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CARMEN
ROGERS found her new home almost by accident a couple
years ago while flipping through the pages of a magazine
at the supermarket checkout line. There it was
photographed on a steep hillside in Montecito, the home
that architect Barton Myers built for himself and his
wife in 1998.
Divided
into three separate structures, the steel-and-glass
house is uncompromisingly industrial in style yet is
still in harmony with the unspoiled, oak-filled
hillside.
Carmen
and her husband, Rick, knew this was the home they
wanted, but they didn’t know if it could be adapted for
a corner lot on a busy Westside street.
PAPYRUS sprays and other
exotic trees and plants fill the courtyard outside the
living room. A wall separates the courtyard from the
street and the sound of water from a reflecting pool
spilling into an outer trough helps drown out traffic
noise. “There is so much glass in the house that we
wanted something really good to look at out those
windows.
They
contacted Myers, who was intrigued by the challenge.
Could the new house retain the qualities the couple most
admired in his home, particularly the sense of openness
to landscape, in a single-family neighborhood, near
Olympic Boulevard?
Myers
had been toying with the idea of designing a series of
houses, each repeating a few signature elements: steel
frame, floor-to-ceiling windows and roll-up doors. These
projects—and the Rogerses’ home in particular—would
explore steel home construction and test the idea that
the hard-edged design of his Montecito house could fit
any location.
The
newly finished Rogers house resembles the Myers house in
some ways but is anything but a replica. The individual
pavilions of the Montecito house march straight down the
hill like stair steps. The Rogerses’ house, in contrast,
sits on a flat double lot on a busy Westside corner and
is built around in a “classic
Los Angeles
courtyard,” Myers says.
THE
architect formed the courtyard by arranging three
separate, steel-framed structures in a “U” shape around
a long, narrow courtyard. Two of the buildings have
roll-up doors filled with windows. (The architect calls
them “roll-up curtain walls.”) The more conventional
walls have rows of clerestory windows along the roof
line to maximize natural light.
At the
center is the main house, with a large living-dining
room with 16-foot ceilings facing south, while a guest
house faces west. On the opposite end is Rick’s home
office and pool parlor.
THE guest house, which is
part of a separate building across the courtyard,
maintains the minimalist décor of the main house. Myers
says construction costs for the Westside home were
comparable to a high-end, wood-frame house.
The most
dramatic moment occurs when doors on the main house roll
up out of sight, literally opening to the courtyard. In
this configuration, the house looks almost as if no
walls ever existed between indoors and outdoors, much as
those walls seem to disappear at Myers’ Montecito house.
For the
Rogerses, their new house is the culmination of the
couple’s personal passion for architecture and design.
After serving as a young actor in television and several
beach-party movies of the 1960s, Rick transitioned into
fashion design, creating beaded denim garments. He also
logged five years at UCLA’s interior design program.
Carmen Rogers is an interior designer who recently spent
three years refurbishing a hotel in Park City, Utah,
where the couple have a second home.
The main
building, with living room, dining room, kitchen and two
bedrooms, has been sparely furnished with carefully
chosen Modernist furniture, much of it chosen by Carmen.
Few possessions are on view beyond some small paintings,
books and a remarkable wood-burning stove in the shape
of a gorilla that the Rogerses bought in
France
many years ago.
His
respect for Myers’ architecture was great enough, Rick
said, that he was willing to part with rare furniture
and other belongings he thought incompatible with the
spare, steel-framed house. “We got rid of a lot of
things we didn’t want to get rid of,” he says, “but the
idea of insulting the integrity of that architecture is
not worth it to me.” Rick found he had to make other
compromises as well. He was ambivalent at first about
having a roll-up door on his pool room, which he prefers
dark, to avoid glare. To accommodate him, the architect
provided a dark, roll-down screen to shade the room from
the window-filled doors. Rick, an expert pool player,
has filled a basement room next to a wine cellar with
his cherished collection of inlaid pool cues. (He calls
the room “the cue-midor.”)
A lap
pool of black-tinted concrete runs along the foot of a
wall that separates the courtyard from the street and
serves as a reflecting pool when not in use. Like a
fountain, the water spills continuously from the pool
into an outer trough, and the sound of water helps to
shield the courtyard from the sound of intense traffic
during rush hour.
One
section of the wall is made of poured-in-place concrete,
a material strong enough to support a massive,
folded-steel, white-painted sculpture by artist Betty
Gold. Attached to the wall by thick, horizontal bolts is
the steel artwork, which “weighs as much as a
Mini-Cooper,” according to architect Thomas Schneider,
who served as Myers’ project architect and chief
assistant on the Rogerses’ home.
The
notion of a walled house in a dense urban setting
appealed to Rick, who said it reminded him of cities in
South America, “where you walk down the street and it’s all walls,
and suddenly you walk into a beautiful courtyard house.”
MYERS,
who built two steel houses in Toronto before the one in
Montecito, is one of a small but quickly growing number
of architects who are popularizing steel construction in
houses for a variety of reasons (see box).
The
strength of steel, he explains, allows architects to
“compress” a home’s structural frame into a minimal
metal skeleton. Unlike a conventional wood frame, the
steel structure seems almost to disappear, allowing room
for floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as broad,
column-free spans.
“Steel
allows a kind of transparency that is possible only with
a highly confined structure,” says Mark Mack, an
architect who teaches a steel-house design class with
Barton Myers at UCLA School of Art and Architecture.
The idea
of the steel house is not a new one. The first one,
according to historians, is the famous Maison de Verre
or glass house in Paris, designed by Pierre Chareau in
1932, in which the large spaces on the exterior walls
left open by the steel frame are filled with glass
block. (Myers often speaks admiringly of the glass
house; Rick says he made a special effort to see it
during a trip to Paris, decades before hiring Myers to
design his own steel house.)
In the
1940s and ’50s, the experimental Case Study houses
reinvigorated the use of steel in housing. Perhaps the
most famous, and one of Myers’ acknowledged
inspirations, is the Charles and Ray Eames House, a pair
of cubic volumes built in 1949 on an ocean bluff south
of
Malibu.
(The first so-called high-tech house, the Eames House
was built entirely of existing industrial materials
available from catalogs.)
Currently, steel construction is enjoying another
revival, this time due to the popularity of prefab
housing designs by young architects and designers such
as Jennifer Siegel. (While expressing admiration for
prefab projects, Myers says he designs his houses for
specific sites unlike many prefab architects, which
offer ready-made solutions for any sites. “You have to
solve the architectural problem in each location,” he
says.)
For
Myers, the Montecito house was a return to steel houses,
a building type that the architect has been designing
for more than 35 years—he built two steel houses in
Canada in the 1970s—and in which he is an acknowledged
pioneer. The high level of interest following the
publication of the Montecito house seemed to offer Myers
the chance to plunge into a new series of steel houses.
Carmen,
who had been nervous about building on a busy corner,
said she is pleased with the results: “It’s amazing how
warm the house is.”
The
landscape design by Katherine Glascock is one of the
things that Carmen likes most about the house. In the
center of the courtyard stands a mature stone pine with
twisting, expressive branches and long needles. Unable
to dig in the side garden because of buried utility
lines, Glascock built a hill out of terraces and filled
the terraces with papyrus sprays and other exotic
plants.
“There
is so much glass in the house that we wanted something
really good to look at out those windows,” Rick said.
“The garden became the artwork for the rooms,” he added.
Said Carmen: “When you look out the bedroom window, it’s
like being in a garden.”
The
architect, for his part, seemed pleased when a visitor
calls the courtyard the best room in the house.
“There’s two kinds of architecture right now,” says
Myers, a man of strong opinions. “One is about making
objects, the other is about making spaces,” he says,
adding, “I’m interested in making spaces.” |
