STYLE : DESIGN : Land of Enchantment
For more than 30 years, internationally acclaimed artist Tony Duquette has been working away at an environmental project high in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Malibu. The 175-acre ranch (which he calls Sortilegium, Latin for enchantment ) consists of a residential compound surrounded by sculptural pavilions, an otherworldly retreat from his Beverly Hills home.
Visited by many famous people--including Mary Pickford, Man Ray, Greta Garbo, Vincente Minnelli, Christopher Isherwood and George Cukor--Sortilegium has long been an open-air theater for Duquette, the first American honored with a one-person show at the Louvre and a Tony winner for his costume design in “Camelot.” The ranch also has served as an ideal studio for his larger works, such as the chandeliers and tapestries for the Los Angeles Music Center. (His Robertson Boulevard studio closed about 10 years ago.)
A treasure trove of fragments from Hollywood’s past, the place is built almost entirely from recycled elements. The elevator cage from the legendary Hollywood Hotel reveals itself as a miniature metal pavilion on the main drive. There are windows from Garbo and John Gilbert’s love nest on Tower Grove Road, pieces of a Chinese temple from the 20th Century Fox lot and octagonal trellises from the sets of MGM’s “Kismet.” “I used anything that helped me to capture the effect I was seeking,” he says, “whether I found it in the streets, in the attic, in the desert or the sea.”
Duquette bought truckloads of materials from Navy sales at Port Hueneme and recycled his sets from an L.A. production of “The Magic Flute.” Edith Head donated a gazebo, and reindeer antlers came from the Hearst ranch at San Simeon. Other items come from his travels in Europe and Asia.
Instead of a single large house, which would have intruded on the landscape, Duquette created a cluster of pavilions, using colors that blend with the surrounding foliage. Some of the pavilions are seasonal--the summer bedroom opens directly onto the landscape, while the winter quarters are sheltered by the hills. Purely ornamental structures have been added so that the complex now resembles a lost civilization mysteriously unearthed. Around these, Duquette has installed succulents, agaves and other drought-tolerant plants and trees, all watered by drip irrigation.
Sortilegium took on new meaning in 1988, when a fire destroyed the Duquette Pavilion, the San Francisco home for most of Duquette’s work, including the 28-foot-high angels created for the L.A. Bicentennial. Here, below Boney Mountain, the ranch emerges like a phoenix from the ashes. And Duquette’s vision, like Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, survives majestically.
