Joshing Around : Playful and Engaging, Josh Schweitzer’s Houses and Restaurants Are Redefining the L.A. Look

WHEN HE WAS a child, there was plenty of space: Josh Schweitzer’s early Midwestern memories include a lush, untouched ravine hard by a babbling brook, rolling rural vistas that met the sky uninterrupted and a rambling wreck of an outsized colonial mansion with too many rooms, too many fireplaces and an abandoned barn out back for him, his brother and sister to play in.

Now the only room to move is in his imagination. Los Angeles is gridlocked on both sides of the curb; motor traffic gets most of the ink, but the city’s cheek-by-jowl architecture doesn’t allow for much new business. The smart designer has to look at an existing building, go snake-eyed and see something else in its place. Schweitzer is just such a quick-change artist. Inside his head, it’s still the wide--and to some eyes, wild--open spaces.

THERE’S SOMETHING heroic about saving a doddering building from the wrecking ball. What Schweitzer likes to do, more than anything, is pry old buildings open--get them some air, let them breathe, light them up. “Old building stock,” he says, in an adoring tone, “is wonderful.” In the six years since the 37-year-old designer arrived in Los Angeles, he’s lifted some of the city’s best-known architectural faces and become known for his bold, angular shapes and idiosyncratically earthy palette. He and then-partner David Kellen put the restaurant community on notice with the opening of City restaurant in 1984, a brutal swath of high-tech white with picture windows that opened, in perfect L.A. fashion, onto the parking lot. This past year, on his own, Schweitzer designed two restaurants that were on the list of must-sees before the menu ink was dry--Campanile, a stately, hard-topped version of an open Italian courtyard, and Border Grill 2, whose hectic rainbow-hued interior fairly sways to some existential cha-cha.

The word “tear-down” is not in his vocabulary. Schweitzer has established himself as a nimble fixer of the too-small, the run-down, the not-quite-right. At a time when the real estate market precludes buying up, and empty space is almost non-existent, he is the man who makes staying put possible.

It’s all a matter of perception, of whether you see a building as an obstacle or an opportunity. Take this garden, which wraps around a dowager of a house in the Los Feliz Oaks neighborhood above Hollywood: Somebody else might say it’s a little overgrown, the concrete walkway’s cracked, the tree at the end needs a trim. Schweitzer stands under the tree, smiling dreamily, and sighs at how wonderfully Italian the place seems to him.

The garden nestles behind what is officially known, on the Los Angeles Conservancy list of historical buildings, as the 1928 Lloyd Wright-designed Samuels-Navarro house, named after two of its owners. To Schweitzer, it’s “Diane’s house”--Keaton, that is, who has hired him to wreak $300,000’s worth of redesign on a building that has weathered too many remodels and a measure of neglect.

It is a daunting hodgepodge; as Keaton puts it, “this house has been through hell.” The original steel-trimmed windows on the building’s lower level, covered by panels of hammered copper, hang next to new windows that approximate Wright’s style, but in the upstairs master bedroom, a previous owner installed cheap aluminum sliders that would be more appropriate to a dingbat apartment.

Comparatively speaking, that’s an easy fix. The living room fireplace masks the original fireplace and mantel, which nobody bothered to tear out. The lower level is trisected by two poured-in-place concrete walls and then chopped into small storage rooms by a row of intersecting plaster walls. It’s all topped off by what Schweitzer calls “a ‘60s hotel-motel roof” that has nothing to do with the rest of the house.

Armed with Keaton’s drawings and photographs of the original house, and his own aesthetic, Schweitzer is two months into a nine-month effort to “bring it up to an equal standard” with Wright’s design, in terms both of quality and innovation. There are certain elements, like the steel windows, that he wouldn’t presume to alter. But things that don’t work, like all those walls downstairs, have to go. His preference for plain shapes and an aversion to finicky detail--born of necessity back in the days when his clients didn’t have six figures to spend--dictate what will, and won’t, remain.

“I got used to simple dry wall and paint, simple forms, and then I’d work with the light coming in, and different heights, rather than embellishments and detail,” he says. So he is willing to settle for cosmetic changes on a small guest bedroom and bath to buy himself the chance to attack the warrened lower level: He’s already pulled out the plaster walls and cut through the concrete ones to “open it up and get some movement through it.” A little shadow-and-light magic, some “uplighting and downlighting and a series of planes” should turn the space into a combined office, library and guest suite.

Schweitzer worked a similar, if smaller-scale, trick on photographer Mark Hanauer’s Hollywood studio, which suffered, like Keaton’s house, from terminal truncation, both vertical and horizontal. An oppressive 10-foot-high hung ceiling disguised a lofty bowstring-truss building, and the 2,800-square-foot space was riddled, he says, disapprovingly, “with lots of walls.”

Hanauer had only $55,000 to spend on transforming the space into his studio, office and living quarters. By cutting unimportant corners--Hanauer, who rarely cooks, didn’t mind cheap kitchen cabinetry--Schweitzer was able to stretch the budget to cover the creation of a whitewashed temple of light, a vast space with second-story office and bedrooms at the head of two Brobdingnagian sets of stairs.

The stairs are, perhaps, the best symbol of Schweitzer’s approach, of his determination to bend physical reality to his will. More than anything, Hanauer wanted floor space for his photography sessions. So Schweitzer condensed the stairways by making the steps steeper. Risers are usually eight inches, tops; these are 18 inches, not good for the arthritic, but fine for a tall, spry photographer and his 4-year-old son, who negotiates the downhill run by sitting on one step at a time.

The only casualty so far, reports Hanauer, was a stubby Scottish terrier who tried to follow the photographer’s Airedale downstairs, became airborne and has wisely refused to go near the stairs since.

AT FIRST GLANCE, Schweitzer might seem to be building an architectural Tower of Babel. The one thing his eateries undeniably have in common is that they are veritable towers of babble, among the noisiest restaurants in town. His residential work is almost monastic by comparison--his own stark desert house, which he co-owns with five people, and several cool, precise kitchens.

The mid-city home on Washington Boulevard that he shares with City/ Border Grill chef Mary Sue Milliken defies categorization. Once the Aloha Swim School, it is three outbuildings in search of an identity: the original school office (now a kitchen) and two unconnected structures that sit on the 100,000-square-foot property. His clients may want to know what each room is for, but Schweitzer is “nomadic”: The master bedroom is wherever he and Milliken choose to sleep on a given evening.

Response to his work is as varied as the work itself. The New York-based Architectural Record featured Schweitzer’s desert home on the cover of its annual Record Houses issue in April because “of the combination of playfulness and a very serious approach to the place, with the use of those bright colors,” says executive editor Paul Sachner. His architect readers either loved it (“they found the stripped-down aesthetic absolutely appropriate to the desert”) or hated it (“they felt this was a glorified shack, with a certain slapdash look to it”). Nobody took the middle ground.

But Schweitzer sees continuity where others see variety; he defines as simple elegance what a critic might consider crude. He communes with a muse at once grand and down-to-earth. Essentially, he’s interested in rooms that celebrate, whether they be in homes, restaurants or offices. “I like that monumental quality of big, high spaces,” he says. “There’s something uplifting about man’s relationship to these big things that they’ve done. It lifts the spirit up--’We’ve been able to accomplish this’--and at the same time, it is very humbling and centering. I like having that sense that mankind is powerful and can do something wonderful but is connected to this other huge thing that is much bigger than we are.”

So he tends to redesign buildings to draw the eye heavenward--to the skylight at Campanile and to the jolting murals at Border Grill 2. He repaints walls in what he calls a “homey” palette: warm earth tones that have become something of a totem for him, to the point that one client dubbed a happy pea-soup shade “Josh green” because he tends to drape both his professional and personal frames in it.

His changes are massive and spare, such as the huge plaster wall that serves as permanent backdrop and conceals a storage area in Hanauer’s studio. Schweitzer is after “that Zen quality,” he says, “that can be achieved in sort of the simplest structures. I think there’s a simplicity that brings out some kind of spirituality for me . . . not overloaded with decor and paintings, but really about the place. It’s sort of cleansing that way. There’s a connection with your inner self.”

Keaton, who heard about Schweitzer from her cabinetmaker, checked out his restaurants and appreciated the size of things. She also liked the fact that she’d never heard of him before. “I like trying new people out,” she says. “When you try a person who’s already established and famous, you end up being intimidated. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be afraid to speak up.”

Although much of their collaboration has been via fax machine while Keaton was in Italy shooting “Godfather III,” it has turned into an easy partnership. They both love big--Schweitzer for what it reveals, Keaton for what it conceals.

“I’m a collector,” says Keaton, “not a smart one, but I have a lot of junk. And other people shouldn’t have to look at it all the time. So I want Josh to make me lots of places to hide things. A ‘40s, oversize, massive look.”

HOWEVER EAGER the patron is, the renovator faces a paradox. He invents inside his predecessor’s creation; he has to come up with an Eden where someone else has already put down sod, planted a couple of fruit trees and bought a cheap little garden snake. The question is, how can you soar when your foundation has already been poured, your walls framed, your budget estimate signed--and a chorus of building inspectors is telling you what you can and can’t change?

Schweitzer puts in 70 hours a week wrestling with the contradictions. Being irreverent helps: He has as little regard for existing spaces as he does for the hierarchy of his profession; although he received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Kansas, he refused, on principle, to take the next two steps--a three-year apprenticeship with a licensed architect or engineer and an 11-hour exam, which he dismissed as being all about rote memorization and not about aesthetics. Officially, he is not an architect, but any obstacle can be circumvented with a little ingenuity. Walls move, and building-department bureaucracies are satisfied by an engineer’s signature on Schweitzer’s building plans.

Being obstinate is useful, too. Schweitzer is one of those people who thrives on a little fiscal adversity. Give him tight purse strings, and he becomes even more determined to prove he can prevail. “I don’t have any problems with small budgets at all,” he says. “I have more problems with big budgets, finding ways to spend the money. I’m poor and cheap and always trying to solve my own problems in the most economical way that I can, and that’s fun to me.”

He is a walking advertisement for style on a shoestring--curly blond hair wedged into a geometrical ‘do, signature baggy Bermudas that look surfy or chic, depending on the eye of the beholder, and a collection of heavy-cotton, mock turtlenecks in emphatic colors. When he really wants to make a statement, he adds matching crew socks; for formal affairs, he might wear a white shirt. Some people may look forward to the day when their credit limit allows them to graduate to hotter couture, but Schweitzer’s clothes are the equivalent of sandwich-board advertising: no need to spend a penny more.

He invests where he thinks it will do the most good. He advised Keaton to carve up a whole floor and ignore the lumpy plaster work, “which is everywhere and could cost a lot of money” to replace. At Border Grill 2, he spent money on murals by two London artists--and if some of the dry wall and plaster work behind them are “real sloppy,” Schweitzer says he doesn’t care. “I think that when I look at it in terms of the whole budget, the type of project that it’s supposed to be, having it have this sort of rough-hewn quality is perfect.”

“LESS IS MORE” worked fine for Mies van der Rohe, but in the era of the remodel (which promises to continue as long as real estate prices rise), “more for less” has made Schweitzer a very popular fellow. Six years ago, he was trying to shoehorn the 40-seat City Cafe into a 700-square-foot space on Melrose Avenue. Now, in addition to the Keaton project, he’s working on a residential remodel that centers on a 40-by 35-foot master suite, as well as a rehab for “Sea of Love” director Harold Becker and an office for “Big” screenwriter Gary Ross.

The last few months have been “a little whirlwindish,” he admits, and helped to make him “the world’s most unprepared” new father. (Son Declan Schweitzer was born on June 17.) He drove over to Keaton’s, only weeks before the anticipated arrival of his and Milliken’s first child, with a borrowed portable bassinet in the back of his station wagon and a stupefied grin on his face. The couple had not yet had time to take a childbirth class, nor did they have any idea where the baby would sleep on a permanent basis, given that all of the swim-school buildings are too small for both parents and child.

None of which is meant as a complaint. Schweitzer spends most weekends in happy, recuperative catatonia. Too much work, particularly in the last year, has given him a sustaining faith in himself.

Like any new true believer, he has, of late, become something of a zealot about what he does. He knows that he’s in a “service industry,” he says, “but for myself, it’s an art. I’ve always been willing to do compromises, to take them as a challenge. It’s only in the last year that I’ve felt there are times when somebody says, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this and this and this,’ and I have to tell them it’s a mistake.”

He learned to say no at Campanile, when he found out, in mid-construction, that he was supposed to step aside once the walls were up and let an interior decorator take over. “My hackles just went way up,” he recalls, so he approached building owner Larry Silverton.

“I said Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the greatest architects in the world. He did everything . He designed fabrics, furniture, silverware, stained glass; he did everything. He wouldn’t let an interior decorator come in and do a space of his. And Larry said, ‘You’re no Frank Lloyd Wright.’ ”

The question of Schweitzer’s relative genius, or arrogance, aside, he refused to back down. “I said, ‘I’m not going to stand here and let you take this space away from me and be happy with it. If you want to do that, I’m off the job. As of this moment.’ ” And then he waited, praying that Silverton would not call his bluff.

“I was mad,” Schweitzer says. “It was the maddest I’ve ever been at a client. It was just an automatic response.”

Luckily, after 10 minutes of heated debate, Silverton acquiesced. Schweitzer came away with a new confidence. He showed a prototype for light fixtures in the bar to Silverton and to Campanile’s husband-and-wife chefs (who are also Silverton’s son-in-law and daughter), Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton, and got a stern, “ ‘No way.’ ” He produced them anyway, and they’re in the bar today.

Silverton, a construction lawyer for the past 25 years, was taken aback at first by his designer’s pugnacious reaction, but he’s glad he let Schweitzer have his way. “I like the concept of deferred discovery,” he says of Campanile. “You stand in the street and you don’t see the tower, and then, little by little, it unfolds. There are surprises inside.

“If you get 80% of what you want in a building, it’s ideal,” Silverton says, “and I got more than that.”

SCHWEITZER’S earliest renovation memory is also of a disagreement: His father preferred modern furniture in an all-the-conveniences tract house, while his mother longed for an old home in which to showcase antique furnishings. She won. At 6, Schweitzer was scraping paint off that sprawling colonial in Louisville, Ky., the first of a series of fix-up projects that occupied him through an adolescence spent in Louisville and then in Toledo, Ohio.

His father, the son of a Methodist preacher and himself an Episcopalian, tried to train son Josh to care about religion as well, though with less success. Schweitzer grimaces at the memory of the years he spent as “substitute altar boy,” which meant that he was the kid who filled in whenever the regular altar boy came up with an excuse. All that he came away with was a reverence for the place of worship that echoes in his secular designs.

After high school, he became a human pinball, careening around the continent, doing a little bit of everything that people were doing in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics from Pitzer College after pit stops at Claremont and Vassar, milked cows on a Vermont dairy farm, worked in a couple of factories and spent a year as a tennis pro in Upstate New York. In 1976, he married high school sweetheart Susan Feniger--now a chef and cookbook author who also happens to be Mary Sue Milliken’s partner--but they divorced two years later.

He had his eye on architecture, but it was off in the far distance. Finally, in 1980, he headed back to the Midwest and picked up his master’s degree.

The only place he hadn’t been was the big city. Ever the visualist, he thought about attractive images he’d seen--James Bond movies and Emma Peel from the “Avengers” television series--and picked London. After a year there working for a couple of architects and a year back in Kansas applying what he’d learned to his siblings’ houses, he faced a quandary: What was he going to do with his life?

Re-enter ex-wife Susan Feniger, who had come to Los Angeles and was about to open City Cafe with Milliken. Would Schweitzer like to come to a really big city to design a really small restaurant?

Once he arrived, he tried working for architect Frank Gehry, and then invited Gehry co-worker David Kellen to become his partner. Together, they designed City restaurant, the original Border Grill and Rondo. But by 1988, Schweitzer realized that he was happier--as he’d always been--on his own. He now runs Schweitzer BIM (which doesn’t stand for anything; he just likes the look) from a run-down Hollywood cottage, where he employs four younger designers and would-be architects.

His next move is into furniture, working with a manufacturer to produce domestic translations of his City restaurant chairs, Border Grill stools and specific assignments such as a new bed for the Keaton master bedroom. Given his current preoccupation--where is that baby going to sleep?--he’s devoting most of his attention to living, rather than working, space.

Schweitzer may not be up there vying for huge commercial or cultural assignments, but he owns a secure seat in what he calls the “junior architect circle.” He’s leaving his mark on the city, making rehabilitation the clever, even fashionable, alternative. All it takes to buy a bigger house is money; today’s domestic trend-setter hires Schweitzer instead to create more space out of thin air. He is the designer as liberator: If there’s a tired, huddled mass of a building yearning to breathe free, like as not Schweitzer knows about it.