Art and light rule in this Pacific Palisades house

There’s a secret behind certain houses in Pacific Palisades: the kind of heartstopping ocean views that make all the adjacent palm trees, pools and velveteen lawns seem to fade to grey. One such Pacific Palisades house, a riff on a Norman-style villa, has a sober limestone façade beneath a pitched metal roof, and it raises few eyebrows from the street. It’s a new build by Johnston Marklee, the celebrated LA firm founded in 1998 by architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee. Known for their private houses, often reclusive mysteries on the outside and shapeshifting wonders within, Johnston and Lee have also made their mark with the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, designed for the Menil Collection and opened in 2018.

‘Dominique de Menil was famous for wearing her fur jacket with the outside in, so no one would see the fur,’ Lee says, laughing, of the oil heiress who established the pioneering art museum with her husband John. That a patron of such high calibre could be so low-key pleases him: her approach ‘has a certain normalcy on the outside that doesn’t betray something exciting inside – I think this is also what we’re trying to capture’, he adds.

The duality perfectly applies to the new four-bedroom, 8,573 sq ft house Johnston Marklee has designed in the Palisades. ‘On clear days, we can see the sand on the beach in Santa Monica,’ says Clare Casademont, who purchased its plot with her husband, Houston financier Michael Metz, in 2010, following an extended LA holiday. It was only in 2013 that they decided to replace the nondescript stucco house on the site with a custom design by Johnston Marklee.

They had met the architecture studio through the Menil Collection, where Casademont is a trustee. And once they shared their brief – a relaxed second home for family, a place for art and antiques – the architects suggested the couple look up their friend Pamela Shamshiri, of the LA-based interior design firm Studio Shamshiri, whose layered, historically-informed work is widely known and revered for its sensuality and elegance (also see its renovation of Ledgewood, a 1961 Robert Kennard house in the Hollywood Hills). With that, the team was complete.

Casedemont and Metz have been art lovers for 30 years, and their tastes range from perception-altering contemporary sculpture by Simone Leigh, Robert Irwin, Olafur Eliasson and Rosemarie Trockel to paintings by Deborah Roberts and Yayoi Kusama and intimate works on paper. Their architects anticipated a few challenges.

‘Southern California is about views and light,’ says Johnston. ‘The clients wanted that, but they have a great art collection – and protecting the art was important.’ Johnston Marklee designed deep skylights, sculptural in their own right, to funnel sun down into the core of the bow-shaped house without glancing off walls. Behind a generous covered porch, sliding doors open to the Pacific while clerestory windows filter the light. For the architects, one of the pleasures of the project was shaping a floorplan that was equally open and protected, defining rooms but not in an airless, episodic way. Seeing through from one space to another was the idea. ‘It was a great opportunity to have the design, art and architecture synergise,’ Johnston says. ‘And I know Pam really strived for that, too.’ 

Early on, Casademont took Shamshiri to see the Houston home of the de Menils, designed for them by Philip Johnson in 1950. It was decorated by the couturier Charles James, who created voluptuous interiors that were anything but fur-side in – imagine Demna Gvasalia taking on a John Pawson house today. The house became ‘a spiritual motivation’, says Casademont. ‘It’s not that we were trying to duplicate what Philip Johnson did in that house for Mrs de Menil – it’s that they lived casually with great art.’

While allowing that art is still the first thing you should see, Shamshiri and her artistic director Taska Cleveland aimed to domesticate it without lessening its impact. Beside Robert Rauschenberg’s rough-edged cardboard collage in the dining room, for instance, a panelled bar looks like the height of civilisation. A geometric Jenny Holzer canvas in the private gallery floats at the shoulder of a plump Directoire bergère and a seven-sided ottoman, reproduced from a James design in the de Menil living room.

Shamshiri also had her eye on contemporary works by Vincenzo De Cotiis, Rogan Gregory, Jeff Zimmerman and others that would stand their ground alongside the art while evoking some of the connoisseurship of the de Menils, who, in the early 1950s, entertained the likes of Max Ernst and René Magritte in their glass-walled box.

More than anything, Shamshiri recalls, ‘Clare and Michael wanted the house to be cosy. We really pushed for colour and texture – I thought the best way to achieve that mood would be in a more painterly way, rather than just having more things. It became an exercise of placing these eclectic objects within the pools of light, and introducing colour through that.’

A curving settee by Martino Gamper in the entry hall makes her point, glowing with citrine brilliance beneath a whorled skylight. A yolk-yellow stool in Casademont’s dressing room echoes the round oculus above it. Beside a hall window, an aloe-green René Herbst armchair basks next to Doug Aitken’s mirror-faceted wall sculpture, both silhouetted against walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s Pavilion Gray. The silvery hue works particularly well on the second floor, where prints and drawings are the focus.

In December 2021, the couple finally moved in. Despite the project’s nine-year timeline, Shamshiri finds new beauty in it all the time. ‘Sharon and Mark’s work is like a folly,’ she says. ‘It’s so heart-opening and enlightening – that sense of wonderment happens immediately. I was really humbled by both the art and the architecture.’ She’s come to see the house as a lesson in knowing ‘when to be quiet, to bow down to something that’s more important in the room’.

For Johnston and Lee, the project was another chance to dismantle conventional thinking about space and light, inside and outside. And to polish up their stories. ‘There’s a quote we really like from Andy Warhol about Studio 54,’ Lee says, smiling. ‘“It’s a dictatorship at the door and a democracy inside.” We like that idea.’

INFORMATION

studioshamshiri.com

johnstonmarklee.com