Feasibility, team selection, budgeting, and contract negotiation, setting the project up to succeed before ground is broken.

Schedule and cost control, quality oversight, and clear owner reporting through every phase of the build.

Punch lists, commissioning, and warranties. A clean, complete handover of a building that works.

LaPorte Projects was founded on a simple belief: the owner of an exceptional property deserves an advocate as committed to it as they are.

For the past ten years, Colin LaPorte has managed the design and construction of high-end residential and commercial projects across Southern California, guiding owners through contract negotiations, budgets, schedules, and the hundreds of decisions that shape a building.

The practice is deliberately boutique. Each engagement receives proactive, analytical, and discreet principal-level attention, with relationships across Los Angeles, Orange County, and Santa Barbara's finest architects, builders, and consultants.

Colin holds a degree in architecture from New York University and is currently completing a Master of Real Estate Development at the University of Southern California.

Tanager Way

At the end of a cul-de-sac in the Bird Streets, a guarded street façade gives way to a house turned entirely toward the city.

The house that previously stood on the site faced away from the view. Vantage Design Group, led by principal Russell Holthouse, turned the new home toward downtown Los Angeles, keeping the street elevation nearly opaque for privacy and saving the reveal for inside. An oversized pivot door opens to a skylit foyer, and the main level beyond becomes one continuous room with the terrace when its walls of glass slide away.

The same travertine runs inside and out, so floors, walls, and terraces read as a single stone shell, warmed by walnut millwork. On the entertaining level, an infinity pool with baja shelf and spa sits against the skyline beside a jade bar and walk-in wine room. Across roughly 14,000 square feet on three levels, the house also holds a primary suite with its own fire-pit deck, guest suites below, and a gym and yoga studio overlooking an atrium, with steam room and sauna.

The Strand

On a lot just 33 feet wide, a three-story house of board-formed concrete and cedar that appears to float above the sand of The Strand.

KAA Design Group, which has designed some three dozen houses on The Strand, handled both the architecture and the landscape, and calls the house The Vessel: with neighbors only about six feet away on either side, the team treated the narrow lots as shipping berths and the house as a boat slipping into dock. A two-foot band of windows between the upper and lower floors makes the top level seem to hover by day and glow like a lantern at night, while vertical cedar paneling and adjustable shutters on the upper floor manage sunlight, views, and privacy.

The owners asked for two things that pull in opposite directions: an open plan that brings the beach inside, and enough wall for a collection of large-scale contemporary art. Gardens are drawn into the 7,400-square-foot house through a sculpture courtyard, and a circular sky opening crowns the terrace off the primary bath. Interior designer Alana Homesley took her palette from the owners’ art and their Bulthaup kitchen, anchoring each room with a single focal piece, down to the beach-level game room with its billiards table and bar.

Arkell Drive

On a promontory at the end of a Trousdale Estates cul-de-sac, a full renovation of a two-story residence with views across the city, the canyon, and the Pacific.

The property is defined by its frontage: an unusually wide lot, framed by mature olive trees and a private orchard that keep the house hidden from the street. Inside, the plan is open beneath soaring ceilings, with chevron-laid wood floors running through the living and entertaining rooms and a chef’s kitchen at the center of the house.

Walls of glass open to an infinity-edge pool set against the ocean view, and the primary suite is planned as a retreat of its own, with an indoor pool in its bath. The work reached every system and surface, the quiet, unglamorous part of a true full renovation, while the finishes were held to a gallery standard throughout.

Stradella Court

On one of the highest ridges in Bel Air, a new-build estate conceived as a garden in the sky, with views across downtown, Century City, the Stone Canyon Reservoir, and the Pacific.

SAOTA designed the house around the panorama, a sweep of roughly 270 degrees, so that the view returns from room after room. Monumental concrete forms give the architecture its weight, while broad sheltered terraces, lawns, and water features blur the line between the living spaces and the landscape. An infinity-edge pool runs to the edge of the site, with an outdoor kitchen and bar alongside.

Inside, the program is built for a large family that entertains: nine bedrooms, four kitchens in total, and finishes in some of the finest stone and marble available. A full wellness level holds a gym, sauna, steam room, and hot and cold plunge pools, and a separate guest house has its own deck and pool.

Carla Ridge

In Trousdale Estates, a 10,000-square-foot residence by Woods + Dangaran, organized around a two-story atrium and opened to downtown on one side and the Pacific on the other.

Woods + Dangaran divided the house into two low pavilions so that a large program sits quietly on its sloping site. The public pavilion faces the skyline: a great room wrapped in full-height sliding glass, beside a pool detailed with infinity edges on two sides. The second pavilion holds the bedrooms and a family room, with the primary suite at the end of its own gallery, between an outdoor fireplace and a louvered seating terrace.

The atrium is the hinge of the plan, lined in board-formed concrete and arranged so that the views are revealed in sequence through framed openings and deep overhangs. Teak casework and wall paneling and travertine floor slabs complete a deliberately restrained palette. The house was completed in 2021, with landscape by Chris Sosa.

Canon Drive

Behind mature hedges and a gate on a flat half-acre in the Beverly Hills flats, a full renovation of a traditional 1986 residence, with interiors by Michael S. Smith.

Smith, known for his work on the private residence of the White House, approached the house as a series of layered, quietly formal rooms. The entry sets the tone: hand-painted walls by Maria Trimbell, custom bronze sconces by French sculptor Patrice Dangel, and a sweeping iron staircase. Beyond it, the dining room is wrapped in hand-painted Gracie wallpaper beneath a 19th-century Spanish crystal chandelier, and the formal living room pairs Venetian plaster walls with a Calacatta Viola marble fireplace by Jamb London.

The kitchen is finished in Calacatta marble around a large central island, opening to a den that doubles as a screening room, paneled in walnut with a hand-carved limestone fireplace. Outside, a shaded loggia and an outdoor fireplace overlook the pool and spa, and a detached guest house serves as a gym.

Broad Beach Road

A 1958 Cape Cod-style beach house by Gerard Colcord on Broad Beach in Malibu, partially renovated and thoughtfully restored.

Colcord, often called Hollywood’s society architect, designed hundreds of traditional California houses and generally avoided the modernism of his contemporaries. This one sits behind a gated entry on about an acre, with roughly 100 feet of sand extending from the house to the water, an unusual depth even on Broad Beach.

The work preserved the character of the original design while bringing the interiors up to date. Smith, known for combining historic and modern pieces, gave the rooms a warm, layered quality, and walls of glass that disappear fully open the main living spaces to the ocean. A detached guest house and a beach cabana complete the property.

The Culver Steps

On a long-vacant lot between the Culver Hotel and The Culver Studios, a mixed-use building and public plaza that has become the central gathering place of downtown Culver City.

Developed by Hackman Capital Partners in partnership with the City of Culver City, and designed by EYRC Architects, the four-story project brings together roughly 40,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, 75,000 square feet of creative office space, and a 35,000-square-foot public plaza at the corner of Culver and Washington Boulevards. The site had served for years as temporary space, a Christmas tree lot in winter and an event staging area in summer.

The project takes its name from the grand stair that cascades down the side of the building, linking the ground-level plaza to an elevated restaurant pavilion and doubling as amphitheater seating for concerts and outdoor films. EYRC designed the building with no back side, so every elevation addresses the street, and used wood generously throughout to give its spaces a carved, warm character. Landscape architecture is by SWA Group. The project opened in 2019, with Amazon Studios leasing the full office component.

Culver City Creative

A seven-story, 280,000 SF creative office building in Culver City, designed by Gensler as a vertical campus of tall floors, deep balconies, and exterior stairs.

C3 rises 132 feet from a three-acre site at Hannum Avenue and Bristol Parkway. Gensler took its cues from the early 20th-century industrial buildings being converted to offices across the city: an exposed concrete frame, expanses of glass, and operable double-height glass walls that open the floors to the coastal climate. Floor plates of 38,000 to 45,000 square feet alternate as the building rises, pushing out past the envelope to form building-wide balconies.

Brightly colored stairs climb the eastern facade between those balconies, and truss-framed sky bridges link two upper floors directly to the adjacent parking structure. The building was designed to grow with its tenants, with nearly 45,000 square feet reserved for future mezzanines within 20-foot floor-to-floor volumes. Completed in 2018, C3 was named a Best Project by ENR California.

Playa Court Campus

Two 1960 bow-truss buildings in western Culver City, converted into a single creative office campus of roughly 48,000 SF.

The buildings, of about 32,000 and 16,700 square feet, sit together on a private cul-de-sac near the Hayden Tract and Playa Vista. Abramson Teiger Architects gave the pair a single identity: a facade of corrugated, perforated red screens that admit air and a degree of transparency while keeping the interiors private, broken up by green inserts of the same material, and a dramatic glass-enclosed entry.

Inside, the original wood bow-truss roofs were left exposed at 24 feet, with skylights throughout and operable windows bringing in daylight and air. Three new steel mezzanines add floor area in the larger building, and new ground-floor kitchens in each building open to outdoor patios, one through a full roll-up door.

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