Cape Cod on Mulholland
By Janet Eastman
January 18, 2007 in print edition F-1
MULHOLLAND DRIVE, that rope of road winding through Hollywood and the Santa Monica Mountains, is famous for the cantilevered Modernist dwellings that hug the hills. For the last six decades, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and other architects embracing the barebones International Style were drawn to this storied thoroughfare, so close to the stars. Here they built their glass houses, transparent and expansive – visions of the future delivered for the present.
But then one comes to a flat lot where a new Georgian Colonial house sits, as if teleported from Connecticut, gables and all.
Leave it to “Dreamgirls” producer Laurence Mark to reinterpret the Mulholland fantasy. He bought the one-acre property with an aging ranch-style house for around $1.6 million in 1999. He liked the address (“Mulholland is easy to remember”), the location (“It’s as far away from civilization as you can get while still being practical”) and the hint of the East Coast, where he grew up (the original house’s exterior was Cape Cod blue).
At first he thought he would remodel it, but then he and Santa Monica interior designer Michael S. Smith – two traditionalists with an informal bent – hatched the idea to erect a new Connecticut-style house inspired by the one Katharine Hepburn lived in with her pet leopard in the 1938 comedy “Bringing Up Baby.”
The home is easy to miss from the street. Only a small sign with an address, barely visible among the scrappy trees, signals the turn up a strip of asphalt to the ridge of a canyon. Pull up to the front of the house – gray brick with small-paned windows and wood shutters – and the buttoned-up facade gives no hint of the views behind it. Looking out at the protected slopes from his covered backyard porch, Mark boasts: “I see Mother Nature, not one of those stilt houses.”
At the end of his workdays keeping budgets and production of his movies on track, Mark wants to escape Hollywood. He doesn’t even want to see a palm tree. He retreats to what he calls his country home. “I’m not completely isolated but I feel that way here. It just gives me a feeling that I’m combining the best of California with the East Coast.”
MULHOLLAND today is lined with new, maxed-out Mediterraneans and Moderns with front-to-back views, says architect Brad Clark, who designed Mark’s house. “Left to our own devices, we’d be doing contemporary,” he says of his Los Angeles firm, Kovac Architects. “Larry’s house with a colonial New England look is unusual for us and for that area.”
Homes along Mulholland have long been defined by the surrounding sawtooth topography. In the 1920s, developers pushed to have the hilltops paved and soon private lanes were springing from the two-lane road leading past overgrown shrubs to odd-sized lots. Small cottages came first, followed by Spanish-style mini-mansions, ranch-style houses and then soaring glass-and-steel pads.
“Mulholland Drive is mythic,” says Kevin Starr, a USC professor of history and the author of a series of books on the California dream. “Drive up the hill. Come into this enchanted place, with hidden gardens, hidden homes. The people who live there can be in their Hollywood-style residences, overlooking their audience, consumers who are happily in tract homes watching their work on DVD. By just being up there, it tells them who they are in case they happen to forget that day.”
Marlon Brando hid away for years in a compound here, thankful that his staff could drive down to fetch whatever he needed. Jack Nicholson still lives here. But few would know it. Privacy is created by gates and landscape, and in some canyons, down-sloping lots conceal caissoned cliff-hanging houses.
It was only natural that multilevel houses would be adopted in this unlevel land, says architect Ted Wells, who is on the advisory board of the Southern California chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.
“The terrain doesn’t lend itself to historically flat architectural styles like a Georgian Colonial,” he says. “It wasn’t a big leap to adopt Mediterranean styles on Mulholland Drive that were designed to step up Italian and Spanish hillsides. The Modern style worked on multilevels too. John Lautner designed his Chemosphere house off Mulholland to sit on a single column that raised the house so as not to disturb the sloping lot. Function and expense drove these solutions.”
Blame director David Lynch’s edgy movie “Mulholland Drive” if our image of twisted Mulholland does not embrace a house like Mark built with pitched roof and dormers, a style first popularized on the East Coast centuries ago by wealthy colonists.
“That would be a distinctive approach for a new home there,” says social historian Starr after being told of Mark’s house. “This just shows the power of architecture to suggest and create place, especially for someone who grew up in the East Coast. Your home tells the story you want to tell.”
MARK’S 5,179-square-foot house with a two-car garage could have been larger.
The original ranch-style house was U-shaped, built around a front courtyard with a towering silk tree with greenish gray bark. Mark wanted to keep the flowering tree in the courtyard as well as preserve the large front and back yards.
As for the house itself, architect Clark says the lot size allowed for it to be triple the original footprint. Mark kept the same footprint but added a second story to one wing. “I don’t want to have to use a megaphone to talk to friends in my home,” jokes Mark, who moved into the house in 2002.
“If you saw Larry’s house standing next to another house on that same street, without any walls around it, it might look out of place,” Clark says. “But because it wraps around an entry courtyard and has a nice, human scale, it makes sense.”
Step inside and the small entry with its rugged hardwood floor and painted panel walls seem designed for unloading winter coats – and Hollywood expectations of a movie producer’s house. Across from the stair hall is a cozy dining room with blue-gray hand-blocked English wallpaper, an 18th century American mahogany table for eight and a white fireplace mantel seemingly plucked from “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”
Most of the furnishings came from Mark’s previous Hollywood Hills house. He says designer Smith usually deals with “royalty” – the English banking Rothschilds, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, director Steven Spielberg, supermodel Cindy Crawford and others who aren’t concerned about cost. But Mark is. It’s his profession.
“Once in a while Michael would have to announce the price of something and I would say, ‘Oh, dear’ or ‘Oh, fine,’ ” says Mark, who adds that whether it’s for his house or a movie, he’ll say no unless he believes that something is absolutely worth the money.
Framed black-and-white photographs by Ansel Adams and Bruce Weber that Mark has collected for 20 years hang on walls in the entrance, living room and bedrooms. He splurged to have a darkroom installed near the laundry to develop his own photographs.
“It’s a home hobby that also serves as a bit of a vacation from the hubbub of Hollywood,” says Mark, who lives alone. “When you have a sense of calm about you it hopefully puts you in touch with the real world and keeps things in perspective.”
Mark grew up in Manhattan’s affluent Sutton Place, attended Connecticut boarding schools and earned a master’s in film at New York University. He worked his way into publicity, marketing and production at the big studios, before heading his own production company since 1986. “Working Girl” was one of his first hits, followed by “Jerry Maguire,” “As Good As It Gets” and “I, Robot.”
Days before Mark accepted the Golden Globe Award for “Dreamgirls” as best motion picture (musical or comedy), he was hanging out in his living room, facing a white-painted mantel that bears none of the award statues he has collected over his career. (He keeps them at his production office.)
On this day, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” was playing over the vintage jukebox in the adjacent TV room. Near his side was his British harrier dog, named Rizzo after Stockard Channing’s character in “Grease.” In his book-lined home office overlooking the canyon, he was fielding calls to arrange an European tour for “Dreamgirls.”
He says he prefers to watch award shows in his flop-down TV room with a dozen of his friends sitting on pillows on the floor, eating takeout Chinese. But it won’t happen this year. The Producers Guild of America has nominated him for “Dreamgirls” and on Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce this year’s Oscar nominees. “If that happens, I guess I’ll have to go,” he says, not trying to sound convincing.
Mark, an energetic man in his late 50s, walks the red carpet for his work, but when he’s home, he slides in socks on unpolished hardwood floors. He has risen to the top of his spotlight-seeking profession, but uses Tinseltown’s fabled route to psychically and architecturally disconnect from its cliches and trappings.
“When a dinner cancels,” says Mark, “I’m happy to come home.”
janet.eastman@latimes.com
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Traditional but not stuffy
Santa Monica interior designer Michael S. Smith thinks traditional furnishings need to be played with: “This is California, after all, not Colonial Williamsburg,” he says. Smith achieved a casual traditional decor at Laurence Mark’s house by using comfortable, practical furnishings that appear aged. Nothing is too bright, sharp or trendy. Half a dozen tricks he employed in Mark’s house:
Casual: To avoid a formal look in the living room, he paired antique English chairs with a rustic turquoise table.
Lighting: He placed two large lantern fixtures in the vaulted living room instead of a chandelier.
Window coverings: Simple printed curtains, not heavy drapes, provide acoustical and visual warmth.
Mirror: A classic round one over the antique fireplace mantel is framed in carved wood made to look like bamboo, not an “uptight” gilded frame.
Rug: A faded red-and-blue rug over the hardwood floor anchors the facing sofas, in unmatched muted grays.
Balance: Modern-framed black-and-white photographic prints and dark-finished linear tables give the room structure, “so it’s not all mooshy.”
– Janet Eastman