Los Angeles Times - Home Section, May 27, 2004
featuring the Kaplan Residence
Following is the text from page one:
INNER LIFE
Watch me watch you
Drapes? No way. Not everyone wants privacy. People who live in fishbowl houses almost dare you to peer in while they make their morning coffee, argue about bills, pad about in pj's. So go ahead, be nosy. They're cool with it. And guess what? They're peering back.
PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GLASS HOUSES
Jeremy and Michell Kaplan can eye passersby from their living room Strangers walking past their Echo Park house wave, and some drivers stop, get out of their cars and step up for a closer look. The Kaplans relish their very public lifestyle.
By JANET EASTMAN
Times Staff Writer
People living in glass houses accept this: They're part of the scenery.
A couple talking inside their loft apartment in an arts complex in Santa Monica are watched by gallery goers as if their picture window were a flat-screen TV. A Hollywood Hills bachelor absent-mindedly moons hikers when he walks from the shower to the kitchen, past floor-to-ceiling glass doors. Party guests along the Strand in Hermosa Beach struggle to deflect the lusting looks of outsiders spying frosty pitchers of margaritas every new crowd wave.
It is, says a Newport Beach resident like living in Disneyland.
The perks of inhabiting a scene are the view - of water, hills, lush urban life - and the parade of people drawn to it.
The flip side to being In a ass house: Passersby can see you snoring in the recliner, sneaking a spoonful of ice cream from the freezer, arguing with your spouse.
The fishbowl home, where It's really easy to look inside, is becoming more common as buttoned-up cottages buffered with frontyards are being replaced by glass-paneled homes that press up to the property line. Meanwhile the people peering in have become even more curious about what goes on in these houses, saw behaviorists who study those on both sides of the window.
Even If it were illegal to stare inside someone's home from a public area - which it isn't - we'd still be compelled to do it. And If there is action on the other side, our pace slows down. What are they doing? Eating? Wearing? Do we like the architecture? The artwork? The dog? We make split-second "American Idol" Judgments with Simon Cowell smugness.
But it's not our fault.
Homeowners who don't shield themselves or their possessions from us want us to look, says Sam Gosling, a psychologist working with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. They want us to be impressed with their window dressing and for us to know they have status, affluence, taste.
"They didn't put those objects there because they had no other place for them," says Gosling. (Continued on Page F8)