New Modes for Modern Lives

An odd phrase, “The Un-Private House”--it’s the title of an ongoing exhibition at UCLA Hammer Museum that takes a look at 25 homes of the future.

The name implies that the houses in the exhibition, which comes to the Hammer via New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, are non-private, public in some way.

But that’s not the idea. Rather, these houses depart in a big way from what we have traditionally called the private home--designed for the nuclear family living in suburbia. Mom and Dad (that is, one male and one female heterosexual, married to each other); 2.5 children; pet optional. These houses aren’t like that. They are un-private houses, designed for a new generation of families who no longer fit that mold.

“The first criteria [for the exhibition] was that the houses had to represent a significant development in the contemporary architectural scene,” says Terence Riley, curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design. “Beyond that, what we were finding most interesting were houses that also represented something other than the traditional domestic program.”

Riley says that the house first became a “private house” when people became wealthy enough to move the family business out of the family home. “That’s when it became about acquiring all the habits, attitudes and comforts that we call ‘domestic,’ ” he says.

One of the biggest changes Riley finds in the new breed of homes is that now families are becoming wealthy enough to move the family business back into the home in the form of elaborate home offices.

“I suppose it’s one of the transitions that also raises the most anxiety,” Riley says. “Each succeeding generation is somewhat scandalized by the next generation’s adaptation of technology in the house, the telephone, the TV, the radio--all of those things were considered some sort of a threat to domesticity.

“The house of the couple who are both currency traders horrifies most people. [The Lipschutz/Jones Apartment, New York City, contains a digital trading room, as well as six video monitors throughout the apartment to allow the couple to keep constant track of world financial markets.] Immediately there is this vision of 24-hour work. The fact is, this couple has very clearly learned how to manage technology.

“The first crack in the monolithic production of three- and four-bedroom houses, with a peaked roof in a suburban tract near public schools, was when the housing industry realized there was a whole market for people who were growing older, who needed a different type of house than they had before,” Riley continues. “There can be different kinds of houses for different kinds of people.

“They used to always talk about resale value--they urged people not to do anything that will make the house less salable. At that time you could talk about a certain monolithic model for houses, and that is no longer true.”

Perhaps the best people to define the un-private house are the residents of those houses--an emerging group of often non-nuclear families whose private lives no longer fit comfortably into the “private home.”

Hergott Shepard Residence,

Beverly Hills, 1999

* Architect: Michael Maltzan.

* Residents: Alan Hergott, 50, attorney, Bloom, Hergott, Diemer and Cook; and Curt Shepard, 44, screenwriter.

Hergott: We were casually looking around in this area for a house to buy and remodel. None of them had the right combination of things, [and] we couldn’t quite imagine, with the money we had to spend, making them right enough for us. We met a real estate agent who said: “You guys are never going to find a house that you like--but I know of a lot that you might want to buy and build a house on.”

Shepard: We had a lot of discussions about lifestyle [with Maltzan] before we ever talked about design. Our art collection is very important to us, so first and foremost we wanted it to be a home for the art collection. Also, because of this amazing site, we wanted to capture the view. Those were two very important but kind of contradictory things that [Maltzan] had to solve, to capture the view, but to also have enough big walls and proper light conditions to accommodate an art collection that changes and grows.

We didn’t want curvy walls. [He laughs.] You can’t really hang much on curves. We wanted it to be right angles, and we wanted it to appear as a minimalist sculpture from all angles.

Hergott: I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious or obscurely intellectual about “private” versus “un-private.” The house is clearly set up to serve as a place for entertaining, and a place to serve any number of our specific needs, individually and as a couple, for living.

Shepard: It’s basically a big house with two bedrooms. It’s not necessarily for a gay couple, but definitely a couple with no children. The privacy needs are a little bit different from the usual houses with three bedrooms--it’s very open.

It’s kind of amazing how guest after guest comes in and says, “Oh, I expected it to be so cold and austere, but it’s so cozy.” It’s warmer than a lot of people assume it’s going to be, having heard about it, or seen it in pictures. And it was important for us to have furniture that was not so “design-y” that it wouldn’t be comfortable.

Hergott: We spent a lot of time sitting in furniture before we broke ground to make sure it was all comfortable. There’s a difference between what is a comfortable chair, and what looks comfortable, both are subjective kinds of judgments, and they are often confused. They bespeak a certain amount of conditioning that we have about comfort.

Shepard: I love sitting and working in my office, it sort of feels like a treehouse, with the windows all around it.

Hergott: It’s a very livable house.

Ost/Kuttner Apartment,

New York City, 1997

* Architects: Sulan Kolatan, William Mac Donald.

* Residents: Beatrix Ost, 59, artist-filmmaker; Ludwig Kuttner, 53, entrepreneur, textile industry.

Ost: We live in the country [in an 1820 Jeffersonian farmhouse in Virginia], and we were just looking for a pied-a-terre in the city, finding a place and restoring it.

The funny thing was, when we met the architects, we were thinking of something that resembled Venice, with Venetian tiles--this romantic hideaway. Then suddenly, they came to us with computer-rendered ideas, and it was completely mind-boggling, completely new. We’d never seen anything like it, but we said, sure, why not? They said nature is curves, bodies have no edges. And so then they made a model, and we fell in love with it.

I am an artist, so I did the coloring, it was really quite wonderful and playful work. And anything you bring into it fits. Because it is so colorful, if somebody brings in flowers, it’s always the right flowers. If somebody drops a scarf on a chair, it’s always the right scarf. It is not austere and stiff.

Of course, the theory has to be livable. My husband has built a lot of houses in Germany, so he is very practical. There is a folding wall that makes it into two apartments, or folds open so there is room for parties.

It is built like a sculpture. The roundness, it’s beautiful to the touch, to the eyes--it just is good.

WorkHouse, West Hollywood 1996

* Architects: Danelle Guthrie, Tom Buresh.

* Residents: Guthrie, 46, Buresh, 46, and Ryan Buresh, 12.

Buresh: In the early ‘90s, there was quite a slowdown in construction. [So] we decided to build our own home and our own office. We don’t have any money--let’s be clear about that.

So we went looking for “difficult” property in Los Angeles--things that conventional builders or developers would find unattractive. We found an R-2 property--which means you can build two units on the property--and it only had one house on it, extremely old, small and in really bad shape, a 600-square-foot house from the 1920s. All the right qualities! And did I mention it was on a busy street? And it was adjacent to a rather large apartment building. I guess we’re up to strike three.

At the time, along with six other architects, we were doing an exhibition, and a book, addressing the housing shortage in Los Angeles, and how to make some of the neighborhoods denser. Our [property] became part of the project.

We started remodeling the inside of the [1920] house to [live in], and began plans to build [an office] in the back. But we still had no money, so we decided we needed to have our office and our home in the new building. We rented out the [1920] house.

We were interested in [creating a new structure] where many different activities could take place. The whole building could be an office, the whole building could be a house, there were many different ways we could cut it up.

So, we were initially living in the same place where we were working. And we situated the [work space] in the middle of the [new building], as opposed to in a garage or a basement--right smack dab in the middle of our house. It was great for a while, and then we got really busy; at one point we had five or six people working in our home studio, then it got to be too much. When the tenant in the [1920] house moved out, we moved our office into that house and made the studio in the new building into a family room.

Another issue [we considered] is developing spaces between houses in residential districts, where ownership of those spaces would be shared conceptually. We chose to make a space between the apartment building and our property that would be shared. The apartment building can’t physically use it, but light is available, air is available, the view is available. We talked about that as, here’s a snappy term, a “suburban optical piazza.” It has to do with breaking down our fortified property lines, especially in more dense situations.

Often, architects become too prescriptive as to how they see space being used. That limits how other people might move into them.

Mobius House, Het Gooi,

the Netherlands, 1998

* Architect: Ben Van Berkel.

* Residents: The Lavermans--Wim, 54, publisher and editor of trade magazines; Hetty, 51, social work manager; and Floks, 16 (Violet, 19, is away at college).

This house is loosely based on the seamless, single-sided mathematical model known as the Mobius strip.

Wim Laverman: It was of course the idea of the architect, but we gave him a briefing on our wishes and our needs. His first drawing was just a sketch, but it was already there, the Mobius ring. When the house was finished, we [felt that] we had created it ourselves, because we feel it like a second skin. [It] gives us a feeling of continuous movement, just an endless space. But it is very difficult to describe, because we hardly feel it--it is a part of our lives.

[The neighborhood] is pretty old-fashioned, even by Dutch standards; most houses were built 50 to 80 years ago. Some [neighbors] like the house, most of them don’t--but they can appreciate the design, that it is something completely different.

I’ve always looked ahead in my business, in my work, in my life. I hardly have any archives, I don’t store things, I don’t own a lot of things. When you design a house for yourself in such a case, you have a modern and futuristic way of looking at it.

Shorthand House,

Houston, Texas, 1997

* Architect: Francois de Menil.

* Resident: Elsian Cozens, 66, former assistant to late art patron and collector Dominique de Menil (mother of the architect); currently handles special events for the Menil Foundation and Menil Collection Museum, Houston.

The house’s name refers to the architectural shorthand of using elements like a table or the fireplace hearth, rather than traditional walls, to define the “rooms” in this open, flexible house.

Cozens: I lived in Houston in a large Cape Cod-type house on about an acre of land. But my children have all grown up, gone off, have children of their own. So I decided I would sell that house and build more of what I call a city house.

By this period, Francois [de Menil] had become an architect, he had designed the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum [part of the Menil complex], which I think is brilliant. Everything just sort of fell into place.

I found a wee bit of land in the heart of Houston, facing Rice University. It’s only 50 feet by 100 feet. I wanted to build something for me, because the house I lived in was something I purchased, it wasn’t built for me.

It was very simple: I wanted space and light. That was about it. I do a great deal of my work at home, my work seems to go through the night and the weekends. Francois came up with this brilliant idea of what looks to be a wall, but when you slide the doors to each side, inside that space there is an office. The whole house is very, very efficient. You have this one room that’s 70 feet long--but it becomes 4 1/2 rooms, by opening and closing doors. It’s sort of like an origami: It opens up and closes up as you need it.

I can’t wait to put the key in the door--my house is so embryonic, it is so gentle and so quiet, although I’m on a very busy street. I don’t know what the magic is. It took me more than two years before I put up a piece of art, because I did not want to invade the architecture.

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“The Un-Private House,” UCLA’s Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000. Through Jan. 7.