by Stephanie Cartozian
Steve and Chris Tight’s hacienda-style home on a quiet street in Palos Verdes Estates doesn’t announce itself with extravagance. It reveals its story slowly, through stone terraces, thoughtful architectural details, and interiors layered with the memories of a life lived across continents. It feeds into the belief that some homes are waiting for the right family to find them.
In 2017, after six years in Dubai and six in Hong Kong, the Tights were ready to return to California. Steve Tight, a Stanford-educated architect and licensed contractor, also had obtained his MBA from Harvard and worked for the Walt Disney Company in international business development. That meant expatriate communities, private schools, and global travel were part of family life.
“We wanted the kids to experience public school,” Chris Tight said. “And Palos Verdes had some of the highest-ranked schools in the state.”
Their home search began on Zillow. One listing stood out: a sprawling Spanish Rancho-style home, designed by Walter S. Davis, in the heart of Montemalaga. The photos suggested solid construction and generous proportions, what Steve describes as “good bones.” The house had a contingent offer pending. For a month, the opportunity seemed lost. Then the deal fell through, and the Tights moved quickly.
Steve was comfortable purchasing sight unseen. Chris wasn’t.
“We flew in from Hong Kong for the weekend,” Chris says. “I needed to feel the house in person.”
What they found surprised them.
The listing had not advertised an ocean view, yet directly across the street stretched a sweeping panorama of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island. Behind the house lay something even more unexpected—an overgrown garden hidden behind a towering hedge of thirty-foot elm trees and a chain-link fence.
“There was crazy land undisclosed in the listing at the back of the residence,” Chris said.
Beyond the hedge were fountains, a sports court, and a sprawling backyard with enormous potential. Steve immediately imagined terraces, orchards, vegetable beds, and stone walls built from the native Palos Verdes rock scattered across the property.
In January 2017, the Tight family made the house their permanent home.
For an architect, living in a house designed by someone else is never entirely comfortable. Within months, Steve began reshaping the property, starting outdoors.
His first project was a terraced garden—an idea he had sketched in his mind during that whirlwind weekend visit from Hong Kong. The chain-link fence was replaced with low stone walls constructed from PV stone found on site. The gardens were organized into productive and ornamental zones: vegetables, fruit trees, and eventually chickens. Currently the house boasts seventy-seven fruit bearing trees and Steve says, “I must have removed five or six large PV stones from every hole I dug, and that’s what was used in creating the eight or so terraced walls on the rear slope.”
“There was already an aviary where the previous owner raised pigeons and doves,” Steve said. “We turned the aviary into an old world style chicken coop.”
The couple also discovered a hidden deck at the far edge of the property and a rustic bar that they often utilize when entertaining outside.
On their very first night in the home, the Tights received a call from a former Stanford classmate of Steve’s. He had seen their new address in the Stanford alumni magazine.
“He said, ‘My mother-in-law, Kay Weber, built that house. It has a spiral staircase,’” Steve recalled. “She hadn’t seen it since she sold it.”
The Cook family visited the house on the mother-in-law’s 80th birthday in the very home she had built decades earlier. The connection has endured ever since and Cook described the event as “this is your life tour” where they toured all the places most special to her together. Steve says the “reunion” was a special experience hearing the stories of each of the four siblings who had previously grown up there, where they slept, what the property was like when it was the only house on the dirt street. Kay Weber is still a current resident of Rancho Palos Verdes nearing her nineties now.
“We’ve stayed in touch. It felt like confirmation that the house was meant to be ours,” Chris said.
During the first six months of 2017, the couple undertook a major remodel, adding a new primary suite and office while reworking several problematic spaces.
Chris remembers the kitchen most vividly.
“It was bizarre. Dark. There was definitely a better way to do it.”
The renovation introduced better circulation, new sightlines, and what Chris jokingly calls Steve’s signature feature:
“He likes a million skylights.”
The light oak floors were refinished in a deep espresso tone, and the stained glass panels in the foyer were replaced with clear beveled glass to capture the ocean view. As a gesture of respect to the original artisan, a portion of the original stained glass was reinstalled above the entry.
The result is a foyer that opens naturally toward the living room, where the house’s personality fully reveals itself.
The living room feels less like a staged interior and more like a visual autobiography. Italianate columns frame the passage to the sunroom, steel-framed windows admit coastal light, and the furnishings tell stories from France, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
Behind the sofa hangs a grid of nine square artworks, three rows of three, each depicting the moon reflected on a pond in luminous acrylic resin. Steve acquired the first pieces during a Moon Festival season while working for Caesars Entertainment. On Steve’s ride from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, the taxi driver mentioned that he was an artist. Curious, Steve looked at his website and eventually purchased six pieces.
“He made one for every month of the year,” Steve says. “I couldn’t stop at just a few.”
The dining room reflects the couple’s years in Asia. A black lacquered mahogany table with a rotating lazy Susan—custom-made in Hong Kong with a massive tree trunk base—sits beneath three traditional Arabic lanterns. Vietnamese ancestor portraits on reed paper line the walls, while antique clocks tick quietly throughout the house.
The clocks are more than decoration. Steve’s great-grandfather was a clockmaker in England, and Chris’s father assembled an extensive collection of timepieces.
One favorite, a grandfather clock found in Lyon, France, is missing the lower case, leaving the ornate silver pendulum suspended dramatically below the dial.
“It shouldn’t work,” Chris says. “But that’s why we love it.”
The Tight home resists the polished perfection often associated with architectural remodels. Chris’s favorite workspace is not inside, but on the backyard patio, where she makes most of her business calls surrounded by gardens that Steve designed. Chris is currently leading a capital campaign to benefit The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.
Their 10-year-old pug, Hazel, wanders easily between terraces, sunroom, and living room, as if the house had always belonged to her. PEN
