Frank Gehry’s neighbors were furious. Homeowners on his block in Santa Monica – a bastion of Southern California openmindedness – minced no words about the house he was renovating on the corner. It was “antisocial,” a “monstrosity,” a “prison,” they told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

Back in 1978, Mr. Gehry was an audacious up-and-comer poised to assume his role as the most famous architect in the world. To his neighbors at the time, though, he was just the guy down the street who had the gall to put up chain link.

There were other things about Mr. Gehry’s house that bothered the locals: the unpainted plywood, for instance, or the storage-facility-grade corrugated metal, both unapologetically visible from the street. But it was the angular porch covering made of chain link – a material typically associated with urban security fences and subdivision back yards – that really set tongues wagging in this upscale neighborhood of half-timbered Tudors and stuccoed Spanish Colonials.

Even the architect himself expressed a cryptic ambivalence about it. “I hate chain link too,” he told a reporter two years later. “But I wanted to see what could be done with these materials by using them in a sculptural way.”

Chain link is the Rodney Dangerfield of home fencing. Though widely in use, undeniably hardworking, and cheaper than virtually any of its competitors, it has struggled to get any respect ever since the Anchor Post Fence Co. began manufacturing and installing it in this country at the turn of the last century. (The company, now called Anchor Fence, boasts that the first American chain-link fence, installed in New Jersey more than a century ago, stands today.)

“Chain link is an affordable, strong, long-lasting, secure fencing system,” said Jeff Beneke, author of “The Fence Bible” (Storey Publishing, 2005). “It’s easy to install and doesn’t need any maintenance. With a locking gate on it, it’s tough to break through.”

And yet the product’s many virtues have always been dimmed by its basic unloveliness and its undeniable evocations of factories, parking lots, and minimum-security prisons.

“There’s no real way to make chain link pretty,” Mr. Beneke said. “It’s a utilitarian fence, not an architectural fence.”

That bit of insight will probably come as no surprise to homeowners who have chain link by chance, not by choice. There are plenty of people who, upon buying the beautiful house with the big backyard they’d always dreamed of, also ended up with the somewhat less-than-dreamy chain-link fence sur rounding it. Especially in areas that saw surges of middle-class development in the postwar years, chain link was king.

And because the stuff basically lasts forever, a great deal of it is still with us.

For those who just can’t bear the sight of it, replacing chain link with a backyard privacy fence made of wood or PVC (polyvinyl chloride, a rigid and weather resistant vinyl that simulates wood) is certainly an option – though neither comes cheap. Expect to spend about $25 a linear foot for the former, assuming you want a 6-foot-high fence, and up to $35 a linear foot for the latter.

Faced with such steep costs, many homeowners who inherit chain link decide to work with what they’ve got. One quick, easy, and cheap way to dress up a fence is to place long vertical slats of tinted polyethylene through the links.

“They’re basically like Venetian blinds,” Mr. Beneke said. “They come in different colors, and they weave through the mesh.”

Aside from adding color, he says, the slats change the fence into “more of a visual barrier. Around a pool, for instance, it creates much more privacy.”

If you don’t like the colors of the slats you find at the hardware store – or if you believe that adding strips of colored plastic or metal to chain link simply adds insult to injury – pre-cut wooden slats can also be found at lumber or fence-supply stores. And if you’re willing to put in the time, Mr. Beneke said, there’s no reason you can’t make your own slats out of whatever type of wood you like.

Bill Ullrich is a former president of the Chain Link Fence Manufacturers Institute in Columbia, Md., and head of a fencing consulting firm in Annapolis. He pointed out manufacturers’ efforts to improve the look of the product, including vinyl-coated chain link, often colored green or black, that “practically disappears into your landscape.”

Replacing existing galvanized-aluminum fabric with the colored sort, while leaving the fence’s frame intact, is a cost-effective way to greatly improve a fence’s look, he said, especially if the new fabric has a smaller mesh and a lighter gauge than traditional chain link. The newest and nicest fabrics cost about $13 a linear foot for a 42-inch-high fence – roughly half the cost of wood, and just a little more than one third the cost of PVC.

But perhaps the easiest and cheapest way to refine a chain-link fence is to make the most of its unique structure by letting creeping plants – such as moonflower vine, morning glory, or hyacinth bean – wend and weave their way through the links.

In this way, Mr. Ullrich said, “you can have [chain link] as the foundation of a living fence. It doesn’t have to be this ugly commercial thing in your back yard.”