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R EBOOT

S I LV E RTOPJOHN LAUTNER’S ICONIC 1958 “HOUSE OF THE FUTURE”

IS RESTORED FOR A NEW GENERATION

A soaring concrete shell forms a column-free roof over Silvertop’smain living area. The glass wall retracts at the push of a button,

opening the house to the terrace. Mass Beverly’s Nido dining chairscomplement a Mecox dining table. Landscape design by Studio MLA.

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Opposite top: Bestor Architec-ture restored every aspect ofSilvertop. At the entry, tilewas replaced and cedar sidingrefurbished.

Opposite, bottom left: The cast-bronze front door is original; theterrarium was replanted and isopen to the sky.

Opposite, bottom right: A glass, metaland wood doorway providesaccess to the west courtyard.

Above: Designer Jamie Bushfurnished the interiors. The two1965 lounge chairs are by ArneNorell; Jens Risom chair andottoman at right from RalphPucci. Travertine-and-brass tableby Ten10; Heather Rosenmanvase on the custom coffee table.Newly added custom cedarcabinetry conceals the televisionand audio equipment.

ilvertop is a habitable sculpture: adynamic composition of concaveand convex curves that seems tolevitate from a hilltop overlooking

the Silver Lake reservoir. A billow-ing concrete vault, supported on four

columns, arches over the expansive living room.Bowed brickwalls at either end conceal the compactkitchen and bedroom wing. An elliptical infini-ty pool echoes the ellipse of the roof vault. A steepdrive, cantilevered from the hillside, wraps aroundthe house, and steps lead down to a guest house anda tennis court that juts into space.

This house of the future was conceived in 1958 byJohn Lautner, who—like his mentor, Frank LloydWright—dreamed of things that never were. Tech-nology has caught up with his vision, and that al-lowed anewowner—music-industry executive LukeWood—to restore the house and subtly enhance itshiddenmechanisms.Working fromLautner’s plans,which are now in the Getty’s archives, architectBarbara Bestor and a team of creatives spent threeyears completing bits of the house that had been leftunfinished and seamlessly integrating new climatecontrols, sound systems and lighting. As Bestor

explains: “Luke was game to make it all it could beand become a demonstration of the future of design,as Lautner had intended.” Interior designer JamieBushdesignednew furniture that takes its cues fromthe architecture, while providing a comfortable liv-ing environment for Wood, his wife—writer SophiaNardin—and their two teenage daughters.

Wood started out as a guitarist in an alt-rock bandand progressed, through a stint at Dreamworks, tobecome president of Beats Electronics. Music anddesign are his twin passions, and Bestor knew hewould be the ideal custodian when Silvertop cameup for sale in 2014. “It was more fantastic than any-thing I could have imagined,” Wood says, recallinghis first visit. “Nobody realized how long it wouldtake to restore, but we weren’t intimidated. In theworld of music, things can come quickly or taketime. There was no pressure—we were living oneblock away in a house we loved.”

It made sense to pause and get everything right, forthe house had waited 50 years for its final polish.Lautner always took the long view. In a book pub-lished just before his death in 1994, he declared:“The purpose of architecture is to improve human

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Opposite top: The Egg Collectivecustom dining table has a built-in bench designed by BarbaraBestor and Jamie Bush andmade by ROWLA. Gubi Beetledining chairs; custom industrialfloor lamp by Jamie Bush.

Opposite bottom: Bush designed atwo-sided sofa covered in Dong-hia fabric; custom jute-and-cot-ton rug from Marc Phillips. TheAxon table lamp is by Apparatus.On the far wall, a brick panelslides up automatically to pro-vide access to the kitchen.

Top left and above: Bestor Architec-ture designed a new breakfastnook and banquette in theremodeled kitchen. Custom tableby Jamie Bush; Muuto Visu chairs.Artwork by Glen E. Friedman. Corkceiling panels were refurbishedthroughout. Satellite Pendantfrom Gubi.

Opposite: A new kitchen islandwas designed by Ilan Dei Studio.Fixtures by Fantini; Gaggenauoven and cooktop.

life. Create timeless, free, joyous spaces... [These] can be as varied as lifeitself and they must be as sensible as nature in deriving from a mainidea and flowering into a beautiful entity.”

In his six-decade career, Lautner built about 50 houses, though asmany more went unrealized. A few exceptional clients shared hisquest for sculptured forms and fluid volumes allied to structuralrigor. Kenneth Reiner, an inventor turned entrepreneur, commis-sioned Silvertop. “Mr. Reiner and I worked on this project for almostten years, researching and developing different things,” Lautner re-called. “We were constantly breaking new ground, inventing andtesting new designs.... Nothing stock was used and there wasn’t anyhurry to finish; we wanted to get it perfect.” Sadly, Reiner’s businessfolded before he couldmove in, and the house sat empty for a decadeuntil it was bought in a bankruptcy sale by Phillip and JacquelineBurchill, who lived there happily for 40 years.

For the past century Los Angeles has been a crucible of innovation inresidential design, and Silvertop looks across the reservoir to RichardNeutra’s VDL house, which was begun in 1933 as an experiment in liv-ing and rebuilt after a fire in 1963, just as Lautner’s house was nearingcompletion. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast. The Austrian-bornarchitect used the VDL as a model for nearly 300 buildings that playvariations on a few simple, orthogonal themes, perfect proportionsand elegant restraint. Lautner grew up in the woods of Wisconsin,absorbed Wright’s love of organic architecture and—though he found

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A retractable glass ceilingand wall opens the masterbathroom to the outdoors.Custom tub by ModulMarble; Waterworks fixtures;Gessi showerhead.

L.A. painfully ugly—spent the rest of his life here,exploiting the freedom it offered a maverick. Buthe had to fight for every advance: The L.A. Build-ing Department refused to approve the cantile-vered driveway of Silvertop and insisted he builda full-scale mock-up for testing. Lautner and hisengineer had the last laugh—it has survived twomajor earthquakes without a crack.

Drama is the hallmark of Silvertop. Projectingplanes shade the carport at the top of the hill and arecessed entry. A low-ceilinged passage, lit from aterrarium, builds anticipation for the lofty sweepof the living room. There, floor-to-ceiling glaz-ing—still suspended from the clips Reiner invent-

ed—frames a panorama of the city to the east, whilethe westerly view to the Hollywood Hills is shadedby two tall trees. An aged sycamore serves as asite-specific sculpture, and another tree penetratesa hole in the projecting roof plane. Mia Lehrerredesigned the garden, which extends to the edge ofthe site. Fromhere the graceful arch of the roof vaultplays off the angled walls of dark brick that enclosethemaster suite and the daughters’ bedrooms. To thesouth, pool changing rooms are enclosed by railroadties, with fiberglass panels to pull in light.

Within, the kitchen has been upgraded, and newcork ceiling panels from Portugal have replacedthe old, there and in the bedrooms. In the living

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The master bedroom features automated woodlouvers and glass panels; the cork ceiling and sky-light also open electronically. Poliform Bolton bed;Restoration Hardware faux-fur throw. Area rugfrom Marc Phillips; chaise with brass-wire baseby Phase Design. Teak daybed with Raf Simonscushion fabric by Lawson Fenning.

“John Lautner believed that architecture should beprogressive, that it should evolve with technologyand be a living thing,” says LukeWood.

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Left: A living-room corneroffers views of downtownLos Angeles. Scallopedconcrete ceiling elementsconceal cove lighting. Theswivel chair, covered inMaharam mohair, is byMichael Berman; pillowfabric by Kelly Wearstler.

Above: Bestor Architecturedesigned the crow’s nestabove the carport based onearly Lautner drawings thatwere never realized.

room a section of the glass wall glides silently aside.(“Before, it was operated by a motorcycle chain andsounded like an Austrian cog railway,” says Wood.)The master bathroom is small by contemporarystandards, but it becomes infinite when the glasswall descends into a newly excavated slot and theglass ceiling recedes, leaving nothing but a slendershower head between you and the sky. In the masterbedroom, an array of tiny bronze buttons operatesthe shutters, folds a concertina of cork ceiling pan-els, and opens the windows and skylights. Overheadspeakers are concealed behind a thin layer of cork,and the sound is digitally processed and equalized.Concealed LEDs turn the house into an etherealtheater. Mechanical services line a tunnel that runsunder the house, and these have all been updated.

“Lautner believed that architecture should be pro-gressive, that it should evolve with technology andbe a living thing,” says Wood. “That guided Barba-

ra and the team in the choices we made, and we allshared a respect for the historical significance of thehouse. It was a collective effort—like a great bandplaying together.” After completing the guest house,a circular space that had been left unfinished andused for storage, he asked them to add a tiny record-ing studio and console in one corner, painting thewalls a similar shade of blue that Bestor had used forhis office inCulverCity. The concrete column risingthrough this sunken space ended in rebar; now thathas been crowned with a glass-railed crow’s nest(which Lautner designed but was unable to realize)commanding a 360-degree panorama of the city.

“We wanted to preserve the consistency of materi-als that Lautner used but distinguish our additionsfrom what was there,” explains Bestor. “The slidingcabinet that hides the television screen uses thesame Louisiana cypress as the existing paneling,but we ran it vertically rather than horizontally. We

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cleaned the end-grain fir flooring and matched the terrazzo, which wasextended out from the kitchen. Jamie’s decision to employ a circular rugand a double-sided curved sofa in the living room created a much betterbalance with the monumental fireplace.”

“The design and placement of furniture in the living roomwas determinedby the scale and character of the architecture,” says Bush. “Wewanted thereto be a dialogue between the two, allowing the family to use every part of theroom.We custom designed almost everything, repeating shapes in the dou-ble sofa—whichwere inspired by those ofVladimirKagan—floor lamps andbrass drum tables. For contrast we added pieces like the two green-leatherarmchairs with buckled straps that look Brazilian but are, surprisingly, thework of Swedish designer ArneNorell. They echo the greenery beyond.”

Public appreciation for classic modern houses in Los Angeles has neverbeen greater. Escher GuneWardena Architecture, who are working withthe Getty on the conservation of the Eames house, restored Lautner’sChemosphere house for publisher Benedikt Taschen. Jim Goldstein hascontinued to enhance the former Sheats house in Beverly Hills, in col-laboration with the master’s office, bequeathing it to LACMA as the firstLautner house to be publicly accessible. In his lifetime this creative ge-nius was widely disparaged, and Silvertop was dismissed as a costly folly.Moviemakers still use modern houses as shorthand for villainy, but thathas become a tired cliché. ThoughHollywoodmaynot know it, the legacyof modernism has now been embraced by the good guys. .

Above: Bestor restored Lautner’s infinity-edge pool, which was the first ever built.Case Study #22 chaise lounges from Modernica; teak dining table, Gloster.

Right: Silvertop’s transparent, ethereal quality is revealed from thewest courtyard; Lautner created an opening in the cement canopy for the

large fir tree. The brick-clad bedroom wing is at left.

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