From Vision To Reality, Architect Paul McClean Transforms Glass And Steel Into Monuments Of The California Dream—His Included
There is a collection of dreamlike, sprawling estates sprinkled through the hills and canyons of Los Angeles—the calling cards of architect Paul McClean and his namesake firm. Sharply geometric and clean-cut in profile, they are Contemporary Modernist to the core, distinguished by glass as a central material and water features as elusive as mirages.
Size is the standout feature of these super-indicators of blockbuster success, and they are typically loaded with one-percenter extras: the helipad and bulletproof glass of a Bel Air mansion; an aerial bridge transporting you into the home’s interior; a subterranean swimming pool illuminated by sun cascading via an enormous skylight.
The largest so far is the impossibly massed 105,000-square-foot spread dubbed “The One,” which sold in 2022 for $126 million. For reference, that’s approximately the same size as Terminal 2 at LAX—concourses and baggage areas included.
Paul McClean homes are known—written about, filmed, and photographed. Yet interestingly, the man himself did not set out to be the maker of uber-grand homes in Los Angeles, and increasingly elsewhere.
An Early Calling
“My goal was to design houses for families,” McClean explains. “And we’re fortunate that we still get to do that. But now we have this very broad range. I think the smallest house that we’re working on right now is about 3,000 square feet. And the largest house we’re working on is about 105,000 square feet.”
Paul McClean is an architect to his core. He still sketches with pen on paper, and his firm, McClean Design, consists of a dozen or so designers working from a low-key office in Orange County, a former corner store that retains the clover-green sign of its past life.
The man himself is unassuming, with an easy smile and quick laugh. His profession, he relays, was a calling in the truest sense, and had him drawing homes in his childhood Dublin house.
“I wanted to be an architect since I was a really little boy,” he states. “When I was like four or five, my mom said I was always drawing houses and asking, ‘Who’s the person who does that?” An architect, she told him.
First Steps
Enter the early seeds of Modernism. At age ten, young Paul McClean discovered a book on Frank Lloyd Wright among the handful of architecture books at the local library and was entranced by images of Fallingwater.
“I just couldn’t believe that was really a house,” he says.
His first big break came as a teenager when he landed a job working on an addition at his school. The principal, who knew of young Paul McClean’s aspirations, offered part-time employment as a condition of awarding the commission.
Later, while attending the Dublin Institute of Technology, Paul McClean spent summers working on architectural sites. One summer gig (“the best summer job ever,” he says) stands as a personal favorite and would instill a sense of creating things of permanence.
“I was wandering around Ireland on trains and with a bicycle,” he recounts, “making drawings and surveys of ancient castles.”
Other design gigs of this period took him as far away as London and Australia.
“Basically, I would just go knock on doors till somebody gave me a job,” he explains.
In the pre-Internet 1990s, this meant tearing phone book pages listing architects, then charting their locations on a map and walking from office to office. Such confidence, one imagines, mustering the pluck to present oneself at a stranger’s office, asking for a shot at a job. For Paul McClean, the stakes were much simpler.
“I wouldn’t say it was confidence,” he says. “It was just desperation. I needed money.”
Go West, Young Man
Like many architects before him, particularly Modernists, the landscape and climate of Southern California called him from his native Ireland.
“I’d look out my window at the cloudy rainy skies and I was like, ‘blue skies, great architecture—I’ve got to go check that out,’” he says.
Paul McClean also saw the terrain as a welcome challenge for another of his calling cards: pulling off minimalist, acrobatic-like designs in a remarkably hilly and uneven desert landscape. He landed in Laguna Beach in the mid-1990s. It was a good place to launch his career. Commissions were varied, nearly all bearing his skillful California Modernist stamp.
“People are eclectic and they encourage that in that community,” he points out.
The combination of ocean views and contemporary homes was a rigorous boot camp for another McClean design stamp; the ability to wring much beauty from every view.
New projects had him regularly speaking before the local design board, which served as advertising for new commissions, since they were often attended by locals seeking an architect. By 2000, the young Paul McClean had opened his firm.
Inflection Point
The Hollywood Hills house on Blue Jay Way would merit its own chapter in any retrospective of Paul McClean’s career.
“It’s not often that you can see an inflection point so clearly in a firm’s trajectory,” he says of the striking Modernist home he was hired to build in the mid-2000s.
He completed the project around 2008, just in time for the market crash. The home hit the market and, surprisingly, given the economic climate, it sold for a handsome sum.
“People hadn’t seen that type of number in the Bird Streets of West Hollywood.”
With its profit as proof of concept, McClean Design began designing speculative homes in Los Angeles between 2008 and 2013. It was the recession, an odd time to be doing so, and by the time the market bounced back, there was plenty of new Paul McClean inventory available and move-in ready. Suddenly, his name was everywhere, as were his works, which tracked with a resurgence in popularity of a California architectural classic: Modernism.
Water and Light Are Universal
Around 2020, international clients began seeking his homes in places far beyond Los Angeles.
“When COVID came and everyone had to stay home, we had to get on planes,” he reflects. “Not what I expected at all.”
The houses they create are classics in the California design vernacular—sleek cathedrals to the good life—and are desired worldwide. Today, there are Paul McClean projects from Nevada and Hawaii to the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Thailand, and Turks and Caicos.
In 2025, his firm celebrates its 25th anniversary. The boy who once sketched houses in Dublin has become the architect who builds the California dream, all sunlight and glamour, in glass and steel.
“I think of myself as a California architect and an Irishman,” he says—a duality that defines both his identity and his work.
He is both an aspirant and a dream-maker. Paul McClean, after all, came west chasing blue skies, and now creates for others the vision he once pursued for himself and has realized.
Paul McClean
McClean Design | mccleandesign.com
Photographs Courtesy of McClean Design; Photos by Manolo Langis, Jim Bartsch, Stephanie Keenan, Tyler Hogan
