OUT OF THE SHADOWS
SOMETHING about Barbara Bestor’s dining table, an inexpensive minimalist steel piece, isn’t quite right. The glossy surface, powder-coated a watermelon pink, is perfectly cheerful. But laden with platters of finger foods, the table is falling a little flat.
Suddenly inspired, the architect sprints to a nearby bookcase and pulls down two thick volumes.
“I knew that ‘The Name of the Rose’ and ‘A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method’ had some purpose,” says Bestor, 41, placing the books as impromptu pedestals for her dishes. “I’m a completely topographical architect.”
Indeed, even when she is throwing a party, Bestor considers every elevation. Tonight’s fete celebrates a new furniture line by her friend David Weeks, the lighting designer. It’s also her first large gathering in the Los Feliz home she recently built on a promontory directly across the street from the iconic 1924 Ennis House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s fourth and final textile-block house in Los Angeles.
Yes, Bestor admits, it was daunting putting her creation in such close context to what she calls Wright’s “high-concept, radically huge gesture.” Built from patterned concrete modules that transcended the flat look of cinder-block construction, the Ennis House was inspired by Mayan and Aztec structures.
“It is L.A.’s Machu Picchu,” Bestor says, referring to its tomb-like appearance and current state of disrepair, partly due to the Northridge earthquake in 1994 and fierce rainstorms of 2004. “I’d much rather look at that every morning than the Getty Center.”
VISITING the Wright landmark did offer some revelations for Bestor as she planned her house. “It looks so monumental,” she says, “but on the inside it’s a fairly modest one-story house with secret gardens and a linear pool hidden from the street view.”
The latter was an inspiration for Bestor, who purchased her steeply sloped property in late 2005.
“If you put a pool at the bottom of a hill, you’ll never use it,” she says. “Or you’ll spend all your time running up and down stairs to make sure the kids are OK.”
Instead, she dropped the 2,800-square-foot, two-story house into the hillside, angled away from the street to follow the topography of the lot and to maximize a southwestern panorama that stretches from Long Beach to Santa Monica.
That placement created a triangular patio with enough room for a thin 27-foot-long pool, part of an indoor-outdoor living space at the front of the house.
“One of the most unusual and useful things in the L.A. codes is that you can build a pool right up to the property line,” she says.
A concrete wall meant to keep the pool safe for children and inaccessible from the street also gave Bestor a chance to put the Ennis House on a pedestal. Sitting in one of her favorite outdoor chairs, she observed that a properly angled barrier would obscure street traffic and the hillside below Wright’s house, so that it would appear to rise from her pool wall like an intricate tribal sculpture on a museum riser.
“The sloping angles pull the houses together,” says Culver City architect Steven Shortridge, a guest at the party and an early client of Weeks’. “The strength of the house is how well its spaces and form relate to and ‘dance’ with the Ennis House across the street.”
FOR Bestor, it almost wasn’t to be.
She has been drawn to Glendower Avenue since the late ‘80s, when as a student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, she had a crush on the street, she says. “There was a Schindler down the road and the Frank Lloyd Wright house. For someone who had come from New England, it was an architectural fantasyland.”
But after she was hired to design a house on the challenging site, her clients bailed.
“It was bananas. I had to buy the property. It was out of my league financially,” Bestor says, adding that construction costs alone for the hillside site eventually ran slightly more than $1 million. “But the house had to be built.”
So Bestor, author of the 2006 style guide “Bohemian Modern: Living in Silver Lake,” became her own client, moving forward with her usual cost- efficient materials and processes.
“Barbara’s work is definitely populist,” Shortridge says. “It is about how you experience being in and living in the spaces that gives it its meaning and quality.”
Bestor speaks passionately about the “suppressed narrative of Los Angeles modernism: livable architecture built for artists with features that people take for granted now in the American home.” It’s this kind of romanticism tempered with a grounded pragmatism that has won Bestor such an ardent following.
TONIGHT, the guest list for the Weeks party skips across the fashion, design, movie and music industries, and as newcomers arrive, they all beg for a home tour.
On the entry floor, a huge window in the dining room offers a western vista of the basin below. Downstairs, however, sleeping quarters for Bestor and her 8- and 9-year-old daughters are shrouded by treetops for privacy.
The whole house has what she calls a “warm and cave-y look,” attributed to the hardwood floors, marine-grade rotary-cut Douglas fir plywood panels, and concrete walls stamped with the grain of the wood that molded them.
“A lot of contemporary houses try to disguise the ugly parts like retaining walls,” she says. “To me they are an essential way of showing how you really build things, and they can be aesthetic in and of themselves.”
Indeed, when further foundation work proved necessary on the lower level, Bestor gained space that she turned into a library for her daughters. With plywood bookshelves and a built-in daybed along one wall, and animal wallpaper by graphic designer Geoff McFetridge on another, the remaining expanses of bare concrete look as warm and purposeful as exposed brick in a historic loft.
“I love how she combines prints and patterns, textures and colors,” says Brooke Hodge, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., who visited the house while it was under construction. “It feels youthful and casual, but it has a lot of character. Not everyone would put a rolling red barn door on a plywood wall in Los Angeles.”
Though she is perfectly happy to design terrazzo counters and teak cabinets for clients, Bestor rejects the current fetish for spa bathrooms and gourmet kitchens. With two bathrooms on each floor, she standardized the components and saved money by using industrial tile and plywood cabinetry. In the kitchen, she painted cabinets white to match the marble counters and fashioned an island made of Douglas fir with a “lawn green” laminate top and painted sides.
“I did a billion kitchen remodels when I was starting out, and all I want is to cover all the bases and make it interesting and cool,” she says.
Milling around the open-plan dining and living room, which opens to a deck on one side and the pool on another, Bestor’s guests demonstrated her theories about architecture and social interaction.
“Weirdly, a lot of the logic of making a house suitable for kids also applies to adults,” she says. “You want to have a lot of visual openness so you can be in the living room and keep an eye on what’s going on out by the pool, and you should always have different paths and exits so you can avoid someone if you don’t want to be seen.”
Bestor’s maternal approach extends to her role as host. “Once everything’s set up, it’s pretty laissez-faire,” she says. “My favorite bartender is your family grandmother old lady who knows what you’re having and gets everyone wasted.”
Tonight’s guest of honor, sitting under one of his Torroja lighting fixtures, voices his approval of the scene from a long sofa that Bestor covered in vintage airline upholstery fabric.
“You don’t know what to expect when you’re at the top of a hill across from a Frank Lloyd Wright,” the Brooklyn-based Weeks says. “I always fantasize about moving to L.A., and houses and parties like this are a good endorsement.”
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Bestor’s strategy: Balance splurges and bargains
“I am totally the put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is lady,” architect Barbara Bestor says. When building her own home on a pricey and challenging hillside lot, she offset splurges with strategic purchases. A look at how she balanced the budget:
WINDOWS: The dining room has a picture window that’s 15 feet wide and 8 feet tall. “That’s one continuous piece of glass, and it cost $10,000,” Bestor says. Elsewhere she used aluminum windows from an industrial supplier that cost $200 each.
LIGHTING: Some fixtures were designed by her friend David Weeks, whose work can cost thousands at the Ralph Pucci showroom in the Pacific Design Center. By contrast, a vintage bamboo globe pendant on the deck was $200 at Rewire in Los Angeles, and her kitchen breakfast bar is illuminated by $50 woven wicker pendant lights from IKEA.
FIXTURES: Good mirrors and sinks in the bathroom are important, Bestor says. She splurged on La Cava and Duravit sinks and saved money on tile, citing B & W Tile in Gardena and Universal Tile Co. in Ontario. “Even though I cover the floors and the walls all the way to the ceiling, I only spend between $5 and $8 a square foot on tiles,” she says. “It’s supposed to be background stuff. If you want it to last a long time, you don’t want to be too of-the-moment.”
FABRICS: For the pool deck, Bestor had cushions made from Donghia’s Oahu print in Sunbrella; the fabric costs $140 per yard. By contrast, the bold colors and patterns used for her throw pillows are less expensive fabrics from IKEA, Marimekko or vintage sources.
FURNITURE: Bestor was besotted with the Mai Tai collection of outdoor furniture, a short-lived 1950s design by John Caldwell for Brown Jordan. She found a set of four chairs and two chaises at All Patio Furniture in Sylmar. “They were really trashed, so I had to have them stripped and powder coated and re-strapped, bringing the total cost to $7,000,” she says. For Bestor, who saves money with built-ins and vintage finds, the furniture was worth the expense. The finished product, now a juicy orange, “is the only furniture I was going to put by the pool,” she says, “so I wanted something bright and with presence.”
-- David A. Keeps