STYLE : ARCHITECTURE : Castle in the Air

A home should be a place where you create a world all your own. Sometimes, though, you need help in overcoming small rooms and inconvenient walls. For talent agent Howard Goldberg and real estate agent Jim Bean, it was Beverly Hills designer Franklin D. Israel who helped them “liberate the house we dreamed of” from a Hollywood Hills ranch house.

The pair hired Israel because, Goldberg says, “he had a vision, but he also listened to us.” Israel opened up the house by tearing down interior walls and then adding a private “castle,” made up of a master bedroom and a study. By painting the house ochre and replacing the window frames with red-stained cedar, Israel united it with the more rough-textured forms of the addition.

Space flows freely from the front door to a giant living room. There, you are surrounded on three sides by glass and the rough-and-tumble garden designed by landscape artist Jay Griffith. At the heart of the concrete block and galvanized metal addition stands a bed Israel calls “a two-poster,” slotted between the two columns that hold up the wood beams supporting the study above.

“I like to think of this house as separate pieces peeling away from each other,” says Israel. Here, as in another recent project, the Propaganda Films studio in Hollywood, Israel used richly colored and textured materials and fanciful forms to set the scene for the lives of his clients, now the stars of their own fantasy.