High drama
Pools, patios and lawn furniture have long been fixtures of the Southern California lifestyle, but they rarely achieve the glamour that greets a visitor to the home of Duane Phay, who has raised indoor-outdoor living to elegant new heights in his house above the Sunset Strip.
Born in Singapore and raised in Manhattan, Phay knew he wanted a house on a promontory when he began looking in 1999. He quickly fell in love with a 1948 house in need of updating. Phay loved the property’s nearly 360-degree views, and he wanted every point in his home to maximize this spectacle, which meant ripping out walls, redoing windows, creating huge doors to the outside and turning terraces into outdoor rooms. The transformation took more than two years. Today an outdoor dining room at the house’s entrance achieves his goals; a lower deck that will become an outdoor living room is a work in progress.
Because Phay favors gray tones, the house, both inside and out, evokes the sleek drama of a futuristic sci-fi movie set, with a reflective stainless-steel interior wall, a tumbled-glass fireplace and flooring of dark gray cement-board siding that is smoother than slate.
A 13-foot-long ornamental metal gate made for Disney’s Tomorrowland separates the outdoor dining area from the indoor dining room, which is backed by oversized glass and wooden doors. Each aspect of the home’s design displays a simple rectangular geometry, all muted in color except for one exterior wall adorned with purple glass tiles that are common in Brazil. “My inspiration is the Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld,” Phay says. “He is a genius at creating indoor-outdoor spaces.
“I wanted to be able to do easy entertaining,” Phay says, such as his “Sunday afternoon satay parties” that remind him of the cook’s night off when he was a child. These are staged outside, as are many daily meals. “When I built this house, I wanted to make it so I could sit and read the newspaper by the pool,” Phay says. “I find now that I never sit in the sun, but I always eat my lunch out here, and at night the pool is a wonderful light source.”
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Resource Guide
Vidrotil 3/4-inch purple glass tiles, $20.34 per square foot, at Hagan Flynn Inc., Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, (310) 659-2614. Kai Douglas fir bench by John Cortese, $850, at Silho Furniture, Los Angeles, (323) 935-9955. Paola Lenti Wave chaise longue, $5,780, at Modern Living, West Hollywood, (310) 657-8775. Satay from Singapore’s Banana Leaf at the Farmers Market, Los Angeles, (323) 933-4627.