clapham, Muswell Hill and Bromley. They mean it literally - it is a series of separate cities, seceding as fast as they possibly can from shared responsibility for anything, from schools to police to road maintenance. The city of LA is punctured with sub-cities, newly established municipalities opting out of association, nominal, moral or fiscal, with what goes on down the road. West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica: they have their own schools, their own police, their own road-maintenance budgets. Beverly Hills collects big ol' corporate taxes from its commercial taxpayers. Hence the silver fire hydrants. Compton and Watts have to give money to businesses to open up there at all. Hence the potholes. Compton and Crenshaw aren't clamouring for separate status.

The next stage of seceding from the city is to secede from your neighbourhood by living in a private gated, policed community, and then you secede from your neighbours in that community by throwing up impermeable electrified walls round your house, through which you then drive in your impermeable air-conditioned Lexus - God forbid you should share air, oh yuck - to your membership-only club or security-badged office. (Los Angeles is the only city where the homeless haven't managed to make a success of publishing a paper, because they never get within arms' length of their potential customers.)

So any study of housing in LA has to be about differences, not communalities. The topography helps, folded hills and winding canyons, narrow alleys and overgrown beachside walkstreets. Every corner unwraps a new vista, every party invitation launches a treasure hunt. This is a great relief to publicity-shy celebrities - Los Angeles has the most reclusive exhibitionists in the world - but it also means that you probably couldn't find a place to put those acres of identical boxes we know and love in Britain. In LA no two sites are alike, so no two houses are alike. Well, no two lives are alike, no two stories, no two dreams. It's a private matter, living in LA, and where and how you live is as much your own business as everything else.

Because everybody comes from somewhere else and everybody reinvents every detail once they arrive. Many people come just for a holiday, leaving the parrot with a neighbour, a note for the milkman, and a fully furnished life, and simply never go back. I suppose there are people who inherit their homes in LA, but I've never met one. The average occupancy in the more opportunistic neighbourhoods - West Hollywood, the Sunset Strip - is three to four years; people depart as suddenly as they arrive, so the adventurous or budget-strapped can shrug together a future from others' abandoned pasts.

Many people's weekend treat is frequenting the garage sales that spill over every sidewalk, and almost no one on a budget (except Mid-Westerners who deeply fear germs) would think of buying furniture or crockery new. For one thing, you could not find this stuff new. These al fresco retrospectives - evidence of moving on, or moving up, or giving up and moving back - delineate the hysteric outer limits of fantasy and self-deception: tufted vinyl stand-alone bars, Flintstones Moderne sidechairs, puffer-fish lamps from the smoking room on the Mary Celeste.

Celebrities and rich people do not have to frequent garage sales. My goodness, it's not even worth their while to hold garage sales. Imagine being Madonna and having somebody suddenly recognise you half-way through cutting a sharp deal on that cast-off Frida Kahlo from your New Mexico period. It could really screw with the haggling. No, the rich, or the newly-rich simply start again, they redo their lives from the hardwood up. And an amazing percentage of the houses here have been built on big piles of cash.

The thing that seeps only gradually into the consciousness of new arrivals is that the true awesomeness of Los Angeles is not in having a population of rich people - there are rich people in ever major city in the world - but that there are hundreds and thousands of rich people. This apprehension, fully appreciated, can lead to fits of despair comparable to catching one's reflection wearing stretch satin jeans. These are the depths of hopelessness; this is when you realise that you have been born in the wrong body and the wrong life, and you will never, unless reincarnated as a particularly privileged earwig, live the dream for which your gifts and talents are suited.

But the lucky ones find various ways to barter their cash for domestic glamour, and the simplest has always been buying the lustre of a famous name. Celebrity architects, like supermodels or major-league baseball players, are a class with whom it's not easy to have a lot of immediate sympathy ("What's on for today?" "Well, burnishing the boiseries and rethinking the patination on the pool." "Tough life..."), but it's hard to know sometimes whether it would have been worse to have clients with no ideas or too many.

Take, for instance, the director Arch Obler, footnoted in film history as the maker of the first three-D movie, who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build him a guest house in Malibu - and then revealed a lifetime's collection of model hippo-potamuses. Not witty, Surreal hippos, not serene, mystically-charged Chinese jade hippos: these hippos would have been right at home hanging on the boardwalk or picking their nails with a plastic golf tee. History has not preserved Wright's reaction, but the last I heard the house was empty and neglected at one end of town, and Arch and the hippos were shacked up in an apartment 20 miles away.

Others commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright, as they do Frank Gehry or Richard Meler today, because they liked what he'd done before, but that can also trip the unwary: creative originals always want to experiment with something new, but when these little experiments are liable to rack up six-figure bills, all they can do is lie in wait for an unsuspecting client and spring the surprise on them.

None of the sites on which Lloyd Wright built in Los Angeles lent itself to pouring a waterfall through the middle of the living room - a trick he had to save for the Mid-West - but he found other ways to boost the maintenance, notably a striking cement-block ziggurat construction system which was - and still is - held together by not much more than continuous transfusions of cash. It's not random that one of the few people who tries to live in such a Lloyd Wright house is Joel Silver, producer of Die Hard and The Terminator.

Close scrutiny of this house (similar to the one pictured top right on the previous page) reveals a strong family likeness to a Mayan ruin. Lloyd Wright was infected with another distinctive local virus - pastiche. This can, in fact, be a safer way to proceed. Pointing to something you and the architect can both already see should be some indication of what will come out.

And pastiche is as old as the city itself. The very earliest European invaders looked at the local vernacular and copied it at three times the scale with a few contemporary conveniences. Thus was born Spanish colonial, which has handled all innovations from garages to Jacuzzis with shameless equanimity.

Every style, nationality and period of architecture has a genetic legacy here, and one might have expected that a city of successive and constant fads would have embraced postmodernism too. But you can't parody something that was never original: besides, L.A, though not taking its cultural pretensions at all seriously, takes its fantasies very seriously indeed. Nobody who has raked together a couple of million in this town is going to laugh at themselves for it. No siree. When they build temples, to beauty or to Mammon, they build them with capitals.

Another reason people like their houses to look - um, special - is the source of much of the cash that builds them. Life here is public - or rather, public life is what counts - and not just because the climate makes a perversion of walls and curtains. Many people here are most comfortable when they're on display. It's what they do. It may be less obvious now that gold lame and Bugatti tourers have been replaced by construction boots and bad hair, but they're on display on the set, at the gym, at parties; why stop at home?

Architecture in Los Angeles feeds on the movies, both their profits and their imagery. It was Cecil B de Mille himself who initiated sunken bathtubs; vile seductresses in the silent era were frequently seen emerging from them in clinging wet, bias-cut robes, and good ideas catch on fast. Movie- makers were shaping popular aspirations from the start. Theirs was the first modern art form expressly made for ordinary people, and by 1927 a hundred million Americans went to the movies every week. In the aftermath of World War 1, the working people who had become the first audiences were moving into the middle class; the middle classes had aspirations to even more refinement, and de Mille and his colleagues considered one of their prime functions to be teaching middle America how to live in style. So every couturier and coiffeur with notions too wacky to play in Paris hopped on the train out West. Great care was lavished even on tiny details - lingering shots of silver settings, bow ties being fixed, cigarettes inserted into holders - workout videos for your dreams. By the Thirties, an entire architectural movement was being invented on Hollywood sets, that streamlined "life-is-a-cruise-ship" moderne, full of curved and polished chrome to catch the light, and long, curved staircases to prolong the star's entrance.

But the rich, as we know, pay a high price for everything, and not always in cash or tradeables. Taking on a house that's not just a statement but a cry to heaven is like a marriage, or perhaps a reckless fling. Such houses can never be possessed, only temporarily occupied - even the biggest Hollywood ego is reduced to custodian status by the lowering teak of the Arts and Crafts movement or Modernist Richard Neutra's unforgiving geometries. A place that embraces 50 at dinner may seem less cosy for slobbing out with a video and a pint of ice cream.

I asked an habitue of these rarefied spaces why there's never anything personal or messy in them, how indeed it's possible to live in a place where cereal-stained OshKosh dungarees carelessly dumped on the kitchen floor might bring out the Fire Department, and she casually responded, "Help." Help is the answer: help that speaks no English and can't gossip to the Press or complain, that smiles while learning to cook chargrilled baby artichokes and organic infant food; help whose cousins arrive to do the equivalent grooming job on the outside space - gardening here having as much cachet as ironing - and see nothing wrong in being asked to relieve themselves in Portaloos temporarily plonked on the lawns. Help has to be kept separate to preserve the image.

It's not so easy, having hired people to design, and build, furnish, and clean your perfect home, to find somebody who'll tell you how you're supposed to live in it. Madonna recently moved into a castellated fortress overlooking Lake Hollywood, and hired her brother, Christopher Ciccone, to paint its substantial exterior in all-over flame-and-yellow stripes, in case any passing joggers misplaced their Maps to the Stars' Homes. Madonna is probably pretty comfortable in these surroundings (there are even books on the floor in one of the photos I've seen, though I'm not sure they're what people in movies call "practicals"), but sometimes the occupants seem pathetically adrift in their new prosperity, weirdly time- lagged between image and lifestyle.

This can lead people like my friend Lori, a lighting designer, into very peculiar situations. Not so long ago she was supposed to be doing the lights for a starlet's new house; they wandered into the first room and the starlet said, "This is my study, where I write." "Oh, what do you write?" asked the suddenly impressed Lori. "Well - I guess nothing much right now, but I intend to, like, write, you know." So they moved to the next room and the starlet said, "And this is my sewing-room." "My lord, such a wholesome and unusual form of creativity for one who could afford to wrap the whole of Rodeo Drive in her Amex card - what do you sew?" "Oh, I'm sorta, like, just getting started." Of course, the bakehouse, conservatory and music room were equally hypothetical, and by the time they reached the nursery for the as-yet-unborn children of the as-yet- unchosen spouse, Lori didn't know whether to weep, flee or check the status of the starlet's rehab.

So the socially nervous or secretly friendless live by another local rule, and just don't invite people in. In London, keeping up appearances constrains architects and developers to preserve the facade of a boring stucco terrace while committing whatever heresy they like within. On the whole, the British are more interesting once you know them better. Here, where the past is, well, history, and you're only as good as your next movie, people's houses get as many facelifts as their owners - and with equally mixed results. And many of them eventually discover that it's much easier to impress from a distance than to create a house - or a face - they can live with.

So pity the movie-star millionairess, wondering, as she prepares to dress for her guests, why her ward-robe consultant and her interior decorator didn't talk. It's pretty easy to live poor and simple in sunny LA. It's being rich that's tough.

! Photographs illustrating this feature come from: 'The Los Angeles House' by Tim Street-Porter, published by Thames & Hudson on 30 May at pounds 35

Mayan modern: for this 1924 house, Frank Lloyd Wright used a technique called 'textile blocks', in which linking blocks of sculpted concrete are knitted together; windows drop down from the roof all the way to the ground floor

Movie-star glamour: Cedric Gibbons, designer of the Oscar statuette, had this house in Santa Monica built in 1929 for his bride, the sultry silent-film actress Dolores del Rio; the Art Deco ocean-liner look is the epitome of Hollywood

Shades of the old South: with its colonnaded front, picket fence and jockeys at the gate, this house at Pacific Palisades is a fine example of Los Angeles pastiche. The Chevy convertible on the left used to belong to Steve McQueen

Mediterranean eclectic: rear and rose garden of the Casa Bienvenita, built in the Twenties by Addison Mizner, the architect who created the look of Palm Beach. His Moorish/Spanish/Italian style is one of LA's most popular dreams

Anything goes: built by John Woolf in 1940, the Pendleton house (top), in the style known as Hollywood Regency, attracted stars of the lustre of Garbo; Diane Keaton now owns the copper-clad Art Deco construction (above left); architects working today built this Cubist house over a ravine (above right)

Police house: traditional Moroccan dwellings, with stairs rising from an outdoor living area to a patio and upper rooms (left), inspired this house built in Santa Monica for Andy Summers, formerly of The Police. The architect, Mark Mack, has used an entry loggia to frame the initial view of the house (above)

Light fantastic: architect Josh Schweitzer's house (above) has wildly skewed windows; 'Sortilegium' (below left) was the Orient run riot in Malibu (destroyed in the 1993 fire); Arts and Crafts by Greene and Greene (below right), 1900