SOUTH BAY DIGS | Digital Edition Online

44 DIGS.NET | 9.5.25 A R C H I T E C T U R E + D E S I G N P R O F I L E | P A U L M C C L E A N 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 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 desired worldwide. Today there are 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 Irish man," he says—a duality that defines both his identity and his work. He is both aspirant and dream-maker. McClean, after all, came west chasing blue skies, and now creates for others the vision he once pursued for himself, and has realized. 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 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. 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 McClean had opened his firm. Inflection Point The Hollywood Hills house on Blue Jay Way would merit its own chapter in any retrospective of 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 L E F T P H O T O B Y T Y L E R H O G A N R I G H T P H O T O B Y M A N O L O L A N G I S

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