When, in the late 1970s, a young Los Angeles filmmaker named Jane Spiller commissioned Frank Gehry to design her home in Venice, California, it was an early but groundbreaking period of Gehry's career. He was taking the kinds of inexpensive, workmanW structing homes distinguished by sculptural, exaggerated geometries.
"Jane Spiller was one of our greatest clients," he recalled in the 2009 book Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli). "She wanted us to do our stuff." The completed Spiller House, half a block from the Venice Beach boardwalk, is a pair of boxlike units, one designed for the owner to live in and the other to host tenants. Within an unassuming facade of unpainted corrugated-metal sheets, the virtually unchanged interior architecture still brims with idiosyncrasies-the appearance of naked studs uncovered by drywall, rooms cut at irregular angles, visible heating and cooling ductwork. From the ground-floor living room, a rectangular opening cuts through the second floor to reveal the almost perpendicular orientation of the skylight on the roof.
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MORE, PLEASE
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EYE IN THE SKY
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THE JOY OF KØKKEN
In Brooklyn, a writer transforms her kitchen into a space of warmth and connection, blending personal memories with Scandinavian design.
CURTAIN RAISER
ELLE DECOR partners with designers Christine and John Gachot to refresh an iconic lounge at a New York institution, the Metropolitan Opera House.
The Empire Strikes Back - A 19th-century gem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gets a tour-de-force restoration thanks to Frances Merrill of Reath Design.
Is it possible to simultaneously go back in time and leap forward? This was the challenge a couple set for themselves upon purchasing a salmon-pink 1869 house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Longfellow House, the National Historic Site that served as George Washington's headquarters during the revolution. We loved all the beautiful old details of this house, the homeowner says.
Just Like That, But Cheaper. -One writer tried to replicate a classic ELLE DECOR interior in his apartment. Could he do it for $500?
It was all about the green curtains. In 2008, to my great surprise, I was offered a ninemonth fellowship based in New York City. I had lived there twice before, both times unsuccessfully, meaning I had failed to create any kind of significant social life, and so this was a chance not only to do research for my new novel, but also an opportunity to get things right. I swore I wouldn't let the city break me a third time.
And How! - Decorator Nick Olsen transforms a Sag Harbor home into a Hamptons retreat with an irreverent humor.
If you must go to the Hamptons, however-because it is devilishly good fun, after all-you may notice an apparently modest, low-slung cottage on Sag Harbor's Main Street and think, with a comfortable sort of feeling, Now that is how a house should look. Nestled amid the Botox bars, helipads, and club-staurants, it could almost set the sordid world aright both a rebuke and a solution to the chaos that surrounds it. A real home.
