Looky-Loos in Search of Culture
The Chemosphere went up for sale this month. Actually, I would have missed the whole thing except I saw the ad. A tiny ad, buried deep in the real estate supplement, next to a “Classic Contempo” and a “Country Cutie.” The Chemosphere.
Are you familiar with the Chemosphere? No? It is not, as the name might suggest, a relic of the 1964 World’s Fair. It is simply the most famous house in L.A.
That claim, of course, will get some arguments. But let me describe this place, and you will--I think--begin to recognize it.
The Chemosphere is shaped like a flying saucer and sits on top of a single concrete column in the Hollywood Hills. The arrangement looks dangerous and adds to the drama. The house seems to hover delicately over the land, absorbing the views of the city below. As modern as it sounds, the house has stood at its site for 30 years.
It is possible you have seen the Chemosphere from a vantage point on Mulholland Drive. More likely, you’ve seen it dozens of times on the television screen, or on magazine covers. This house, perched on its stalk, so cool, so removed, has become one of the standard symbols of L.A.
I could go on and on about the Chemosphere. It’s a great house. But I won’t. My real purpose today is otherwise. I want to describe a phenomenon.
When I saw the ad, I knew what I was going to do next. It was inevitable, unstoppable. I was going to round up some friends and together we would pull an opportunistic, camouflaged, culture-driven looky-loo.
And so we did. For a very good price, which is to say nothing at all, we toured the Chemosphere, courtesy of a friendly real estate agent. It turns out the house probably is better contemplated from a distance. The floating otherworldliness of the Chemosphere fades once you pass through the front door, and it becomes merely an interesting place to live.
But we did learn stuff. We discovered that a round--actually, octagonal--house seems to invite parties. You walk into the Chemosphere and immediately picture it filled with your friends. None of us was certain why.
And then there was the matter of the shower. This particular shower, one of two in the house, shares a common wall with the living room. And on the living room side, an elegantly designed peephole provides a view of anyone who might be sudsing down. Why would an architect with the stature of John Lautner, who designed the Chemosphere, choose to install this bit of licentiousness? Or did he? We didn’t know. A mystery.
Pretty soon we left. We were looky-loo frauds, all right. None of us had anything close to the $1.8 million being asked for the Chemosphere. But we were satisfied frauds. We had absorbed this house, one of the most remarkable in the city, sat on its sofas, roamed its decks, played in the kitchen.
Maybe we should apologize to the friendly real estate agents, but I decline. Because Los Angeles is different from other cities. In this place, if you want to know the essence of the city, you must prowl the neighborhoods. That’s where the good stuff lies.
In New York or Chicago, you can feed off the public spaces, the shopping avenues, the boulevards. They are the city. But not here. Here, public spaces hold neither mystery nor interest. The heart of Los Angeles lies behind the hedgerows, and always has.
That may be why so many of the great architects who chose to work in Los Angeles left their heritage in homes, rather than office buildings. They sensed that the energy of this city was turned inward. From Frank Lloyd Wright to Richard Neutra, they worked the neighborhoods and left the commercial districts to their lesser colleagues.
And that is why a Sunday morning stroll through any of a dozen neighborhoods, from West Adams to the Hollywood Hills, will turn up more surprises than a walk through our downtowns. These places are the repositories of the real Los Angeles.
The sticky problem, of course, comes when you want to get behind the hedgerows, into the kitchens and back yards. There are not many solutions, legal ones at least. And thus, in my experience, came the evolution of the opportunistic looky-loo.
Not a pretty technique, but effective. And occasionally, as with the Chemosphere, you score big. Now if the owners of the Lovell House would just put it on the market. . . .
