As part of our Twenty fifth-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative journal tales from earlier than our web site launched. This story beforehand appeared in Dwell’s February 2002 subject.
Restoring a traditional—which requires little greater than authentic plans, an excellent contractor, and a king’s ransom—is straightforward. Renovating one is one other matter completely. Confronted with reconciling private want with the tasks of preservation, each home-owner cursed/blessed with a masterpiece has, throughout one disaster or one other, puzzled, “What would [insert name of genius here] have accomplished?”
Anne Friedberg and Howard Rodman truly acquired a solution—and from one of many icons of Los Angeles structure, John Lautner. In a metropolis famend for the standard of its residences, Lautner’s achievement is singular: Greater than any of his contemporaries—together with his instructor, Frank Lloyd Wright—he discovered the essence of the town he claimed to detest and transformed it into structure. Lautner’s 60-odd residences, which embody the world well-known flying saucer-shaped Chemosphere, appear to have coalesced out of L.A.’s sexuality and corruption, friendliness and inscrutability, its capability for fantasy and its onerous, darkish energy. Usually described as “observatories,” equally are Lautner’s works observations—of an precise, cultural, and imaginative topography of the L.A. mind-set.
Given the power of his imaginative and prescient, it’s shocking to study—as Friedberg and Rodman did—that Lautner cared much less about how his creations regarded than about how they felt to those that lived in them. In 1992, the couple bought the Zahn home, a two-bedroom construction designed by Lautner in 1957 for an aged homeopathic physician. A lot as they appreciated its singularity. Friedberg and Rodman, writers who work from home—she authored Window Procuring: Cinema and the Postmodern, he wrote the screenplay for Joe Gould’s Secret—knew the residence wanted vital reworking to accommodate their wants, and in the end approached Lautner himself. The outcomes proved remodeling—not solely to the construction however to the purchasers as properly.
Satirically, given the result, Friedberg and Rodman weren’t in search of a home in any respect. “We had been studying the Sunday actual property advertisements, which we did as leisure,” Friedberg remembers. “And Howard mentioned, ‘Hey! First time in the marketplace. John Lautner.’ We might by no means gone to have a look at a home earlier than.” They contacted theagent, the splendidly monikered Crosby Doe, of Mossler, Deasy, and Doe, an L.A. actual property agency specializing in traditional architectural properties. Doe proved to be a little bit of a traditional himself. “He’s a particularly dapper man with just a little moustache who typically wears ascots.”Rodman says. “And he drives both a classic Facel Vega, Jaguar, or a 1966 Worldwide Harvester Journey-All restored to a fare-thee-well.” Doe’s aptitude for presentation prolonged to his work. “Crosby was exhibiting the home in December, January, a kind of monthswhere the air could be very clear and the view actually pops out at you,” Rodman remembers. “He selected the hour,” Friedberg provides. “Twilight. You walked up the driveway and you could possibly see the ocean. The siting was simply unbelievable.”
And the home, in Beachwood Canyon, above Hollywood, is a minor gem. Trapezoidal in form, the outside is distinguished by twin rows of adjustable, perforated metal screens, which offer shade, privateness, and air flow. Inside, a light-filled central atrium begins on the glass-enclosed entry, from which a staircase winds as much as the principle ground, and climaxes in a beneficiant skylight supported by a cross of metal beams.
Rodman “was very taken with it as a sort of fantasy,” which mixed the villain’s lair in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with an embrace of futuristic (for 1957) gadgetry. Lautner had fitted the home with an intercom that connects the kitchen with the first bed room, entrance, and carport (and featureda police band), and what Rodman describes as “certainly one of these future-that-never-quite-came-to-pass low-voltage relay techniques. The advantage is, you’ll be able to flip sure lights on and off from any of 5 locations. The downsides are—we now know—there are solely a few electricians who nonetheless perceive this. Elements are actually onerous to get. And if one of many relays jams, then each gentle in the home that’s on stays on, and each gentle that’s off stays off.”
Having arrived as tire-kickers, Friedberg and Rodman departed as potential patrons—and, embracing their position, determined they couldn’t take the primary place they noticed. “We went round with Crosby and checked out about thirty-five different homes,” Rodman says. “And we acquired one of the best architectural training you could possibly probably get.” Doe’s information of the event of the town and its kinds disbursed from the Jaguar’s driver’s seat over three months of Saturdays elevated Friedberg and Rodman’s appreciation, not solely of L.A.’s superlative residential structure, however the uniqueness of Lautner’s creation. “We got here again to it 3 times,” Rodman remembers. “There was a day that we realized that the driveway spirals a sure approach, the stair spirals in the identical path, and in reality it’s a chambered nautilus. Otherwise you’s see particulars, like the way in which the partitions float.” With a nudge from Doe, who invoked Beachwood’s literary previous, the couple took the plunge.
As structured, nevertheless, the 1,800-square-foot second-floor dwelling quarters (with an extra 500-square-foot utility room on the bottom ground) couldn’t accommodate the couple’s want for workplace house and bookshelves. When all of the architects they approached, together with such heavyweights as Eric Owen Moss, and Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson, proved unwilling to tamper with a traditional, the Rodmans turned to the maestro himself.
The architect, who was 81, arrived in a silver BMW with a LAUTNER vainness plate; a big man, imposing as his creations, he strode on to the deck and surveyed the town. After greater than 30 years, Lautner was clearly happy to be again. “He identified every kind of options,” says Rodman. “He mentioned, concerning the Douglas fir ceiling within the kitchen, ‘We had that wooden there specifically milled; if the home caught on hearth, it might take three hours to burn by way of that.’”
Lautner, nevertheless, was no softie. “‘You want the home?’” Rodman remembers him saying. “‘Or perhaps you’re the sort of people that like that fashionable facade crap in Santa Monica.’ By which I feel he meant Frank Gehry.” Rodman ascribes this prickliness to underappreciation, a neglect Lautner abetted out of precept (by refusing to advertise himself) and persona (he thought most structure critics had been uninformed, and mentioned so). Provides Crosby Doe, “I feel he might also have suffered from melancholy about what L.A. grew to become, and what he envisioned he may have accomplished.”
But disappointment didn’t equal rigidity. “John was very particular,” Rodman remembers. “He mentioned. ‘Homes are constructed for the individuals who reside in them.’” It was agreed that the funnel-shaped glass chamber that shaped the ground-floor entry can be expanded to surround the outside door to the utility room, and the room itself restyled to carry the couple’s voluminous library and function their joint workplace.
Lautner’s working strategies proved as distinctive as the home itself. “He joked about not being a superb draftsman as a result of, to him, there was no worth in it,” says Helena Arahuete, who labored for him for 23 years and right now runs Lautner Associates. “Usually he would simply do avery tough sketch, then give it to another person to develop.” Lautner, she explains, was “an concepts man” who targeted on the positioning and the purchasers. “He needed to know, ‘Whenever you’transforming, do you want gentle and openness? Do you want enclosed house?’” Rodman says. “At one level, he walked round the lounge, and he requested me to level out the place I’d really feel most comfy working, and I went proper for a nook. That, I feel, knowledgeable the place my workplace was.” The completed room features a pair of custom-designed desks, Lautner’s signature bookshelf design that includes recessed requirements that disappear behind the books as soon as they’re in place, and cork-finished sliders that cover cabinets and permit the couple to work collectively or individually.
Increasing the entry additionally enabled Lautner to exchange the aluminum-frame doorways with the frameless glass he’d needed to make use of 35 years earlier. Friedberg and Rodman agreed, however balked on the expense of the only glass sheet he specified. “I prompt two sheets, as a result of it’s quite a bit much less,” Rodman says. “And he mentioned, ‘In the event you’re going to try this, do three. Two appears like a compromise. Three appears deliberate.’” In the long run, they bit the bullet and adopted Lautner’s authentic suggestion.
When the couple had a baby, the architect was once more recruited to babyproof the stairwell. By then, Lautner, sick with emphysema, couldn’t climb the steps to contemplate the issue immediately. “However he didn’t have to,” Rodman says, “as a result of it was in his head.” The elegant resolution was a minimally invasive Plexiglas gate, which, open or closed, was barely seen. After Lautner’s loss of life, in 1994, his workplace added what Rodman calls a “sneeze guard”—lengthy sheets of Plexiglas, inserted behind the banquette that wraps round two sides of the stairwell—to forestall youngsters from swan diving over the sting (now eliminated).
Within the ensuing years, Friedberg and Rodman have made modifications that protect the unique spirit whereas maximizing livability, most notably within the major bed room, the place architect Dale B. Cohen added a bookshelf beneath the home windows and constructed a headboard that conceals the alarm and intercom controls. However other than wishing for extra land, they’re surprisingly regret-free—a operate, in Rodman’s view, not a lot of alterations made to the home, however the reverse. “I had do quite a lot of rising up as a way to reside right here,” he observes. “I used to be an adolescent for the primary thirty, thirty-five years of my life, and I feel the home taught me that I might be a grown-up with out having to surrender my sense of caprice or playfulness.”
Friedberg marvels on the structure’s affect on her work, which offers with movie principle. “There’s one thing distinctive about dwelling in a home that’s all about gentle, shadow, and establishing views,” she says. “It’s like a cloth paradigm of one thing very theoretical that I reside with on a regular basis. And there’s one thing deeply aligned and pleasurable about that.”
Each agree that the foremost beneficiary of Lautner’s enduring alchemy is their eight-year-old son, Tristan. “Rising up on this home, the place it was gentle and spacious, I imply, you’ll be able to’t have seasonal affective dysfunction right here,” says Friedberg. “I feel it simply produced a contented youngster.” She laughs. “I don’t assume we did.”
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