Ultimate bachelor pad, then and now

AS a host, Michael Rielly rarely has to cope with Los Angeles’ least wanted: the fashionably late. Whether they are invited for cocktails or for a sit-down dinner, Rielly’s guests tend to arrive early, clambering up the stairs from Mulholland Drive to Domus Solaris, the home that the late Pasadena architect Donald Hensman built for himself in 1975 on a weed-covered lot with a view of the San Fernando Valley on one side and the Los Angeles Basin and the Pacific on the other.

Rielly’s guests arrive on time to catch a glimpse of Santa Catalina Island in the last light of day. They gather on the garage-top deck, lounging on 10-foot wooden chaises Rielly designed so that both ends flip up.

“You just have to move around on the furniture,” he says, “instead of moving the furniture around.”

He was equally pragmatic when it came to the house, a redwood-and-glass rectangle accessed by a paved bridge over a pool nearly 50 feet long. When the property was on the market almost two years ago, other potential buyers saw the one-bedroom castle with the modernist moat as a teardown; Rielly believed it should stay put, exactly as Hensman had intended. Don’t move the building, he thought. Just work around its design.

“This house was created as the ultimate bachelor pad,” says Rielly, 43. “It’s perfect for me because I am not planning on starting a family anytime soon. The most I will live with is one other person and my dogs, Mathilda and Banjo.”

RIELLY grew up in a 1960s ranch in La Canada Flintridge surrounded by the designs of Hensman, who, with design partner Conrad Buff III, gained renown as a mid-century innovator in post-and-beam construction. Rielly wanted to respect Hensman’s original plans but still make some changes -- adding pebble aggregate patio pads by the pool, for example -- that enhanced the property as a place to entertain friends and clients.

A sports agent who managed professional golfers and golf course designers here and in Asia, Rielly had lived in the house only a few months when he left his two-decades-long job at IMG early last year.

“I realized that this house was not going to be a weekend project,” he says. “I was consumed with it.”

Domus Solaris, Latin for “house of the sun,” was neither the largest nor the grandest house that Hensman built. In the monograph “Buff & Hensman,” editor James Steele noted the duo’s residential work was distinguished by a “carefully choreographed sequence” of spaces that led the eye through the house and to views of nature.

“This is perhaps one of the most important of the regional adaptations to the Modernist tradition: their use of indoor-outdoor space,” Steele wrote.

At 1,658 square feet, the single-story Domus Solaris took the open-plan house to new heights. Perched on a promontory like a luxury railway car, it is divided into two spaces: a public area composed of a kitchen that virtually disappears behind a counter at the end of the dining-living room, and a master suite lined with windows and double-wide glass doors.

“The best way to tell an architect’s true design intention is to look at the house he designs for himself,” Steele said. Economically and efficiently made from then-plentiful redwood, with teak cabinetry and tile inside and out, Domus Solaris achieved Hensman’s goals to build with a continuity of materials, surfaces and forms. “The site establishes oneness,” Hensman said, “a complete unity of design and purpose.”

Hensman built a second home, Domus Dos, in 1980, and sold Domus Solaris to a buyer who eventually fell into foreclosure. The subsequent owner had strong beliefs about feng shui and carved the floor plan into a multicolored three-bedroom warren.

“They had done nutty renovations,” Rielly says. “The neighbors thought I was nuts to buy it for the asking price, but I have always been a sucker for faded glory.”

A tireless researcher, Rielly gathered much of the information he needed about the house from 411. He got telephone numbers for architect Dennis Smith, who was a partner with Buff and Hensman and sold Rielly the original plans for the house, and for Julius Shulman, who had photographed the house for a 1976 Los Angeles Times Home Magazine article titled “One Big Room, Two Big Views.” Times writer Dan MacMasters described Domus Solaris’ less-is-more appeal. “Nothing,” he wrote, “interferes with the views, the play of light and shadow, the sun and the rain, the slow march of seasons.”

Restoring the house has sometimes been a protracted trudge for Rielly, who served as his own general contractor and worked with about 50 vendors. He stripped the three layers of paint from the interior woodwork and took down the weathered redwood on the exterior, re-milling it as slats for a perimeter fence. That meant driving a 31-foot rental truck filled with redwood from the Mendo Mill & Lumber Co. in Mendocino County.

While in Northern California, he also found Richard Anderson Construction, which replicated the original double doors from old growth wood.

Hanging the doors was something else. During a morning drive on Mulholland, Rielly saw Bill McGaughy of Custom Creations in La Canada Flintridge. McGaughy was hard at work on the restoration of John Lautner’s Garcia House. After McGaughy installed the doors, Rielly asked him to build a fence and outdoor benches.

Restoring the floors should have been easy. Rielly took a sample of the original brown tiles to Western Quarry in Monrovia. After several failed matches, Rielly says, “I played the this-is-for-a-Buff-and-Hensman-house card.” The owner, who told Reilly that the architects had put him in business, took care of the 820-tile order himself.

The tiles, like the stained glass windows flanking the front doors and the tongue-and-groove redwood siding, had a strong 1970s flavor.

“I knew that Hensman had done the house on an affordable level and some of the materials might not have been the nicest,” says David Beatty, Rielly’s friend and a design consultant for an architectural firm in Santa Monica. “We struggled between restoring and making it more contemporary. Mike’s feeling was to pay tribute to the original design but make it more livable.”

Rielly resurfaced the fireplace with an all-white mosaic of rough-cut quartzite tiles from Soli in West Hollywood. In the master bath, the shower got a glass tile face-lift, and Rielly installed two orange glass sinks from CHR Designs, also in West Hollywood. A vibrant tequila sunrise-colored counter now defines the kitchen. Appliances disappear behind teak cabinetry, which also conceals a new powder room.

“My mother said it wasn’t proper to have guests go through my bedroom to get to the restroom,” Rielly says, smiling.

The powder room was unveiled at a surprise birthday bash for Rielly’s mother in March.

“I planned a series of parties as self-imposed deadlines,” he says. “That was a hair-raising mad scramble.”

With the house still torn up, he called three companies to measure for carpeting. “They were all very courteous but they all said, ‘We can’t schedule installation because we do not think you’ll be ready,’ ” Rielly says. Empire Today -- better known to many as Empire Carpet and remembered for those TV ads with a telephone number jingle -- got the job, installing a simple, neutral wool berber that echoes the pebbled patio outside.

With the exception of two orange sofas from Pomp of Culver City and coral lacquered vintage nightstands in the bedroom from Peter Vanstone in Echo Park, Rielly decorated in a natural palette. He found outdoor furnishings and planters in metal and ceramic at California Living on La Brea Avenue and at Ten 10 in Silver Lake, plus a travertine table and free-form wood sculptures at Grain in Atwater Village.

Other sculpture and furniture, including a 1930s Deco-styled Burmese teak table and bentwood dining stools, were already part of Rielly’s collection of pieces acquired during the decade that he spent living and working in Japan and Singapore.

WITH a sister based in Ho Chi Minh City, Rielly formed Crazy Monk International to deal in Vietnamese art. Most of the paintings on display in his home come from their collection, which includes a 1995 canvas by Viet Dung, one of Vietnam’s “Gang of Five” art movement. The piece hangs illuminated by a skylight in the kitchen.

“I did not want to trick this house up,” Rielly says. Instead, he has created a home that is functional and stylish yet serene, with interiors that do not distract from the glistening lap pool by day or the twinkling blanket of the Valley lights at night.

Once he “surrendered to this house and understood what it should be,” he came to peace with the fact that he had tripled his original budget for renovation, though he demurs about specific figures.

“This house is disciplined and dictates tidiness,” he says, “but it is also warm and inviting. Don Hensman was a social genius.”

Last week, Rielly welcomed Alicia Silverstone, Casey Affleck, “Bones” actress Emily Deschanel and other Hollywood members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to his home for an early vegan Thanksgiving. Tofu was served in deference to the live turkey in attendance named Tom. Banjo and Mathilda, Rielly’s Australian shepherds, spent the day at a friend’s house, he says. “We couldn’t have them chasing the guest of honor.”

david.keeps@latimes.com