Hollywood Hills architecture, on the slope it sits on.

A hillside lot in Los Angeles is governed by the city's Baseline Hillside Ordinance, which ties how much house you can build to the size and the slope of the land rather than to what the street would allow below. It caps floor area on a sliding scale, limits how much earth can be cut and filled, restricts how steep a new graded slope may be, and sends anything beyond those allowances down a discretionary path that adds months.

So the first drawings here are not of rooms. They are of the ground: where the driveway can meet the road, where the garage has to sit, how the house steps down, what the retaining does, and what all of that costs before a single finish is chosen. Getting that wrong is the most expensive mistake available on a hillside, and getting it right is most of the job.