Flowers bloom and vegetation returns near a building under construction in Altadena next to where a house was destroyed in the 2025 Eaton Fire. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
IN 1921, THE WRITER AND TOWN PROMOTER WILLIAM E. SMYTHE published a book whose philosophy would endure in Los Angeles as perhaps nowhere else in the world. City Homes on Country Lanes called on Americans to reject the crowded, industrialized cities of the East in favor of “a little land and a living” out West, where an acre could be bought for cheap and a family could grow their own sustenance.
This didn’t have to mean going rural. “Garden homes,” as Smythe called the dwellings he imagined, could be built in urban areas or even constitute them like in Southern California, where a green metropolis was growing: “It is there that the largest number of people have seen the light and gone farthest along the new path,” he wrote.
Smythe filled his book with illustrations of what a garden home could look like. In one diagram, a five-room bungalow on a ⅙-acre lot — “the standard-sized lot in Los Angeles” — sits draped in flowering vines and surrounded by rose bushes, vegetable beds and fruit trees. Behind the garage is a blackberry bramble, chicken coops and rabbit hutches.
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