It’s Spanish, reinterpreted
The Spanish-style stucco looks surprisingly modest by comparison to most other houses in this Brentwood neighborhood -- what you can see of it, at least. Dense foliage obscures all but the entry and a sliver of red-tiled roof. Not even the windows are visible through the profusion of bamboo, oleander, ficus and ferns, and only the circular drive, with its exquisite hand-laid mosaic of polished rock and pebbles, hints at what’s to come.
As soon as collage artist Marina Forstmann Day opens the huge oak-paneled front door, it looks as though the whole place is performing sleight of hand. The foyer leads directly to French doors framing voluptuous gardens that extend as far as the eye can see, and then some: out to the interior courtyard, down to the pool, off to the tennis courts of the two-acre property. The house gradually begins to reveal itself room by room, 9,000 square feet of intimate spaces that add up to a cozy grandeur. Like Day’s work, it is a collage of textures and colors -- burnished woods, pale-peach stucco walls, red clay Saltillo tiles -- and of elegance and simplicity, of modern and ancient.
A massive wrought-iron chandelier in the dining room is laden with crystals as large as the palm of a hand. Orchids and ivy drip from a baptismal font dating back to the Middle Ages; outside, a nymph, whose twin is reportedly in the Borghese Gardens in Rome, cohabits a fountain with lily pads and tall reeds.
Day, granddaughter of the founder of Forstmann Woolens Co., grew up in Greenwich, Conn., in a French-style villa and came west when she married the scion of an old California family. In the early ‘70s, they bought the 1923 Brentwood stucco because, she says, “coming from Connecticut, I was so attracted to the age of the house. I didn’t know at the time that it was a John Byers.”
In the 1920s and ‘30s, Byers, a self-trained Santa Monica architect and contractor, built some 30 homes in Brentwood, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades -- nearly all of them in the Spanish vernacular. He was a passionate student of Hispanic cultures, specializing in adobe and stucco structures and decorative tile and woodwork installed by master Mexican craftsmen.
Over the years, the Day house became an upscale reinterpretation of Byers’ rendition of a Spanish hacienda, with its signature Mission-tiled roof and interior courtyards. The original 3,000-square-foot structure was remodeled at the outset by architect Hap Gilman. “It was very primitive, with corner fireplaces and armoires and no closets,” Day says. “It had been boarded up for two years with the debris of a life in the driveway.”
For 10 years the Days lived there with their young son. “But then we had another child and were bursting out of the two-bedroom situation,” she says. “For a while, we looked for a bigger house, but what I really wanted to do was stay and transform this one.”
That project, Marc Appleton’s first major residential commission, began in 1980 and lasted two years. Appleton, who now has offices in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, had just started his own firm after working for Frank Gehry for three years. “I was still wet behind the ears,” he recalls.
“This was my first lesson in trying to create a home not for me but for someone else,” says Appleton, who years after the remodel met his wife, actress Joanna Kerns, at one of Day’s parties. “From this project I learned that architecture involves a fair amount of compromise.”
Day wanted more of an indoor-outdoor flow and feeling than the Byers house had. She insisted upon Dutch doors for all outdoor passageways to keep out the dogs as much as to let in the plants, which amazed her with their fast and furious growth. “She didn’t want screens,” says Appleton. “Bugs and birds flew in and out.”
He took his cue from his grandmother’s estate designed by George Washington Smith in Santa Barbara. With its three interior patios and outdoor staircase, Forestal was a place where “you traveled inside and outside and back in again.”
Day also wanted a homey family-style house, but her then-husband wanted a more lavish setting for serious entertaining. To keep the new house cozy, Appleton created a floor plan that sprawls in an inconspicuous way, and Day then created spaces within spaces. Bedrooms are hidden around unlikely corners or up outdoor staircases. Though the kitchen, which Day calls “the heart of the house,” is vast and designed with entertaining in mind, the adjacent breakfast room has a snug, comfortable feel with its fireplace and old television.
“It’s a real tribute to Marina that no matter where you are in the house, you are in an intimate space,” Appleton says.
Her son’s apartment, with its own private entrance in what was the original master, is now the guest suite, featuring one of the original, tiny corner fireplaces and an indigo-accented Malibu tile bath. Her daughter’s space, accessible by a stucco staircase adorned with flamboyant plum and ochre Malibu tiles, is now used by Day’s toddler grandchildren. They also have their own playhouse, converted from Day’s former studio and located on the far end of the property down a steep Hansel and Gretel path.
Like the haciendas found in tropical climes, such as the island of Mallorca, there is no inside access to the master bedroom, which Appleton “hid” at the back of an interior courtyard. That means even if it’s pouring rain, Day and her new husband, a Westside lawyer, must go outside to get there, protected only by a wooden overhang.
The outdoor staircase is off this same courtyard; upstairs a sundeck overlooks the tiled pool. Thirty-year-old succulent and tropical plants make the pool area look as luxuriant as Costa Rica.
This small interior courtyard is one of Day’s favorite spots in the house and, with its fountain and St. Francis statue, one of the corners inspired by a yearlong study of monasteries. She stayed at monasteries in Santa Fe, N.M., and Santa Barbara and pored over photographs of others, searching for the most harmonious ways to create and blend private and public spaces in her own home.
“I’ve always believed people need their private space to come together in a fuller way,” she explains. “On the other hand, the living room is truly a living room. It’s not a formal room that nobody goes into.” The private spaces here are hardly monastic, though; practically all of them have indoor and outdoor sitting areas.
Not unexpectedly, the house is filled with art. In the entry hangs one of Day’s wall sculptures, “Soul of the Foot,” a circle of antique shoe lasts attached to a smooth wooden hat frame. Words describing negative emotions -- guilt, despair, resentment, jealousy -- are burned into the soles. “Our difficulties are a point of entry for grace,” Day, a non-practicing therapist schooled in the Jungian tradition, says enigmatically. “They are not something to be afraid of; they enter from the Earth, with humility.”
A Della Robbia bas relief on a mantel. A vibrant floral painting by Chicago-born painter and printmaker Roberto Juarez, whom Day calls her mentor. A Frida Kahlo-inspired portrait on wood by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, a Texan whose symbolic and surrealist work was no doubt influenced by her studies in Brazil and Mexico. A delicate Whistler nude. In the living room, a collage in the shape of a cross by Holocaust survivor and artist Hannelore Baron hangs opposite one of Day’s own assemblages, also a cross.
In Day’s piece, there’s an antique watch, a little WWI red metal, two-dimensional ambulance and the words “breathe” written in vintage Scrabble pieces. She made the piece three months before her brother, the late Nicholas Forstmann -- a founding partner with older brother Ted Forstmann in the buyout firm Forstmann Little & Co. -- was diagnosed with lung cancer. “Most of my work involves images that call to be made,” she explains. “Then usually about six months later, I’ll understand what it was that was trying to come up.
“Where the house and my art have always come together is that I cherish old things that have been made by hand, that have a human imprint, that perhaps have fallen into a state of disarray,” Day explains. “Somehow when I see objects like that, I feel that I can transform them and give them another life.”
She scours flea markets and antique stores, especially during her annual retreats to the Anderson Ranch, an artists’ colony outside Aspen, Colo., and the Vermont Studio Center, where she is on the board. She recently found old ledgers, Tarot and playing cards and antique linen-backed maps at the Marche aux Puces in Paris. Notebooks, toys, any number of found objects are incorporated in Day’s collages, which have been shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the country.
Day’s latest pieces will be exhibited at a one-woman show at the Don O’Melveny Gallery in West Hollywood in November. The new works also integrate antique items, including lace rubbings and turn-of-the-century prescriptions from a pharmacy in Burlington, Vt., old wallpaper and a ship captain’s log.
“This house was not unlike the old materials I use in my art,” she says. “It was in total disrepair. But we loved the house, we loved the land and gave it another life.”
As with Day’s paintings, the place can be read on many levels. Artist’s sanctuary. High-end hacienda. Cozy family dwelling. And just when you think you’ve seen the entire place, another Hansel and Gretel path appears leading from the pool area toward the back of the property. There, a tennis court, patio and vast lawn are “hidden” on a nearly one-acre clearing. Like the driveway, the path’s pebbles and stones were all placed, one by one, over several months, by the gardener’s family, in sunbursts, circles, squiggles and swirls.
It’s another work of art.
