From Thomas Mann to Beyoncé, Malibu and dreams of a second home

Santa Monica. Great land of gold for architects as well as the more obvious filmmakers, Los Angeles continues its real estate genius. If the Moka Museum honors its own designer, Arata Isozaki, who created this playful mammozzone at Lambrate station in the 1980s, today the most sought-after architect is once again a Japanese. Driving on “1” through fogs and haze from Los Angeles to Malibu, trying to look, below, where a large house designed by Tadao Ando for “Beautiful” founders Bill and Maria Bell, now sold for $200 million, will be the most expensive home in California for Beyoncé and Jay Z. But of course you can’t see between the blocked roads while another Japanese architect’s main villa stands unfinished for another top Los Angeles star, a world star, Kanye Westin a family crisis (and ex-wife Kim Kardashian is also negotiating a house with Ando, ​​perhaps out of spite, and uploads a selfie with the arch-star).

In a word, here, the main gate to the stars, always brought dreams-nightmares of a house by the sea. It all takes place at a construction site such as My Love Help Me, a villa under construction, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Fires, a novel about second homes with a David Thalberg-inspired protagonist and narrator. Irene Selznick, whose father, Louis B. Mayer, at some point decided to establish an Academy with relative Oscars to end the workers’ strikes by bestowing this statuette on actors as well as technicians as they continued the strike delayed his villa, which he wanted to build in six weeks. This place has always been very desirable, well ventilated and even a little sinister. John Paul Getty builds his papyrus villa to look like a Barbie house even Thomas Mann builds his own at some point.

When the German writer went to live in America, soon tired of the cold of Princeton, he built a house here, just read the wonderful “Magician”, Colm Toibin’s biographical novel about the author of the Buddenbrooks, released this year. Einaudi. Ups and downs, including in real estate. We follow in Mann’s footsteps, climbing the well-groomed streets and grassy surfaces worthy of Palm Beach. Here we are among the loveliest flowery streets of the Pacific Palisades, between Amalfi, Capri, Monaco and finally Drive San Remo: a modernist but not too white house that would look good in Forte. ; that the Nobel Prize goes to a certain J. R. Davidson, also a German, also a refugee. Majesty, large windows, terraces, nothing innovative, despite the fact that we are in the midst of a revolution with all these emigre architects who came from Europe: Van der Rohe and Gropius, and, above all, formidable Richard Neutra

, steel column designer, inventor of “California Modern” today in the ultimate fashion that reconciles garage architecture with the most complex concepts from Loos. And he starts building fantastic villas scattered all over Los Angeles (and beyond: here’s Kaufman’s sexy Palm Springs home for the sweet life in the desert).

But Mann doesn’t care, he doesn’t want to know about Neutra. Too modern, his houses look like “glass boxes”. He prefers the bourgeois mediocrity of his white villa, perhaps an architectural metaphor for all the writer’s hesitation (to side with Nazism or not? Tell your unfortunate children four? with Capote and Vidal at dinner, with the muscular beaches around the corner?No, he’s nothing). It seems that as soon as he arrives in California, he will immediately be introduced to Neutra, who is Austrian, they will like each other, they think not. Mann immediately hates him, does not want to know about it, avoids him at parties, and in the end the house is built by this Davidson (but then he will quarrel with us, as often happens, because of fermented parcels during construction. While Neutra is renowned for excellent customer relationships).

Mann and his wife “loved Davidson’s cold competence,” writes Colm Toybin in “The Magician”; Mann is actively involved in the project, first of all he knows what he does not want (full-length windows that attract intruders). Then in 1952 he was offered to return to Europe, he did not want to, he was used to the California sun, but he found it ugly (this is how he is) and ended his days in Switzerland. His beach house changes hands between lawyers and publicity and in 2016 it was going to go up for auction without a spinner, then the German government took it and made a foundation out of it, spending a lot of money on restoration, but everything is very secret. , they don’t answer e-mails, they obviously don’t want to bother (or maybe they just have a very long vacation).

Instead of different karmas and moods, there is a whole party in Casa Neutra. Let’s go! Even after hours! Here is an open house for architecture lovers in Silver Lake, a very steep Pigneto with a lake (but it is more of a dam, the main theme of the city), where you only meet men and women in light shirts who go to yoga and restaurants that offer “tomato tonnato” and small bars that sell dog and human treats together (with drinks on site and the risk of confusion). There is a real “Neutra district”, the epicenter of which is the studio house he built for himself in 1932: only two acres, which seem much larger, unfolded around the trees (lesson by Lloyd Wright); a small pool in the patio, like Tati’s, and a large pool on the terrace (but now dry, with water in Los Angeles is always a problem). After practicing at the sacred place of Taliesin West, Neutra arrives in Silverlake in 25 in a modest house, but is confronted by an enlightened industrialist Cornelis Van der Leeuw, who tells him: you can’t live in such a shack. He then funded him, free of charge, what would later become the VDL Research Center in his honor, a home and shop with upper floors overlooking the lake. Still today with finishes, dishwashers and history books, lots of Formica, very original kitchens and kitchen lifts and kitchen lifts, the house is the epicenter of the golden mile for Neutra enthusiasts who, looking at the house numbers, discover the maestro embossed between dried cacti and No entry signs next to Mc Mansion are very ugly. Neutra’s house burned down in a common (for California) fire in ’63, but it is being restored using completely new technologies. After his death, the widow of Neutra, when asked if she wants to return to Europe, unlike Mann, says: I don’t even think about it.

Opposite the Wizard, a neighbor of the canyon, to this day lives Don Bachardi, Isherwood’s widower, an artist. He is now 88 years old and wears less and less shorts and a (black) t-shirt. And kind, and gentle, and a little lost. He perks up when you compliment him. He says old people have a “social duty” to be in good shape and have as few monsters as possible. He is very caring and constantly repeats that Chris was handsome and that all of Chris’ boyfriends went to the gym, but he completely changed his body in only three months. Bachardi says he went to the Harvey Easton gym, the first in Los Angeles, founded in 1938, where Cary Grant, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas trained and where he eventually became something of a mascot. His TV is always on and he seems to have stopped painting. He no longer goes to the beach and rarely goes outside. He shows us a chair in his studio where he used to sit for models, including Natasha Richardson (here’s a portrait, hanging) and former California Gov. Jerry Brown (hanging). The chair has wheels, so the models can be moved. She says that when they bought the house with Chris, they had problems because there was a right-of-way staircase through their property (it’s still there, interrupted by their deck). It’s not bad to be usukapiti from Isherwood.

Not far away, in Santa Monica, truly “the land of Frank Gehry”, the land of another very successful immigrant (from Canada). Still unknown, Gehry designed the Santa Monica Place mall, today a little anonymous and very white, like the Maximus center in Eur, and above all, there is his own house, legendary, still his, all of aluminum corrugated pipes and crystal pyramids ( built by adding a few pieces, because he had little money, but already with inspiration: the neighbors sued him for some kind of indecency). He did it in ’77 when he was still poor; he worked a lot for the architect Viktor Gruen (a Viennese Jew, also emigrated, did not design legendary houses, but he is unanimously considered the inventor of the modern shopping center).