A Mid-Century Masterpiece Home Brought to Life After 70 Years (House Tour)

I think this house and maybe in particular this living room is kind of like a lung for this hillside and this area where it kind of breathes in and out. You know the natural beauty, the air, the views, it's like a pavilion that's breathing and alive. My name's Barbara Bester and my practice is Bester Architecture and we're here in LA at Silvertop which is a John Lautner house that kind of reimagined and restored. We're in this neighborhood called Silver Lake which is on the east side of Los Angeles and this house was a really long-term collaboration between Lautner and his client someone named Ken Reiner. The idea is like the first schematic drawings are from the late 50s and I kind of think of it as the falling water of the west coast you know it really is that significant. You know one great thing is that this project was super well documented and that archive of all those drawings and documentation are at the Getty so when we first started we were able to kind of create our own document of like intentions. So when we came into the project it had been owned by the same couple for over 40 years who had bought it but also put in I would say rudimentary kitchens and bathrooms and things of the parts that hadn't been finished so our job was to kind of take it all back to the core and shell and then in some cases restore the kind of futuristic systems and in other cases we tried to take inspiration from the idea of the house of the future in terms of adding layers of what the house of the future would be today. When you come up to the top of the driveway there's a carport and a ramp that leads to the front door. There's two bedrooms to the left. Coming through the house there is an outdoor terrarium and the kitchen spreads out but then pushing forward you emerge into the huge ceiling and concrete shell of the main living room. Built into that is this ingenious banquet built and designed by Jamie Bush who's the interior designer. My name is Jamie Bush and I'm an interior designer here in Los Angeles. Our studio is called Jamie Bush and Co because it's a whole team effort not just myself. So we were brought on early in the project which was great because we really got to collaborate with Barber's Office, Bester Architecture. So there were a lot of functional requirements that this home had to have but also in a way that's preserving the the integrity of the architecture but being a very livable space for a family of four. So the biggest challenge that we had was how to furnish and organize this grand centralized space. And our goal was to sort of ground three distinct areas. So on the kitchen side we designed floating shelving to ground the music area. On the opposite side we designed this tambour cabinet that was floating on the brick wall to hide the television. And on the view side we created a dining area with a bench seating attached to sort of ground that area. So these three distinct areas were attaching these elements to the existing architecture that gave a foundation for the programmatic sort of separation of the three spaces. Also in the living room another piece that I absolutely love is this 1970s cast stone lantern that to me has a dialogue with the fireplace that it's it's sculptural but it's in the same sort of tactile unrefined finish of this sort of cast in place of concrete. The other materials that we brought inside were this large stainless steel island. There is a black soapstone getting used in a lot of the cabinetry. And then there's also this terrazzo and the terrazzo is used really to create these larger graphic patterns that go inside and outside of the house. And then there's this concrete shell that floats over that and all the walls of the concrete shell are just glass and the concrete shell sits on these four big concrete pillars which are kind of exposed in the house. So some of the futuristic systems in this house include of course the thin shell concrete roof but also the first infinity pool. In the primary bedroom there's a pretty great retractable skylight. In the bathroom there's a pretty amazing collection of Lautner drawings about a large bathing area in the primary. So there's a 10 ton piece of glass that's quite large that open up the bathroom to the outdoor patio that's adjacent to it and then to match that there's a skylight a frameless skylight above. I have to say I feel my favorite area in the house is Barbara's reimagination of the kitchen. It's such a tour de force where she devised a language of wood cabinetry but in a seamless completely effortless way but it's also incredibly functional because the tambour system allows cabinetry to sort of retract upon itself. I think it's just a brilliant reinterpretation of what I think Lautner would have been proud of and how the family likes to live today. For me too the kitchen's probably the most fun place because it really is so people-centric. You know there's so many places to hang out and cook and catch up so that's always great achievement for architects if people are happy and want to be in their spaces.