THE MAK CENTER FOR ART & ARCHITECTURE SPRING TOUR
& an 89-year old neighbor living in his Hollywood Hills mansion since the 1950s, a Lautner I've been eyeing for years, and a season of new museums in LA
SANCTUARIES LA EXPLORES THE QUIETER SIDE OF LOS ANGELES THROUGH DESIGN.
ROOTED IN THE BELIEF THAT SANCTUARY EXISTS EVERYWHERE, OFTEN HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT.
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From the Field is an occasional Wednesday dispatch from Sanctuaries LA — what I saw, what’s worth knowing, and what’s coming up in the city.
Volume 003
This weekend I did the MAK Center for Art & Architecture spring tour. Four houses — skipping the Woodland Hills Van Dekker House because, well, driving — all private homes or studios opened up for one day. There's something so different about seeing a landmarked building where someone actually lives. Where a family has figured out how to inhabit it, adapted it, made it theirs. Versus a house that exists purely for tours. The Hollyhock House is beautiful. But it's a museum. These were lived-in homes (and a working studio!).
THE POLITO HOUSE: HOLLYWOOD HILLS
My favorite home of the day, and honestly the one I can’t stop thinking about. The way the building meets the back deck — and the way that deck connects up to the hill behind it — is exactly the vision I have for what I want to do with my own house someday. A two-story addition where the top level walks directly out to the land. The ivy covering everything. A pool added in 1980 that manages to feel like it was always there. This one has it all.
THE LLOYD WRIGHT STUDIO: DOHENY DRIVE
Lloyd Wright working in his father’s Mayan Revival language, but filtered through his own obsession with the California landscape. The Joshua Tree motif running throughout is so specific, so him. The building currently operates as a showroom for von Holzhausen, an LA-based material innovation company making plant-based alternatives to plastic — a surprisingly fitting tenant. The upstairs dining room and sun room stopped me in my tracks. All that green. I want to interview the owner one day. Consider this a placeholder for now.
THE WOLFF HOUSE: SHERMAN OAKS
I’ll be honest: this one wasn’t for me. Schindler working in an adobe vernacular, clearly channeling New Mexico, with an exterior washed in orange and an interior that reads almost pink. The lines are good. The breezeway is good. The all-wood additions with flagstone flooring from the current owners are lovely. But the color palette kept pulling me out of it. I can admire what he was doing here without it being my thing.
THE TUCKER HOUSE: HOLLYWOOD HILLS
No photos allowed, which is a shame, because this one was a showstopper. The kind of house that makes you quiet when you walk in. This is the version of the work I love most.
But honestly? The best moment of the whole day had nothing to do with any of the houses on the official list. Walking from our car to the Tucker House, a neighbor — 89 years old who has lived in his Hollywood Hills home for almost 70 years — invited me and my friend, Sael Bartolucci, inside. He gave us a tour. He told stories. The kind of stories that make you realize how much of this city’s history lives in the people who’ve simply stayed. He agreed to let me come back in the next couple of weeks to interview him and shoot properly. Stay tuned. This one is going to be a real gem.
UPCOMING
DATALAND opens June 20 inside Frank Gehry's The Grand LA. Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç are opening what they're calling the world's first museum of AI arts, right in the Grand Avenue Cultural District alongside The Broad, MOCA, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. The inaugural exhibition, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, is a fully immersive, 360-degree environment built from machine learning and ecological data. It's one of the last buildings Gehry designed before he passed last December and I wonder how he’d feel about this exhibit opening there.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens September 22 in Exposition Park, and the landscape alone — by Studio-MLA — will be worth the trip. I know that this is on everyone’s radar already; Ma Yansong's building has been rising there for years. But it’s worth noting as the permanent collection reads like a love letter to visual storytelling: Judy Baca, Diego Rivera, Carrie Mae Weems, Norman Rockwell. The fact that it holds the archive from Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles makes this one of the more significant cultural openings this city has seen in a long time.
WORTH KNOWING
LACMA's David Geffen Galleries opened on April 19, and I still haven't been — which needs to change. Peter Zumthor. Twenty years in the making. A 275-meter arc of glass and concrete spanning Wilshire, with the entire permanent collection — 6,000 years of art history — arranged on a single, non-hierarchical level. This one has been a long time coming.
Richard Neutra's Jardinette Apartments in Hollywood — his first LA commission, built in 1928 — has finally been restored. Developer Cameron Hassid spent over $5 million and several years bringing it back — the ribbon windows, the oxblood concrete lobby floor, all of it returned to Neutra's original vision. The building is now accepting tenants.
A John Lautner built in 1947 has been hiding in plain sight on Mount Washington — buried under decades of accumulation. A few doors down from the Rome Compound. I've walked past it for years — incredible lines, loads of land, views — always knowing something was there, but not knowing what. My husband and I had a name for it: a scare hole. This week I saw a video online and recognized it immediately. Same family since it was built. The grandson of the original owner is now restoring it. I'll be reaching out. Stay tuned.
The Stahl House has been on the market since November, and since then the price just dropped $5M. Max Kutner wrote a deep dive on it yesterday. Go read it.
Shelby x