Clubhouse Rules

“Should we be dressed?” she asks. She means dressed up, but it turns out that Mary Sue Milliken, celebrity chef and co-owner with Susan Feniger of the Border Grills in Santa Monica and Las Vegas, and Ciudad in downtown L.A., is used to being photographed au naturel along with the rest of her family. “It’s that German naked thing,” she says, showing me two of the families’ past holiday greeting cards (one that says “ ... and a happy Nude Year”) that feature her, along with her husband, Josh Schweitzer, the architect and designer, and their sons Declan, 11, and Kier, 3. No actual parts are showing, other than an occasional rib or a bellyutton.

Hairstyles and bellybuttons change in the cards from year to year, but in the background of Anne Fishbein’s black-and-white photos of the family, the wandering eye can often make out a shimmering swimming pool, a paint-washed cement wall or a bit of desert grass.

Schweitzer, 48, who grew up in Michigan, and Milliken, 43, who grew up in Kentucky, have carved their home from an abandoned pool club in a neighborhood called, somewhat generically, Mid-City. In 1985, they purchased the Aloha Swim School, which was built in 1958, from the woman who had run the club and her environmental artist son. It cost $125,000. Ten years and another $125,000 in renovations later, it is the background for many photos, parties, birthdays and hours of pure rest.

“We found these strange mammary protrusions of painted glass in the wall that were made by the son,” says Schweitzer, who has designed glasses and chairs, plates, lights, platters and just about everything else for Milliken and Feniger’s restaurants, as well as creating award-winning houses around Southern California. “The amazing thing was that we had another set of the exact same protrusions in a wall at the City Cafe,” the first Milliken-Feniger restaurant, on Melrose in Los Angeles.

Less than a week after they moved to the pool house from their three-room rented apartment in Hollywood--it was late June 1985--the couple threw a huge party. “All the floors ran down to drains, so we just hosed it down,” says Schweitzer. For months, the kitchen was the outdoor snack bar by the Olympic-sized pool. The couple lived in two rooms that had been the men’s and women’s locker rooms. They bathed in the outdoor shower once used by swimmers.

Mid-City’s Main Street is West Washington Boulevard, broad and quiet on a Saturday morning. Large industrial spaces, car repair shops and liquor markets line the street. Every now and then a metal fence, brightly painted purple or green, betrays the presence of some kind of artist. The neighborhood has long been a favorite of hookers. To the north of Washington are a methadone clinic and a few residential pockets. This is not a suburban neighborhood where Norman Rockwell boys on bicycles fling newspapers over picket fences.

“You found the doorbell!” Milliken says, though a visitor’s effort to find the front door involved wandering around the huge green metal fence that surrounds the compound for at least 10 minutes, and even peeking through the mail slot to see shimmering blue water and leaves from a banana tree, until finally, a cell phone call opens the way. “That is the doorbell,” she says, grinning, holding Louis, an elderly Australian sheep dog, by the collar.

The 1,750 square feet of living space are scattered around the pool in four buildings, all painted peaty shades of green. The main building, which contains the open kitchen/dining/living room and a small den, has enormous plate glass doors that open in warmer weather to give a completely indoor/outdoor pool house feel, allowing breezes to travel through rooms. Three grills in various shapes and sizes huddle together on one side of the poolside patio like a herd of banished buffalo. Next to them, built-in couches and bright pillows line the wall in front of a sloping hillside that leads to the studio where Declan, Schweitzer and Milliken all have desks. There’s also a small house for the boys’ room and another for the master bedroom and bath.

Milliken and Kier are making waffles. As much as she has tried to clear the decks for the tour, Milliken is bombarded with work-related phone calls. Beyond the restaurants and her TV work (the now-defunct “Too Hot Tamales” for the Food Network and an upcoming new program for KCET), she has co-authored several books and recently been a consultant for Ang Lee’s movie “Tortilla Soup.” She feeds Kier his breakfast, answers questions and fields phone calls in the push-pull of public-private life. The house is clearly an oasis for the family, a place of harmony carved from a cacophony of opposites: indoor, outdoor; public, private; work, play.

This yin-yang is evident in the very look of the family as well. Their clothes are high-tech Patagonia and pared-down J. Crew, but Milliken has a pixie haircut edged in blond, and Schweitzer, wearing what the family calls “Josh Green,” the color used throughout the house, also has a mischievous smile. Their clothes and design sense is clean and spare, but their humor and playfulness are warm and fuzzy.

Schweitzer recently stopped working flat out at his architecture/design firm to stay home more with the boys and, well, to make things. He designed much of the house and, according to his wife, won’t let anyone throw anything out if he can envision another life for it. An old 2-by-4 has been made into a toy rifle for Kier. The tree house is made from chairs from the City Cafe. A mattress tucked against a wall by the garage awaits a second chance. “You gonna paint that?” Milliken asks. “Maybe,” Schweitzer says.

The pool is a focal point of their lives, though no one in the family is a passionate swimmer. The children’s safety is a concern, but Milliken says that the kids are good underwater swimmers.

Light from the pool plays off living room walls hung with black and white photographs by Larry Clark, Jock Sturgess, Cindy Sherman and Fishbein. The $8,000 flagstone floors were, the couple says, the most expensive thing they purchased in redesigning the house. The furniture is low, curvy, stylized ‘50s stuff that they’ve had since the beginning. “I’m not big on antiques,” says Schweitzer. “I would hate to live a life with children where you were always saying, ‘don’t touch that!’ I have a very perfectionist side, the Swiss genes, but there’s also an English-Irish side. I want a house I can use, not a museum piece.”

The house is perfectly balanced for public and private space. Despite its open, Japanese teahouse simplicity, there are also warm nooks and crannies to hole up in and read. The walls of the studio are lined with Schweitzer’s paintings. “You should sell ‘em,” says Declan, who is hard at work on his computer in the studio.

“My grandmother was always sanding and scraping,” Schweitzer says. She was a handy carpenter, he adds.

Boxes of toys and trucks line the pathways that run between buildings. “The beauty of Southern California is the possibility of this kind of indoor-outdoor life,” says Schweitzer, who has spent some time in Japan, outside Osaka. Declan went to a Japanese immersion school in L.A., and the family hosts an exchange student from Japan who helps him practice his Japanese. One Japanese design concept Schweitzer is particularly fond of is the “borrowed landscape,” the idea that what you look out on, your view, matters as much as the room you sit in. Indeed, the house makes you want to walk, from small garden to small garden, all paths leading to the pool.

“For some reason,” Milliken says, “we are inundated with house guests. Even when the house was just two rooms with drains on the floor, we had friends, and friends of friends, who just wouldn’t leave.” The couple entertains often, and for many people. “No one ever asks us over,” Schweitzer complains. Friends come and cook, sometimes 150 to 200 of them.

Milliken has a small but supremely functional kitchen. There’s a Decor stove (“I wanted functional, Josh wanted beautiful, so we chose this one,” made by a Pasadena company) and a KitchenAid refrigerator that Milliken loves because the freezer is on the bottom, so the things she uses the most are at eye level. Her favorite part of the kitchen: its solid maple countertops, which have to be oiled every week with mineral oil. “It’s great to run your hands over the counters,” she says, “and the oil feels good.”

Her cabinets, designed by Schweitzer, are not deep--the top ones only 8 inches--but open in a way that makes them accessible and increases storage space in the kitchen. “They are not conventional,” Milliken says, high praise from a cook on the front lines.

Now that the house is completely livable, the couple plan to move to Mar Vista. It’s for the kids, they say. Maybe it’s the lure of a new project, with new raw materials.

And yet, Kier wants to show off every part of the place where he lives now. He is so proud of his room and his toys. Declan, too, is clearly comfortable with himself and his parent’s public-private lives. When I leave, reluctantly, Kier pulls me down to give me a kiss. I start to stand, and he says, “A hug, a hug!” in a voice that is not hushed or contained by heavy walls and tiny spaces.