Down to Earth
The house that architect Scott Johnson built for his family breaks all the rules for Hancock Park, a tranquil enclave of huge trees and historic homes. Johnson’s house is snugly inserted into a commercial street bordering the neighborhood. The pool is located on a second-floor terrace, and there’s no leafy yard. The facade is wrapped in corrugated steel and a glass curtain wall, with a semicircular translucent glass lantern lighting the third-floor study. And yet, nobody has complained, and the house is as comfortable a fit there as it would be in a tougher, more urban area.
“A lot of people wonder what this building is,” says Johnson. “It doesn’t have the signs and symbols that say ‘house.’ I live in L.A., which is the storytelling capital of the world, but I don’t believe in narrative architecture. It’s a liberating experience to explore abstraction and solve problems without worrying about questions of image.”
The challenge was to create a house that offers security and privacy, but opens up to views and the bustle of the street. Like the Japanese, who describe the view over a boundary wall as “borrowed landscape,” the Johnsons enjoy vistas of treetops and the Hollywood Hills, which make up for the lack of a garden. Johnson describes his creation as a “study in geometrical precision that is spacious enough for the four of us and allows for entertaining on any scale.” He’s constantly on the move, teaching and visiting far-flung job sites. His wife, Dr. Margaret Bates, runs an OB-GYN practice that can keep her up nights, and their teenage son and daughter wanted a soundproofed room for making music.
From the street, the shimmering cube is enigmatic; its 6,000-square-foot interior feels transparent and the spaces flow together. An assertive steel staircase slices up through the center of the house, linking the ground-floor studio, service areas and a spacious garage to the living areas on the second. The children’s bedrooms are on the third floor and have expansive north-facing windows. In contrast, the master bedroom, separated from the living room by a pool terrace, is secluded and serene. The master bedroom is a round room paneled with ebonized wood and sound-absorbing fabric. A sliding screen door blacks out a narrow window so that Dr. Bates can sleep during the day if necessary. A circle cut through the ceiling to reveal the joists demonstrates how Johnson has juxtaposed raw and refined materials throughout the house.
For a successful large-scale architect like Johnson--a design partner of Johnson Fain Partners best-known for his sharply angled Fox Plaza Tower in Century City--building a house for yourself is an indulgence. As a collector of contemporary art and a furniture designer, he wanted the house to serve as a work in progress, a place to try out fresh ideas and juggle the contents over a period of time. The living room’s polished concrete floors and lofty ceiling, the steel stairs and colored-glass screen that divide it from the dining room and the translucent fiberglass in the kitchen all evoke an industrial loft. The living room, eclectically furnished with unusual pieces and a grand piano, doubles as a music room. The dining room, with its elliptical tabletop of dark and creamy stone split down the middle and its tall, upholstered chairs, opens up through glass sliders to the pool terrace, turning the room into a shady porch on summer days. A rusted steel beam in the cutaway ceiling plays off the elegance of the furnishings.
Having lived in New York’s Greenwich Village and the Haight district of San Francisco, the Johnsons wanted to recapture an urban experience and share the fun of walking to neighborhood shops and restaurants, enjoying the spectacle but shielded from noise. For Dr. Bates, who often has to catch up on her sleep after getting the kids off to school, it’s ideal. “We are high enough up that it’s very quiet,” she says. “But the neighborhood is down-to-earth, and it gave us a lot more freedom to express ourselves than if we had built on a typical residential street.”
