Sophia Loren’s former estate, “La Concordia” had a storied history (it was originally owned by Eve Arden), a spectacular forty-acre site (at the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains), and a superb location (in Hidden Valley, an exclusive equestrian enclave northwest of Los Angeles); what it didn’t have was a great house.   The current owners — an international couple with a young family — had toured a new “historical” house I had done in Bel Air, in a 1920s Tuscan Style, and noticed a Palladian window I had designed (and which had been fabricated by the Paramount Scene Shop from my detailed drawings).  The clients recognized that the window was architecturally “correct” and they contacted me about redesigning their house.  Thus begat an extraordinary commission — and it all started with a window!

          When I first arrived at “La Concordia,” I found the site to be breathtaking.  Nestled in a picturesque ravine filled with century-old native California Oaks, the clients had just completed extensive landscape work by Nancy Goslee Power — putting in terraces, pergolas, allées and a pond — but all of it surrounding an existing board-and-batten “farmhouse” that was architecturally insignificant.  The brief was to design a large house that would be nestled into the landscape, to look as if it had been there for a hundred years.  Although we explored a number of architectural styles, there were really only two that would have been built at that location a century ago: Spanish Mission Style and Craftsman.  We settled on a Craftsman-style house as the thickly forested site lent the house masonry was fabricated with stone quarried on site, although we did not mill any lumber from the surrounding trees.  Not only are the site’s California Oaks a protected species, but we also wanted to nestle the house in among the trees to give the house a greater sense of history and permanence.    

          The 17,000 square-foot house is organized along a major east-west axis, leading from the driveway to the Motor Court, up several stone stairs, through an Entry Porch, into a Stair Hall, then on through the Living Room, and finally to the Dining Room, terminating in a large triple-hung casement window that opens onto a small Fountain Court.   The massive size of the house is mitigated by its sprawling floor plan, its varied scale, and the fact that a large portion of it was literally excavated out of the adjacent hillside; the walls of the Kitchen/Family Room act as retaining walls for the hill above and the Butler’s Pantry is actually twenty feet below grade — although this is imperceptible as a light well brings warm sunlight down into the space.   In addition, there are 2,000 square feet of exterior porches at every building entrance.  Not only is this historically correct, but it has a significant impact on the daily use of the house: despite the hot summers in Hidden Valley, the clients rarely need to use air conditioning as the outside air is naturally cooled under the porches before it enters the building.

          The exterior is clad with wood shingles — stained a dark green in homage to the California Craftsman style — and the roof is concrete “wood shake” tiles, which look exactly like wood, but are completely fireproof, a necessary conceit in fire-prone of Southern California.   On the inside, the clients did not want a Japanese-influenced “Greene & Greene”-type style, so we went instead with a loose Queen Anne / Craftsman style, mixing elements from the 1880s through the 1920s — for a house that naturally would have been added onto and modified over the years.  The clients afforded me an exceptional opportunity to design every detail in every room, inside and out.  From the broadest programmatic elements to the smallest casing details, everything was custom designed: multi-pane double-hung windows with counterweight operable sashes; a cast-plaster Lutyens-inspired fireplace surround; Living Room panels filled with hand-painted de Gourney wallpaper; a solid oak Kitchen island inspired by the kitchen table at Castle Drogo, with a vaulted ceiling and oculus as well; a Dining Room Fireplace inspired by the Library mantel at Shelburne Farms and gilded paneling as an homage to Whistler’s Peacock Room; and a “Balinese”-style sitting room inspired by an original Tony Duquette overmantel are just some of the many, many architectural details in the house.   Because of the ubiquity of Computer Aided Design (CAD), architectural drafting has become something of a “lost art” — but I found that the only way to achieve the proper results was to do the detail drawings by hand.   Over two hundred pages of drawings later, we managed to achieve a spectacular result.

         The clients had declined many offers of having the house published until Ryan Murphy convinced them to let it become Gwyneth Paltrow’s “screen” house in Netflix's The Politican.  The house was then subsequently featured in Architectural Digest.  Finally the world has a chance to get a glimpse of a truly special house, for which I am understandably proud and forever grateful to the clients for entrusting me with this spectacular project.