With vast views and clean lines, a Mulholland Drive remodel takes its owners to a higher plane
Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times
Sitcoske rolls back the door of the master bedroom.
The 'killer view' drew Marcel Sitcoske and Michael Oddo to the site; free-flowing interior spaces kept them there.
By Janet Eastman
July 3, 2008
MARCEL Sitcoske and Michael Oddo were living off Mulholland Drive when they bought a house nearby three years ago with plans to fix it up and sell. Oddo recalls taking floor plans along with photographs to the Los Angeles building department. "The guys there laughed and said they'd never seen anything this ugly," he says. "And they've seen a lot."
But sometime during the construction process, they fell in love with the house and decided to stay. "We moved in before we even had a front door," Sitcoske says.
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The property's potential was in plain sight.
"We bought this house because of the killer view," Oddo says. "We still climb up on the roof, look out, pinch ourselves."
The home seems to float over Los Angeles, with mountains and the occasional helicopter straight ahead and what look like Matchbox cars chugging along below. It took a year of subtracting walls and adding subtle details, but now the remodeled house is a sight in itself, perched along Mulholland's saw-toothed ridges.
Inside, what had been an entry blocked by walls, with separate doorways to the kitchen, living room and dining room, is now an open 35-foot square with just one remaining structural column.
"Most people feel comfortable in open spaces," says Sitcoske, an art advisor who had a contemporary gallery in San Francisco and New York before moving here with Oddo in 2004.
They added a second story, reachable by walnut stairs -- treads only, no clunky risers -- that jut from the wall, as if levitated by a magician. At the landing, a minimal Robert Rauschenberg "Junction -- From Bones and Unions," made on location in Ahmadabad, India, hangs on the white wall. Baseboards are recessed, making walls appear to hover above the limestone floor. In the bathrooms, faucets don't rest on sinks but hang from the wall, and in the tub, the water cascades from the ceiling.
In the kitchen, appliances are encased in stainless-steel boxes that stop short of the floor. A 17-foot-long stainless-steel counter creates one continuous line suspended across the back wall. "It's the largest our installer, a Harley-Davidson type of guy, has ever seen," Sitcoske says.
"There's not much that touches the floor or the walls," she adds. "The house is so open you really see everything in a 3-D way."
The ultimate floating object here is their new master suite. Glass doors spanning 18 feet disappear into pockets, creating an opening to the sky.
"The way it's set up, the view is almost like an infinity pool. You don't see anything below the roof line of the first story, so you get past a lot of the less attractive stuff below," says Oddo, who owns Metro Services, an engineering, cleaning and energy management company. "Fortunately, we don't have vertigo."
The singular vision that guided how remodeled spaces were laid out got a little more complicated when it came time to furnish and decorate. For proof, one need only look to the portable basketball hoop and the golf cart blocking the driveway. The pingpong table alongside the pool. The billiards table in a prime spot in the living room. They're all Oddo's, and when he talks about his toys, Sitcoske just rolls her eyes.
She wanted to keep the furniture to a minimum. She brought in their favorites from the 1930s and '40s: two chrome-framed chairs with tobacco leather designed by Gilbert Rohde, Scandinavian chairs once used in a convent in Norway and two sofas upholstered in brown mohair velvet.
But in their old Sausalito home -- "more like a warehouse," Oddo says -- he could in-line skate, and he had room for a basketball hoop and billiards table.
"Michael's had a pool table for as long as I've known him," says Sitcoske, who met Oddo in 1995. "So if we have to have one . . . "
Really, what could she do?
She found a 1946 Brunswick Centennial table with tapered legs finished in rosewood and aluminum at Thanks for the Memories on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Price: $25,000.
"It adds an element of playfulness," she says. "When we have dinner parties, after a little wine, people who have never played before will pick up the cue."