Before marrying a Beatle, becoming a mother of four, a key member of the band Wings, an animal rights activist, and a vegetarian food entrepreneur and cookbook author, Linda McCartney (1941-1998) was a photographer.

On 25 September 2026, Wrensilva Los Angeles – the audio company’s West Hollywood showroom and listening space – will unveil to the public ‘The Art of the Album: The Photography of Linda McCartney’, presented in conjunction with The Linda McCartney Archive LLP, and MPL Communications. This date will also see the US Postal Service honour McCartney’s extraordinary life with a limited-edition stamp series.

Photography connected with all facets of McCartney’s career and life. The images on display at Wrensilva were used on album covers, and while many were the result of official commissions from record labels, some were personal snapshots.

This is the only installation in the US currently devoted solely to McCartney's music photography. Running through February 2027, it pairs her photographs with the vinyl records that immortalised them, alongside a Wrensilva console where you can play music from that era, including The Beatles, The Cimarons, Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders, Professor Longhair, and Neil Young.

This is the fourth installation for Wrensilva Presents: The Art of the Album. Each one pairs a photographer's work with the respective record covers and vinyl. ‘The idea is to bring people into the creative journey that surrounds the music,’ says Greg Perlot, CEO of Wrensilva. ‘Essentially, [it’s] seeing the genesis of an album cover through the photographer’s lens, what they saw, and then what ultimately became the finished album cover we know and love. For this chapter, we wanted a photographer whose work went beyond enhancing a recording. Mrs McCartney’s unique style helped define what an album cover could be. We brought the concept to the MPL Communications team, and they gave us the chance to do it. We hope this offers people a chance to see her photography in person and experience it in a new way by hearing the albums that feature her iconic work.’

As for a few of Perlot’s standouts in the show, ‘The first is the cover of Paul's 1970 solo record, McCartney, shot during a family holiday in Antigua in 1969. It's the hero image of the installation, and we're presenting it three ways: as a framed print, scaled up into wallpaper on one wall, and reproduced as the commemorative poster.

‘The second is Professor Longhair's Live on the Queen Mary. Paul and Linda met him in New Orleans, while Wings were recording Venus and Mars. When the sessions wrapped, they threw a party aboard the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach and brought him in to play. Nobody released that performance for three years, until Paul put it out in 1978 as its own record, with Linda's photograph of [Professor Longhair] on the cover.’

What it took to document these historical snapshots is the stuff of legendary music lore. According to Perlot, Linda put it best herself: ‘Most people, if I like their music, I can get good pictures.’

‘Most of the people she photographed were already in her circle,’ he says, ‘not assignments she was sent to cover. And sometimes [these] were portraits that hinted at a crack in the mask of rock-star grandeur.

‘Some of these photographs became the cover,’ adds Perlot. ‘Some lived quietly inside the sleeve, found only by the listener who opened it. Some were taken in the middle of the work, before the album had a shape. She photographed people as she found them, not as they performed for the lens.’

Linda McCartney was born Linda Eastman, in Scarsdale, New York in 1941. After attending Sarah Lawrence College, she studied art under Hazel Larsen Archer in Arizona. Using a Leica camera, she landed her first big gig with Town & Country in the mid-1960s, photographing musicians and entertainers, and became a regular at Bill Graham's Fillmore East New York concert venue. Here she shot the most magnetic performers of the day from Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, the Who, and the Animals. Over the years, she perfected her craft and shot legends such as Jimmy Hendrix, and The Rolling Stones on a yacht, and finally, she had that fateful backstage pass to shoot The Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965.

Rather than set up structured photo shoots, McCartney was a fly on the wall and used a more organic approach to capturing her subjects; she said at the time, ‘Suddenly I found that taking pictures was a great way to live and a great way to work.’ Nothing was contrived and McCartney didn’t direct her subjects, but easily captured some of the most famous musicians of her generation in an unguarded fashion when they were on tour, in hotels, or at home, the images sometimes ending up as cover art for albums. In 1967, her photo of Neil Young appeared on the cover of Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House, 1968. Later in her career, she would take the photograph for the cover of Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s single The Girl Is Mine (1982).

Her unique style and soaring reputation led her to become the first woman to photograph a Rolling Stone magazine cover, in 1968, featuring Eric Clapton. Later, she appeared on the cover herself, alongside Paul, in a 1974 issue (photographed by Francesco Scavullo).

Among McCartney’s favourite subjects to photograph were her family and animals. Her photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States as well as at the Royal Photographic Society and the Victoria & Albert Museum in the UK. A collection of photographs, Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait of an Era, was published in 1992.

As for her latest posthumous legacy, the limited-edition US stamp collection features a pane of 20 stamps showcasing five different photographs. The selvage features a black-and-white self-portrait of McCartney behind her camera. Derry Noyes, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps and stamp pane. There will be a first-day-of-issue ceremony for stamps featuring her photography at MoMA in New York City on 25 September 2026.

Wrensilva | Los Angeles, 8625 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood, CA 90069.
On view through February 2027. Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday, 11am-6pm

wrensilva.com

The white stucco church with a crucifix-topped bell tower on the corner of Lucile Avenue and Griffith Park Boulevard in Silver Lake has stood as a local landmark for almost a century. Originally constructed in 1931 as Bethany Presbyterian, the building was put to various uses before sadly spending the best part of the last decade vacant, bar a brief spell as an antiques market.

Now, Casetta, the California-based boutique hotel group that specialises in breathing new life into architecturally significant properties, have made it the sixth addition to their portfolio and pulled off a wholly remarkable act of resurrection. Not only is the gracefully refurbished and rechristened Hotel Lucile ideally located for exploring the east side of Los Angeles and beyond, but it’s also home to Sous Sous, a superlative restaurant set inside the church’s high-ceilinged nave with a menu that blends Southern French cuisine with Deep South flavour.

Wallpaper* checks into Hotel Lucile, Los Angeles

What’s on your doorstep?

Silver Lake has long been established as the trendy, creative heart of east Los Angeles, but strangely the neighbourhood has limited hotel options. The opening of Hotel Lucile may be bad news for the area’s AirBnb hosts, but it’s a winning development for anyone seeking an elegant stay within stumbling distance of Sunset Junction. Many of the city’s best and buzziest bars and restaurants, including the Seco, Bar Stella, Bacari and Night + Market Song, are all just moments away. Outdoor activity hubs such as Silver Lake Reservoir and Griffith Park are also close by, as is Barnsdall Art Park and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. The hotel has teamed up with the Usal Outdoor Research Center to provide guests with a tailored field guide to local experiences.

Who is behind the design?

The Romanesque Revival-style church was designed by architect Scott Quintin in 1930 and built at a cost of around $75,000 (equivalent to just under $1.5 million in 2026). Casetta’s tasteful renovation was overseen by architecture and interior design studio Electric Bowery, led by Lucia Bartholomew and Cayley Lambur, who say they set out to celebrate the church’s ‘European sensibility’. The central nave of the building is now occupied by the restaurant, Sous Sous, with a food concept by The Butcher’s Daughter founder and creative director Heather Tierney.

The original wooden beams, vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows have all been lovingly preserved and are complemented by two large, impressive murals by the classically trained oil painter Erin Lynn Welsh. Each references the local landscape: The deep red mural above the chancel stage pays tribute to Altadena’s Eaton Canyon, which was devastated by wildfire in January 2025, while at the other end of the space is a verdant green scene inspired by the native flora of Elysian Park.

The room to book

Hotel Lucile’s 25 guest rooms are designed in a refined, minimalist style, featuring Parachute linens and Aesop bath amenities. The walls display original works by local Los Angeles artists, curated by the Rhett Baruch Gallery. Minibars are stocked with select products from the nearby Erewhon market, including sea salt popcorn, dark chocolate protein bites and Anytime organic vodka and gin. Wellness products such as a hydrating sheet mask and citrus-vanilla vitamin C gel are also available. The pick of the rooms is number 106, known as the Lucile Suite, which has a living room and its own private courtyard.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

The hotel’s restaurant Sous Sous dominates the main building, and seems destined to become a Silver Lake institution in its own right. In part, this is due to the sanctified ambience that remains in the beautifully renovated space, but it’s also down to the earthly delights being cooked up in the kitchen. Led by Chef Patrick Costa and bar director Lee Zaremba, the restaurant’s inspired mingling of Southern Californian ingredients, Southern French recipes and flavours drawn from the American South leads to some ingenious creations.

The Green Tomato Margarita is one such example, a crisp, refreshing twist on the classic cocktail served with a rim of espelette pepper and Old Bay seasoning. The hamachi crudo pulls off a similar trick, with Virginia peanuts and red pepper relish lending the yellowtail a Deep South tang. There’s also warm, crunchy country bread that seems to have appeared directly from a farmhouse in Provence, but the star of the show is the delicate rainbow trout served with a smoky, Cajun-style blackened polenta crust. Given the surroundings, it seems apt that Sous Sous does miraculous things with loaves and fishes.

Where to switch off

The spacious rooftop deck, which is reserved for guests only, offers panoramic views of Silver Lake. There’s also a pool tucked away in a sun-kissed grotto below street level, which may be too small for swimming laps but is just the right size for sipping cocktails.

What’s the verdict?

Hotel Lucile might have rested on the laurels provided by its prime Sunset Junction location, but thankfully it has loftier ambitions. The gorgeous stained glass windows and innovative menu at Sous Sous make it a restaurant worth proselytising about, while the hotel’s commitment to showcasing local artists on its walls suggests a sincere intention to restore this former church to the centre of its community. Silver Lake’s prayers have been answered.

Hotel Lucile is located at 1629 Griffith Park Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90026, United States

When a group of international press descended on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art this week, a common question in the discourse was 'What the hell is narrative art?' Well, when George Lucas, founder of the museum, made a surprise appearance, he set the record straight: art that tells stories.

‘For 2,000 years, the only way you could tell a story was with pictures,’ George Lucas said, referring to cave paintings that have a presence in the museum.

However, for Lucas, honouring narrative art began with illustrators like those who composed the concept art for his history-making franchise, Star Wars. But after working on this museum for nearly 20 years, the idea kept expanding even into the building itself.

Critics have already called the facility ‘one of Lucas’s fantastical creatures.’ But to Ma Yansong, architect and founder of Beijing firm MAD, the floating design tells a different story. It’s a cloud, complete with a rainstorm pouring out of the waterfall feature on the north lawn.

Beyond the architectural marvel, the museum can be a part of anyone’s narrative even without a ticket. The public green space features an amphitheater, vast gardens, and many pieces of art, including a fountain helming a statue of Yoda in the same mold as the one outside Skywalker Ranch. Except this one has Grogu, more commonly known as “Baby Yoda,” clinging tightly to his elder’s robes, a sign of how the story of Star Wars has advanced over time.

Those without tickets can then head into the Education Wing through one of the two main entrances (similar to Yansong’s design for the Hainan Science Museum), walk under a full-scale Naboo Starfighter from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), and enter the free library with three floors of bookshelves. During our visit, there were such books on display as a history of Lucas’s visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. Another was the complete works of Austrian painter Egon Schiele.

Across the courtyard created by the main gallery floor that connects the two entrances from four stories up is the Museum Wing, which requires a ticket. The first thing you’ll see are the three tubular elevators that look like they were pulled right out of the Death Star. Before you ride them up (which Yangsong describes as 'departing reality'), enter two theaters showing constant films throughout open hours, and there is an exhibit to the left entitled “The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, The Sacred.”

This is where the cave paintings are. George Lucas is not shy about how he borrowed from history to create Star Wars. The Cinema gallery upstairs reveals the end result. Find Anakin’s life-size pod racer in action from The Phantom Menace and the original R2-D2 seen in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). Almost every scene is accompanied by the original illustrations by now-famous concept artists such as Ralph McQuarrie, showing the genesis of iconic sequences and characters from their initial static versions.

The rest of the galleries are grouped by interesting criteria. Some are dedicated to artists like Norman Rockwell. There are multiple iterations of his seminal piece “Triple Self Portrait.” Others are grouped by genres like fantasy, science fiction, and adventure. A bronze statue of Indiana Jones welcomes the latter.

Some galleries are based on societal elements such as school, sports, and civic life, the last of which includes anti-war propaganda going back to 1971. I was hoping to see a section on music, but my itch was scratched when I saw a photo from the Beatles' legendary Abbey Road shoot in the photography section. Oh, and Banksy has an original stencil in the mural section one floor up.

These widespread classifications demonstrate how stories told with pictures have permeated every aspect of our lives, and Tracey Bates, CEO of the Lucas Museum, hopes they will have the same effect on someone as such art had on George.

‘The most exciting part isn’t what we built. It’s what will happen once we open the doors. If this museum sparks that same imagination in even one young mind that George felt 50 years ago, it will have been well worth it.’

lucasmuseum.org

Multi-brand fashion boutique Lang has set up shop in Los Angeles’ new format Row DTLA complex. Founded by Kayla Wong, the mission-driven retail platform showcases gender-neutral apparel from Asian-founded brands and independent talents. Local architect Paul Chan brought down the scale of the raw, post-industrial space by creating a series of theatrical vignettes staged with custom furnishings and finishes that contrast, fuse – and ultimately transcend – references to Asian and North American culture.

‘The design grew from the shared experience Kayla and I have of growing up in Hong Kong and now living in Los Angeles, carrying a sense of being between two places at once,’ Chan says. ‘Our native home became the muse but the store is not a direct recreation. It’s an assemblage of fragments and memories transformed through their encounter with our adoptive city.’

To achieve fluidity across the 1,200 sq ft storefront, the studio eschewed fixed walls in favour of a layered curtain system that, as Chan puts it, ‘plays both a practical and atmospheric role’.

Areas can be enclosed to more dramatically emphasise the products but also open up for better circulation during large gatherings.

While primarily presenting fashions, Lang also serves as an non-prescriptive cultural venue for the community, playing host to exhibitions, talks and performances. Accommodating guests at such events, a semi-circular bench is upholstered in a fabric, developed in collaboration with Los Angeles textile studio Suay that recalls the red, white and blue woven utility bags usually found at hardware stores, construction sites and street markets throughout Hong Kong.

‘Rather than using the original plastic material, we translated its familiar palette of custom tie-dyed textile that also references Southern California surf culture,’ Chan adds. ‘The result reinterprets one cultural symbol through the visual language and material practices of another.’

Above the bench, he introduced four tiers of paper lanterns painted with colloquial Cantonese sayings. The installation helps to wrap but also illuminate this impromptu stage setting.

The overall design is a study in contrasts, which the architect describes as ‘gloss and grit, opulence and improvisation'. Mahogany shelving and moiré-patterned mauve surfaces are joined by hand-brushed and reflective metallic finishes. Bespoke furnishings tie everything together.

Take handmade washi paper surfaces topping display tables throughout. Though traditional in appearance, their surfaces are actually collaged together from upcycled paper collected across Asia and Latin America, including cotton rags from southern India; banana fibre from Thailand; Amate paper made by Otomí artisans in central Mexico; and Yucatán papers that combine age-old Mayan papermaking and Japanese washi techniques.

‘For me, these tables are a metaphor for Los Angeles and its Asian American communities,’ says Chan. ‘The individual cultures do not dissolve into one another; they remain distinct while continually overlapping, borrowing and influencing each other... They suggest that identity is never singular, it is layered, assembled and continually evolving' – a perfect analogy for the design of Lang itself.

Lang is located at Row DTLA, 777 S. Alameda Street, Building M2, Suite 132, Los Angeles, CA 90021

When pondering the more than 50-year career of filmmaker and artist David Lynch (1946-2025), lightness is not the first thing that comes to mind. Who can forget the haunting suburban scene of Dennis Hopper breathing psychotically into a clear plastic gas mask before groping Isabella Rossellini in the ground-breaking 1980s neo-noir mystery film Blue Velvet? The human cruelty bestowed upon The Elephant Man or the bleak industrial trappings of Eraserhead – which put Lynch on the map in the late 1970s, and left an indelible mark on the industry. But the light – and creative possibility – that he discovered in Los Angeles, where he lived for over five decades, with the picturesque sprawling city and its underbelly as his muse and inspiration, undoubtedly informed his work. For Lynch, the city was ‘a feeling as much as it is a place’, according to Pace, which opens a show of his photographs at its Los Angeles gallery on 19 September.

Titled ‘David Lynch: LA’, the exhibition bridges the emotional and physical landscape between the myths and mysteries of the city and its archetypes – the ingenue, the shapeshifter, the beauty, and darkness. The artist’s blurred reality and surrealist slant in films and television projects, referred to as ‘Lynchian’, are also evident in this collection of photographs that spotlight his distinctive artistic sensibility in a medium that bridges his significant contributions to painting and film.

Lynch is credited for bringing experimentalism to mainstream media in the late 20th century, and was bestowed with a slew of prizes, including an Honorary Academy Award, a BAFTA, the Cannes Film Festival Best Director Award for Mulholland Drive (2001), and the Palm d’Or for Wild at Heart (1990), along with a Golden Globe for his 1990s television series Twin Peaks.

Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, moved to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at The American Film Institute, where he set up a studio in the stables at the Greystone Mansion campus in Beverly Hills for four years. Over the years, Lynch also worked as an animator, an author, a furniture designer, and a musician. His talents spanned directing music videos for Moby and Nine Inch Nails, and commercials for Dior, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. His acting roles include playing film director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's drama film The Fabelmans, in 2022.

Because of all his moving-image accolades, many film fans don’t realise that Lynch actually wanted to be a painter. Before his move to LA, he was influenced by Francis Bacon while an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, when he began creating short films out of a desire to effect movement in his paintings.

‘David Lynch had an incredibly rich and sustained art practice that began in childhood, continued through art school in the 1960s, and remained an essential part of his life for nearly 60 years,’ says Genevieve Day, senior director at Pace in Los Angeles.

With past exhibitions from the artist spanning other globally recognised galleries in Tokyo, London, Paris, Milan and Moscow, Lynch joined Pace in 2022, marking his debut with the solo exhibition ‘Big Bongo Night’ in New York, featuring mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper.

Now, it felt important for Pace to honour the commitment Lynch devoted to this practice, and to have this new show take place in his chosen home since 1972. ‘This exhibition, focusing specifically on Lynch’s photo-based work, is a prelude to a much broader retrospective that LACMA is in the early stages of preparing,’ says Day.

This continues the thread of Los Angeles, which became a defining presence in Lynch’s imagination. ‘It traces the atmospheric feeling of the city through his early 1979 black and white “portraits” of the distinctive architecture of Los Angeles, to his continued study of the nude, in which the female body becomes abstracted and visually topographical,’ says Day. ‘Later, he digitally manipulated his photographs, creating a contemporary odalisque – the reclining figure of art-historical tradition. The five large-scale colour photographs of women and smoke expand on this idea of the surreal, vivid in our imagination. Each work has a distinctive quality, but together reveal Lynch’s broader vision.’

As seen in the provocative red lips with a wafting cloud of smoke, Lynch captures these images as a moment of ecstasy. In stark contrast, smoke is also seen as a plume rising from a drab 1950s-style sofa with chintz floral drapery in the background. Ironically, Lynch was a lifelong chain smoker, and, already suffering from emphysema, he died in 2025 following evacuation during the devastating Southern California wildfires that swept through the city that same year.

In the many years that Pace has been involved with Lynch and his artwork – most recently with two 2026 group exhibitions in Berlin – there are still surprises to uncover. ‘Like the best artists, there is a mystery in his work that becomes both illuminating and more confounding the more closely you look,’ says Day. ‘He was a storyteller – some images are overt, while others are much more enigmatic, leaving space for the viewer to create their own narrative.

‘I hope people come away with a deeper understanding of David Lynch as a visual artist,’ adds Day. ‘His photography was only one aspect of his immense creative practice as an artist whose vision found expression across many different mediums.’

‘David Lynch: LA ’at Pace Los Angeles, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, 19 September – 24 October 2026

pacegallery.com

When it came to chronicling the contents of George Lucas’ monumental new architectural undertaking, the MAD-designed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles (opening 22 September 2026 – see last year’s architectural preview), there was only ever one candidate for the publication. German art magnate and monograph master Taschen was assigned the task of assembling this mighty two-volume exploration of the museum’s expansive collection.

Lucas’ museum, set in a prime 13-acre site on LA’s Exposition Park, is home to all manner of materials and artworks that focus on visual storytelling, a display that ‘connects traditions of image-making across centuries, cultures, and mediums’. While the building itself requires 300,000 sq feet of exhibition space (designed by Ma Yansong of MAD with Stantec), the accompanying book is no less ambitious.

Introduced by Ryan Linkof, senior curator and head of film programmes at the LMNA (a former founding curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and curator at Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the book also includes texts by Lucas himself and fellow director Guillermo del Toro.

Both are longstanding adherents to storyboard-driven narratives about fantastical worlds and characters. The editor is Jessica Hundley, author of a number of books including studies of Dennis Hopper, Gram Parsons and David Lynch and Taschen’s The Library of Esoterica series.

The two volumes draw on an abundance of visual richness, covering every genre from sci-fi to Westerns, via children’s literature, fantasy art, and graphic novels. Key artists and themes are given plenty of space and room to breathe, with focuses on the work of painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith, fantasy art pioneer Frank Frazetta, romantic classicist Maxfield Parrish, and all-American icon Norman Rockwell.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a copious amount of material drawn from the world-building of Lucas’ Star Wars series, including concept art and production paintings, costumes and vehicles, alongside things that obviously fall in del Toro’s wheelhouse, like Mexican horror comics.

Arranged thematically, the monograph is awash with classic imagery, inter-generational connections and examples of every form of media, from cave painting to digital art. It’s the ultimate takeaway from a museum that promises to deliver big in every way.

As well as the 6kg+ slip-cased Classic Edition shown here, there’ll also be a catalogue available in the company’s more compact 45 Edition format, with a smaller-still Piccolo edition for a more pocketable distillation of the collection.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, edited by Jessica Hundley, Taschen $200 / £175 Taschen.com, @Taschen, LucasMuseum.org, @LucasMuseum

Paul R. Williams (1894-1980) was a Black American architect whose creativity and determination triumphed over deep-rooted racial prejudice. In a career that spanned six decades, he was astonishingly prolific, a master of historic styles and bold visions of the future. He was the first registered Black architect west of the Mississippi, and he used his position to advance civil rights.

Who was Paul R. Williams?

Paul Revere Williams was born in Los Angeles in 1894. He lost his parents to illness at the age of four and was later adopted into a new family. He went on to study at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and at the Los Angeles branch of the New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design Atelier. He worked for a spell as a landscape architect and also practised at other architectural offices following graduation. At the young age of 25, Williams independently won an architectural competition, which helped him, three years later, to set up his own firm.

He went on to become an 'architect to the stars,' as he was often referred to, designing homes for his era's Hollywood elite. His architectural work was also recognised within his profession, becoming the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923, and later winning the AIA Award of Merit for his design of the MCA Building in Beverly Hills in 1939.

He died at the age of 85 in 1980, and among his numerous accolades is an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal, received posthumously in 2017.

Three shows on his work

Three major LA museums are celebrating the legacy of Paul R. Williams in the coming months, creating a bit of a moment to look back at the architect's legacy.

Why now? Recently, the Getty Research Institute and the University of Southern California School of Architecture have jointly acquired his archive, and each of the three exhibitions focuses on a different aspect of this trove of plans, sketches and photographs representing 1500 projects.

Paul R. Williams at the The Fisher Museum of Art

The Fisher Museum of Art on the USC campus leads off with 'An Architect Considered' (August 18- March 3, 2027), which focuses on 31 multi-unit housing projects, many of them for disadvantaged communities. Williams was long known as an architect working with celebrity royalty, counting Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Sinatra, and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson among his clients. This survey explores a less familiar aspect of his work, and several artists have been invited to contribute a contemporary comment on the exhibits.

Paul R. Williams at the LA County Museum of Art

'Architect for Living' at the LA County Museum of Art runs from November 15 through May 31, 2027, and takes a much broader view. Houses and hotels, restaurants and schools, churches and casinos demonstrate Williams’ versatility and the impact he made on the urban scene in LA and beyond. Many of his buildings survive intact, notably the house he built for his family in the leafy mid-city neighbourhood of Lafayette Square.

It puts a fresh spin on modernist architecture, complementing its traditional neighbours without courting objections: a strategy of accommodation that carried Williams to success in everything he undertook. The house was recently restored by Escher GuneWardena Architecture for a new owner. As the pre-eminent LA restoration firm (whose portfolio includes the Eames House and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House), they did meticulous research and revealed a long-concealed palette of subtle colours within.

Paul R. Williams at the Getty Research Institute

The third show, 'Architecture Across the Color Line,' will be presented by the Getty Research Institute, December 15-March 14, 2027. As the title suggests, it emphasises Williams’ commitment to the Black community and the way it was excluded from many neighbourhoods and marginalised by its lack of access to loans. The architect became a director of a bank that helped finance several important projects, notably Case Study House 21 for Dr Bailey in the progressive 1950s development of Crestwood Hills.

Maristella Casciato, the Getty’s architecture curator, describes Williams as 'elegant, affable, charming and very successful; he appeared able to transcend de facto and de jure forms of racialised segregation and the constraints of white supremacy that were nationally pervasive.'

Paul R. Williams beyond the exhibits

In December, the Getty will publish 'I am an Architect: Paul R. Williams and his Archive', which offers a generous sampling of images and essays, though some of these lapse into academic jargon. We can hope that the Getty, which houses the archives of many other LA architects, will do more than it has to showcase them and raise public awareness of the region’s unique legacy of modernism.

5 works by Paul R. Williams

Paul R. Williams house (1952)

Williams designed a house for his family and himself in the neighbourhood of Lafayette Square in Los Angeles in 1952. The project adheres to modernist architecture principles, defined by light colours and clean lines. It is surrounded by a green garden; it was conceived as an urban sanctuary.

El Mirador Hotel (1962)

Set in the desert city of Palm Springs in California, El Mirador hotel was a remodel of an existing structure created on site a couple of decades earlier. Williams led a major modernisation at the property, which included modernist elements such as a shaded porte cochère entry, modern cabanas and a refreshed sun and swimming pool deck.

First African Methodist Episcopal Church of LA (1969)

A landmark project in Williams' career, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of LA serves the oldest African American congregation in Los Angeles. The structure was designed in Late Modern style and opened its doors in 1969.

Pueblo del Rio Housing Project (1942)

Operating as part of a collaborative group titled Southeast Housing Architects, Williams worked on Pueblo del Rio, one of Los Angeles's most well-known historic public housing developments. The scheme was designed between 1940 and 1942 and was part of Williams' work for the city’s first Housing Commission, where he was appointed in 1933 (shortly after, he also served on the National Board of Municipal Housing).

Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company (1949)

The home of the largest Black-owned insurance company west of the Mississippi, Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, was designed by Williams in a Late Modern style of clear shapes and minimal decorative detail. Set in 1999 West Adams Boulevard, the building included a large auditorium, a civic plaza and lobby murals featuring moments of African-American history.

Los Angeles’ roadside architecture is famous the world over but even modern iterations have roots in the ‘Googie’ style of the 1950s and 60s. Defined by space-age motifs, sloping roofs and sky-high neon signs, Googie architecture responded to a time of great change in America.

After World War II, people from all over the US flocked west, prompting a boom period in California. LA’s freeway system, which connects much of the city, was near completion and a new type of mid-century architecture emerged: one that represented the 'futuristic' advancements of the time, inspired by the space race and rise of car culture, Googie borrowed the visual language of rockets, satellites and atomic orbits, turning the era’s fascination with scientific progress (and science fiction) into architecture. Crucially, Googie buildings needed to be visible from the road, alerting drivers to restaurants, entertainment complexes and pit-stops en route.

The first example of Googie architecture was a John Lautner-designed café of the same name. Googie’s coffee shop, formerly at 8100 Sunset Blvd (sadly demolished in 1988), was a frequent hang-out for the likes of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe – likely due to its proximity to famed Sunset Strip hotel, Chateau Marmont.

In a 1952 issue of House + Home magazine, the writer Doug Haskell described Googie’s coffee shop as starting 'off on the level like any other building. But suddenly it breaks for the sky. The bright red roof of cellular steel decking suddenly tilts upward as if swung on a hinge, and the whole building goes up with it like a rocket ramp.' He likened the work of Googie architects to that of Antoni Gaudí, creating fantastical buildings that would influence generations to come.

The Googie style symbolised a newfound freedom, both in its design and use of materials, blending glass and steel with plastic and cement. To purists, the Googie style was seen as a blight on LA’s great modernist legacy established by Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and more. But others embraced its inventive and distinctly modern and colourful aesthetic.

Googie’s influence was far-reaching. Across pop culture, TV shows such as The Jetsons (1962) drew on the same space-age optimism, from its angular typography to vivid colour palette. Throughout the rapidly expanding landscape of postwar America, Googie hallmarks started appearing in motels, bowling alleys, petrol stations and drive-in restaurants, as well as the fantastical architecture of theme parks. Disneyland’s Tomorrowland (1971) channelled a similar vision of a technology-driven future, while restaurant chains including Denny’s adopted dramatic rooflines and oversized signage.

Over the years, many early examples of LA’s Googie architecture have been knocked down but a few remain. Join us on a tour of the city’s remaining Googie gems.

Norm’s

Perhaps one of the most famous remaining examples of Googie architecture in Los Angeles is Norm’s diner on La Cienega in West Hollywood. Designed by local architects and Googie pioneers Louis Armét and Eldon Davis in 1957, it was immortalised in the Ed Ruscha artwork, Norm’s La Cienega on Fire, (the original of which hangs in LA’s The Broad museum). The restaurant's low, elongated structure is punctuated by a sharply pitched, faceted roof that rises above the main frontage and a towering, angular sign to attract nearby motorists.

LAX Theme Building

Touching down at Los Angeles' international airport, you'll be met by a perfect Googie specimen. LAX's Theme Building, built between 1957 and 1961, resembles something from a Steven Spielberg movie. The building's flying saucer-shaped core is supported by four spindly legs with two sweeping, stucco-clad steel arches crossing above the former restaurant and viewing deck.

Multiple designers and architects were involved in the project, which was named a historic-cultural monument in 1993. The plan was overseen by Los Angeles practice Pereira & Luckman, with architect Gin Wong leading the design. He was joined by a team that included architects from fellow LA firm Welton Becket & Associates and the celebrated Southern Californian architect Paul R. Williams.

Unfortunately, visitors can no longer go inside the Theme Building, but be sure to gaze at its exterior as you leave the airport.

Pann's

In many ways, Googie was architecture for the masses – developed to attract workers grabbing a slice of pie at lunchtime or on their way home from a night shift. Another Armét & Davis-designed Googie gem was the Ladera Heights restaurant, Pann's. Though the firm, responsible for over 4000 Googie designs, was behind the building, its design was the work of lesser-known female architect, Helen Liu Fong. Located on a traffic island, Pann's sky-high sign has all the hallmarks of a Googie classic. The restaurant is still fully operational today.

Cinerama Dome

The Cinerama Dome is an LA icon. Designed by Welton Becket Associates in 1967, it shares many Googie traits while being a distinctly original offering. The building was the first concrete geodesic dome in the world, designed to use a three-projector system across a curved movie screen. The plan was to create more all across the US, but it never happened – leaving the LA Cinerama Dome the only one of its kind.

After closing for business in 2021, it was recently announced that the Cinerama Dome will reopen as an Alamo Drafthouse – a chain of cinemas originating in Austin and one of the first where customers can order food and drinks to their seat. The news was met with delight by most Angelenos, thrilled to see The Dome reopen in any capacity – although many would rather it remain independent. Alamo Drafthouse have confirmed they will preserve The Dome's original signage and exterior.

Bob's Big Boy

David Lynch’s favourite diner became a place of pilgrimage for fans after the director’s passing in 2025. But Bob’s Big Boy has been an LA staple for decades. The Wayne McAllister-designed building opened in 1949 as a shining example of Googie architecture, blending Streamline modern and mid-century influences. Its 70-foot sign – and cheeky, cowlicked mascot – helped put Bob’s Big Boy on the map. The diner’s broad roof canopy projects boldly over a glazed dining room, while curved windows, angled forms and a tall freestanding sign give the modest restaurant a somewhat theatrical presence – perhaps one of the things Lynch loved about it.

Every Friday, Bob’s hosts a classic car night, paying homage to its mid-century past.

Cindy's Restaurant

Something of a proto-Googie example of roadside architecture, Cindy’s opened in 1948, placing it a little before the Googie boom. The diner’s towering sign was almost lost in 2014 after owners struggled to raise the $16,000 needed for repairs but the local community came to the rescue, responding to a crowdsourcing campaign to restore it to its former mid-century glory. The restaurant’s low-lying, modernist structure and Jetsons-adjacent signage make it an interesting example of early Googie – if not mimicking the angular form and freewheeling use of materials of many buildings that followed.

Union 76 gas station

How could we forget gas stations in the Googie canon? This striking example by architect Gin Wong is one of the finest surviving examples. Its sweeping, cantilevered red roof and neon-lit underbelly look as though they are about to take flight. Originally designed as a companion to LAX’s Theme Building, Wong’s futuristic gas station was not selected for the airport, but the design was ultimately realised in Beverly Hills for Union Oil.

I came to scoff and stayed to praise. Dataland, the museum of AI arts in Los Angeles by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, is their supernatural fantasy of gorgeous data. Unlikely as it seems, with multi-coloured lights swirling overhead, underfoot and patterning the body, it is all drawn from the natural world.

The Turkish artists, who are married, first conceived of it during the 2019 Covid pandemic when they felt deprived of actual nature due to the parks and trails that were closed. Working indoors, they created their own out-of-doors, an AI realm that evolved as the new Machine Dreams: Rainforest.

Immersive art installations are commonplace now, but Dataland is a world apart, literally.

Eighty-four 4K Epson projectors and 50 billion pixels deliver images from the Amazon selected from the Smithsonian’s Encyclopedia of Life, a digital resource at the National Museum of Natural History. These are not films but the multicoloured, photographic essences of butterflies, orchids, ferns and fauna. It evolved from Anadol’s own choice to take ayahuasca (a psychedelic) with a spiritual leader and discover profound connections to the rainforest. Here, the journey through the galleries concludes with one called the Sanctuary and a sacred healing song of the Yawanawá people.

Is this recreated world a hallucinatory experience? Pretty much, and doubtless many visitors will enhance their 20 or more minutes of wandering or dancing to light and music.

An omni-sensual experience, it was designed by Anadol, Erkılıç and his collaborators to respond to your responses. At the entry to the 25,000 sq ft structure on the lower level of a Frank Gehry-designed high-rise in the downtown arts district, visitors are given wristbands that convey their physiological and emotional responses. A padded collar around the neck wafts a series of individualised odours, a collaboration with L’Oréal. I got sweet moonflower.

Walking through towering rooms radiant with patterns as well as specific images of foliage and fluidity, with birds and lightning bugs flittering about, my own response was astonishment. The music leans towards techno-pop with bird song from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. During my visit, a long passage from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.3 added to the sense of being in a meadow dappled with sunlight. The romantic theme was suggested by Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor laureate of the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall, which stands across the street. This integration of past, present and future may be key to some sense of wellbeing within the unprecedented presentation. Far from jarring, the Infinity Room is an Avatar-like virtual landscape and fable about a glass hummingbird based on Anadol’s own dreams. But the haunting sound of a mating call is that of a now-extinct bird in Hawaii. It is the last known recording of its call.

Anadol is the most advanced and sophisticated of artists using AI. His pulsing flat screens appear to morph from two to three dimensions and have been shown in many galleries and museums. Art critics were unconvinced and made unflattering comparisons to lava lamps. Anadol accelerated into the challenge by using AI to build his Large Nature Model – ‘the world’s first open-source AI model based solely on nature data’, trained on datasets drawn from 'ethical sources'. As he walked among visitors to this creation, he explained, 'Everything here was designed from the beginning. There are no cables. Intentionally, everything is just art and technology. It’s a first, never been done before. This is ten years of practice.'

He points out that for thousands of years, we have looked at art and had feelings. 'Our model is asking, can art feel us back? Our heartbeat, our emotions, our goosebumps? If it feels, what does that mean? We can hear, touch, smell, feel, even taste, so it's truly exploring the five senses.'

On the taste front, various types of chocolate – 'data sculptures' – are given to visitors at the conclusion of their wander through different galleries. The LA chocolaterie Valerie Confections used data from the show to make the sweets, some being fruity, another with an ashy, woodsy flavour.

About that data: Refik Anadol Studio claims it is erased after 30 days. Visitors can choose to keep their data, which can be used to decorate a T-shirt, available in the gift shop, of course. There are Dataland memberships offering priority visits as well as NFT options. At the conclusion of the show, there is an ironic moment. A gallery with an enormous robotic arm can use your data to produce paintings. The kind that hang on your wall as, well, art.

dataland.art

Despite the foggy morning marine layer at the shore, summer is upon us in Los Angeles, and that means many trips to the beach for fresh seafood and frothy margaritas. Enrique Olvera of local Downtown LA favourite Damian, and award-winning Pujol in Mexico City, has recently unveiled a new concept for Mexican mariscos and agave cocktails in Venice, San Damián. Here's what to expect.

Wallpaper* dines at San Damián, Los Angelesdamian

The mood: Airy California cantina

The former ATLA space on Abbott Kinney was taken up a notch by Mexico City-based architecture studio TALLER ADG who collaborated with brand consultant Charlotte Fischli to refresh the dining room and bar. Lush greenery pops against the airy palette of light timber, which includes tables from Artless and chairs by Mexican architect and designer Oscar Hagerman.

The petate ceiling, made from woven palm fronds, adds a touch of tropical whimsy and draws the eye to colourful pieces from Mexican artists Marcela Calderon and Perla Valtierra. Coming soon: the back patio will become a taqueria, which will no doubt also be packed on the weekends.

The food: Michelin-level Mexican seafood

The pottery and ceramics for plating were all sourced In Mexico City, Oaxaca and Michoacán and make a stunning backdrop for the Mexico-meets-California focused dishes from chef Chuy Cervantes (also of Damian DTLA).

Cervantes is a master of ceviches and tangy poached shrimp aguachile, and you will be tempted to order everything from the raw dishes, along with a smoky mezcal Paloma or Mijenta Blanco margarita. But don’t overlook the crispy tlayuda topped with chorizo de pescado; fish tacos; or a crunchy Weiser Farms potato flauta. Large format plates include pescado asado guacachile amarillo – a whole fish (usually branzino), that is served with tortillas and salsas. And remember to save room for classic churros with a rich chocolate dip. You can walk it all off later on the boardwalk.

San Damián is located at 1025 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291, United States

Sitting among tangles of oak and Monterey pine, on the lip of a canyon in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Owl House is part art, part architecture, its rich contradictions impossible to grasp at a glance. The redwood structure looks different from every angle, emerging onto the street like a fox's den hollowed out of the brush, or perched like a massive nest from the canyon behind. Where it looms largest, however, it is also generously glazed, giving it the all-seeing gaze of its namesake. Inside, it feels exposed, enclosed and, in some places, both. Sculptural, layered and textural, it offers a series of inhabitable collages that are rigorous in their geometry, reverent toward nature, but playful nonetheless.

Discover this refreshed Mickey Muennig house in California

Designed in the early 1970s by architect Mickey Muennig, the house was restored in 2024 by landscape architect Bernard Trainor of Ground Studio. Then last year, its interiors were renovated by Wallpaper* US400 honoree Nicole Hollis' San Francisco design studio for a pair of empty nesters, who use it as a weekend retreat. Like so many things that come to define the identity of a place, the house's Californian aesthetic was created by a transplant.

Muennig, who would come to be known as ‘the man who built Big Sur', moved to California from Missouri and the Midwest. Having studied under Bruce Goff, he travelled to the nearby Esalen Institute in 1971 for a Gestalt therapy workshop and never returned home. Instead, he began to design unusual buildings, using organic forms and local materials that bridge indoors and out. On a ridge above Big Sur, Muennig embarked on private architectural experiments that embraced nature, light and views: a stone and glass teepee with a bed suspended in its conical crown surveyed the sea, while a boxy house nearby featured tiered, spiralling redwood ceilings and a living room bisected by running water.

Meanwhile, he was also designing lush coastal homes and celebrated Northern California destinations: the Baths at Esalen, the Hawthorne Gallery, and the plush Post Ranch Inn, whose guest rooms took the form of treehouses and burrows with wildflower-sown roofs. Architecture became an extension, even a totem, of the landscape, a link between human and nature. The Owl House had presaged themes that Muennig would play with in much of his later work.

Also a transplant, from the southeastern coast of Australia, Trainor became a temporary steward of the house in 2023. His restoration stabilised and protected materials ranging from the copper roof to wooden decks. ‘It was a passion project that combined art and design, and it brought together years of learning along the way,' he says. In late 2024, when a longtime client bought the house, Hollis and colleague Adele Cunningham set to work with great restraint. The result is clarifying, drawing the architecture to the fore and making room for its new residents.

Essential to Muennig's design are moments of sculptural intensity. The entrance operates as a human-scale collage featuring radial trusswork, a semicircular skylight, layered doorways, cut-away walls, and a tilted demilune clerestory window. Wooden collages by Japanese artist Kishio Suga, chosen from the couple's existing collection by consultants Mary Zlot and Sabrina Buell, resonates with the house's language of fragmentation and flow.

To their credit, Hollis' team cleared the space instead of filling it. They opted for materials that complement rather than contrast, and fewer furnishings that, no matter their age, might have always been there. ‘It's a small house, so I didn't want to overwhelm or overthink it,' says Hollis. ‘You don't want to crowd that architecture. You want it to sing.'

Hollis understood the architecture as tactile as much as it is visually extreme. Texture here serves as a unifying principle, with expressive wooden ceilings and terracotta floor tiles. ‘We thought, are the tiles too busy? They're so graphic,' Hollis recalls. ‘But then we all got used to them, and now we can't imagine the house without them.' Harmonising with the redwood and the brass of the fireplace, colourful textiles add cosiness and energy to each room.

Like texture, geometry is palpable throughout, from the hexagonal tiles to the curving walls. In the kitchen, revitalised cabinetry is faced with vertical slats in varying widths, while a globe pendant and loop-base table echo the house's porthole windows. Because the plan resembles a nautilus shell (with bedroom walls curling into cylinders that contain baths), Hollis commissioned rugs from Vaheed Taheri and brought in rounded furnishings with circular or semicircular oversize pulls.

To keep the interiors relaxed, Hollis' team either met the house's whimsy halfway with curved pieces and happy hues, or stepped back to let it play out. They didn't touch the mushroom-shaped window above the kitchen sink, or the mezzanine's pony wall, cut away in a shallow arc that Hollis describes as ‘a smile'. But they brightened the living room with a green sideboard by Matthew Raw and a red sofa by George Smith: ‘Items that one might not want to live with every day,' she says, ‘but that help create an escape from everyday life.'

Outdoors, the garden continues to be a passion project for Trainor, who wove together plant species such as banksias and persimmons to make it feel ‘as if you were walking through a painting', and designed a cedar and brass fence that gambols across the undulating terrain, echoing the language of the house. The result is not a backdrop but a blossoming that feels as whimsical and wild as the architecture it embraces.

nicolehollis.com

bernardtrainor.com

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The world’s most famous sign transcended every conceivable aspiration of its originators, developers SH Woodruff and Tracy E Shoults. The pair were part of a consortium looking to promote their new real estate venture, Hollywoodland. The year was 1923 and the job went to Thomas Fisk Goff of the Crescent Sign Company, who set out the name in 50ft-tall blocky capital letters stalking across the hillside above Beachwood Canyon.

Visible for miles, and brightly illuminated for its first decade, the sign found local favour but soon started to decay. The final act of British starlet Peg Entwistle added tragedy to the site when she jumped off the ‘H’ in September 1932. She became a posthumous symbol of the darker side of Tinseltown.

In 1944, the city took ownership and even considered demolition – at this point, the sign simply read ‘ollywoodland’. Buoyed by local support and with a canny eye to the future, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in to save it, agreeing to reinstate the ‘H’ and drop the ‘land’.

As a result, the Hollywood sign became a globally recognised visual shortcut for a neighbourhood that was originally incorporated back in 1903. The original wooden and steel structure was completely overhauled and replaced in 1978, following a $250,000 fundraising campaign led by Hugh Hefner. Each letter was given a sponsor, including Andy Williams for the ‘W’ and Alice Cooper for one of the ‘O’s (given in memory of Groucho Marx). And there it’s remained ever since, frequently trespassed upon, occasionally vandalised, and even threatening to outlast the industry it celebrates.

hollywoodsign.org

A version of this article appears in the Wallpaper* August 2026 Creative America issue, available from 4 July, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Chateau Marmont occupies a mythic place in Hollywood folklore: a decadent sanctuary overlooking the Sunset Strip that has been attracting artists, musicians and movie stars for almost a century. The hotel’s storied past is reflected in its timeless logo, a typemark set in calligraphic strokes that invoke the uncial script first used by biblical scribes thousands of years ago.

The story of the Chateau Marmont logo

This Gothic lettering is perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic of the property itself, which opened as an apartment building in 1929. The original owner, Fred Horowitz, instructed architects Arnold A Weitzman and William Douglas Lee to model its design after the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley, a French royal castle dating from the 12th century and known as the final resting place of Leonardo da Vinci.

Chateau Marmont opened when Hollywood was in a state of flux, with the silent movie era giving way to the advent of the talkies. In 1931, Horowitz sold the property to the magician and film director Albert E Smith, who reconceptualised the property as a hotel just in time for Los Angeles to host the Summer Olympics in 1932. Writers including F Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker became early fans, and it wasn’t long before Chateau Marmont acquired a reputation for debauchery and discretion. In 1939, Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn famously instructed his stars: ‘If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.’

When hotelier André Balazs took over the property in 1990, he knew he wanted to retain as much of the hotel’s historic ambience as possible. The logo was created soon afterwards, by creative agency Pandiscio Co, which utilised the Libra font originally created for the Amsterdam Type Foundry by renowned Dutch typographer Sjoerd Hendrik de Roos in 1938.

Given the number of artists and other creatives who flock to the hotel, it’s no surprise that the logo has been a source of inspiration ever since. After a stay at the Chateau, Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele conceived a 2019 collection that included handbags, shirts and sweaters that prominently feature the logo, as well as drawstring canvas bags inspired by the hotel’s laundry service.

The logo also appears on the Chateau’s signature stationery, which has been used as a canvas by a succession of visual artists. In a 1991 sketch on a hotel notepad, the Pop Art pioneers Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen reimagined the building’s towering exterior as a mound of caviar and avocado mousse.

More recently, the cartoonist Gary Baseman sketched Blackie the Cat enjoying Sunday brunch in the hotel’s courtyard, while the graffiti artist André Saraiva created a whole series of illustrations featuring his Mr A character on in-room stationery.

No doubt the distinctive typemark will continue to inspire those who stay at the hotel for generations to come. It is a logo that suggests that at Chateau Marmont, history is still being written.

Jess Hannah Révész, founder and designer of fine jewellery brand J Hannah, creates jewellery in antithesis to the mass market. Her pieces, made in Los Angeles, encompass a slower, more ethical way of creating, a mindful philosophy brought to life in the new JH Editions collection.

The ongoing series of hand-created pieces marks the designer’s return to the bench – after having seen her time taken up with running the business – a move triggered by her desire to again experience the physicality of the process. ‘I don’t know that there was a singular moment so much as a gradual realisation that I missed making things,’ Hannah says. ‘Over time, my role shifted from fabricating jewellery myself to designing collections, managing production, marketing, and running a business. I genuinely enjoy those parts of the work (most of the time!), but they’re very different from sitting at a bench and the meditative experience of making something.’

The new pieces are created using the wax process – lost wax casting – where the jewellery form is first carved into wax before taking its final metal shape, here in 14ct and 18ct gold, studded with antique diamonds and reclaimed sapphires.

Hannah tells us how the new collection came to life.

W*: Can you tell us what you enjoy about the wax process?

JHR: What I love about wax is that it resists perfection. I originally learned through hand fabrication, where precision is often the goal – wax carving feels different. It's slower, more intuitive, a little less predictable. I usually begin with a loose idea, but the material has a way of steering the process. A slip of the tool or an unexpected contour often becomes the most interesting part of the piece.

The medium lends itself to open-ended outcomes partly because the material itself isn't precious... not yet, at least. With hand fabrication, there's an implicit pressure not to waste gold, which shapes the way you work. Wax removes that. The intention can just be to spend time in the process, without the outcome needing to justify it.

W*: What was key for you to consider in the design of these pieces?

JHR: In a way, the point was to consider design less. In my day-to-day work, design, collections, and market appeal are always part of the equation. With these pieces, I wanted to step away from that mindset and allow the process itself to lead. It was more personal, for me. I just happen to have a studio practice where the output is gold jewellery, so it makes sense to share and sell it too.

Rather than focusing on how a piece might fit into a collection or be received commercially, I tried to follow instinct and just make. Many of the forms draw from jewellery history, which is a constant source of fascination for me – signets, seal fobs, talismans, antique stones – but I wasn’t interested in developing them into a cohesive collection.

Instead, I wanted to explore them freely, fragmenting, simplifying, or reinterpreting them without worrying too much about the outcome.

The challenge was resisting the urge to control everything or evaluate the work too quickly. I wanted the process to remain intuitive and exploratory, and to leave room for surprise and imperfection. There are pieces in the series that I utterly adore and others that I don't. Part of this practice has been learning to make the work, put it into the world, and worry less about whether I think it’s ‘good enough’. The process itself is the purpose.

Oddly, this feels far more vulnerable than releasing a collection. For the past decade, I’ve been presenting work that has been refined, edited, and developed through a larger design process. These pieces feel closer to the source. They’re less filtered, which makes sharing them feel more personal.

W*: What did you find most challenging in the process?

JHR: Probably learning to let the process lead. When you’re designing for a collection, you’re often thinking about cohesion, production, pricing, customer response, and a hundred other considerations at once. This required a different mindset.

Some of my favourite pieces came from abandoning an original plan and following a small accident or unexpected idea instead. That can be uncomfortable because it means giving up a certain amount of control, which is hard for me. The challenge was trusting that not every piece needed a clear vision in order to be worth making.

jhannahjewelry.com

Paloma Wool was founded in 2014 by Paloma Lanna, and in its dozen years has steadily become something of a cult label. Having started primarily online, the Barcelona-based brand has gained fans globally, and in 2024 started showing its distinctive collections at Paris Fashion Week. After pop-up stores appearing regularly in various cities over the years, Paloma Wool is now establishing permanent spaces: last week, its store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles opened.

This is the brand’s fourth permanent location, after opening in New York, London and Barcelona. ‘Los Angeles has played a significant part in our story, so opening here felt like a natural evolution,’ says Lanna. ‘We had a temporary store on the same street two years ago, and from the very beginning, we felt at home in the neighbourhood. There was a real sense of comfort and belonging that made it difficult to imagine being anywhere else.’

Inside Paloma Wool’s Los Angeles store

The light-filled space was designed with longtime collaborator Max Milà, who has worked with Paloma Wool on other stores, each of which is a response to its unique setting rather than a replication of another. ‘This particular space immediately stood out because of its extraordinary natural light,’ says Lanna. ‘Depending on the time of day, the space feels and looks different, which brings a sense of movement and life to the experience. Even now, coming into the space each day feels like a genuine treat.’ The bright interior is stripped back, with its high ceilings exposed and white walls offering a contrast to lacquered black furnishings and metal fixtures, alongside bespoke lighting by Milà. It’s fitting for a brand whose pieces sit at the intersection of pretty and edgy, smart and relaxed. The overall effect echoes the DNA of Paloma Wool: pared-back yet featuring striking points of interest, and contemporary in a somehow timeless way.

The window of the Paloma Wool store on Barcelona’s Avenue Diagonal hosts installations by guest artists – most recently an intricate dollhouse by Petra Collins – and this tradition of creative collaboration continues at the LA store. For the opening, a video piece by Carlota Guerrero showed live feeds from the store fitting rooms and the footfall outside on a series of screens, blurring the line between the public and the private. ‘What happens inside is visible from the outside, and what happens outside becomes visible from within, creating a continuous exchange between the two worlds,’ explains Lanna. Referencing both Guerrero’s personal photography practice and LA’s celebrity culture, ‘Retail Theatre’ is an unexpected upheaval of traditional window displays. Fittingly, to celebrate the store’s opening, the piece has been ‘activated’ this week by a series of familiar faces, including Isabelle Albuquerque, Rachel Sennott and Chloe Cherry.

Paloma Wool’s physical spaces are important ways of connecting with its community; as Lanna says, making ‘our online project tangible’. ‘While digital platforms have been essential to our growth, there is something irreplaceable about meeting people in person, sharing experiences, and creating meaningful interactions around the work,’ she says.

The unique space offers not just a backdrop for exceptional and interesting clothes, but Paloma Wool’s multihyphenate interests and unique perspective. ‘I want the space to be somewhere people enjoy spending time, rather than simply passing through. Whether someone is visiting with friends or simply enjoying a day to themselves, I hope they leave feeling they have had a meaningful and enjoyable experience,’ Lanna says. ‘More than anything, I hope people feel at ease here and leave with the sense that they have spent time in a thoughtful, warm, and inviting place.’

Paloma Wool, 8410 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.

palomawool.com

It’s 9am on a Sunday morning on Sunset Boulevard and Next Health clinic is busy. A man sits in a hyperbaric chamber, still on his laptop, while pressurised oxygen is pumped into his body. He’s doing a 90-day challenge – one hyperbaric chamber a day for 90 days to track his mental and physical health. Nearby, two young men in track suits, jaded from the night before, fast-track detox shots into their veins in the IV Lounge. They are among the many ‘health tourists’ who come to LA for treatments and innovations they can’t find at home. Think on-the-spot diagnostics, such as brain, liver and heart scans, grip-strength checks, toxin screenings that look for microplastics, IV therapy, and genetic and blood testing.

Near the IV station, a red-light-therapy face mask, which resembles a Venetian carnival mask before it’s been decorated, sits next to a tray of brain-health booster shots and electrolytes. Also nearby are the infrared LED bed, infrared sauna, cryotherapy cabin, VISIA Skin Analysis, InBody Scan and – in its own private room – LA’s hottest treatment yet, the Ammortal Chamber. It may sound like Frankenstein’s favourite hangout, but this space-age boudoir offers red-light therapy and guided meditation alongside four other ‘modalities’ with the aim of improving heart rate variability and mental clarity. ‘It’s great for time-pressured individuals who want relief from an adrenaline-fuelled day,’ explains Next Health co-founder Dr Darshan Shah.

The tech-meets-wellness longevity boom

When Shah opened Next Health in West Hollywood a decade ago, he pioneered concepts such as ‘optimisation,’ ‘longevity’ and ‘biomarkers’ and this personalised and proactive approach to health is now mainstream. ‘A lot of people are doing self-experimentation with how treatments affect their biological age and it’s great to be doing N-of-1 [single-subject] experiments in a medical setting,' Shah adds.

As tech innovations accelerated, other concierge-led longevity clinics followed. Remedy Place opened on The Strip in 2019 offering cryotherapy chambers, ice baths and sauna alongside lymphatic drainage and a VO2 lounge and now has sister sites in New York and Boston. 10X Health, which opened in Beverly Hills in 2021, is in 46 countries including the UK and UAE, and signature treatments include genetic testing and a Superhuman Protocol – a 40-minute session involving electromagnetic pulses, red-light therapy and an oxygen mask (Kylie and Kendall Jenner have the beds in their homes). There’s no shortage of celebrities eager to endorse dream tickets to wellness, youth and vitality.

And what starts in LA has a ripple effect; in 1998 Barry’s Bootcamp was founded in West Hollywood and now operates in 15 countries. Celebrity facialist Ole Henriksen debuted his signature facial on Sunset and concierge-driven longevity clinics are all over the world. (In London, pioneers are spas such as Surrenne and Six Senses London and walk-in clinics such as REVIV and Get a Drip. )

‘Most people (at the clinics) are dabbling with wearables like Whoop and Oura, and they also have devices like bioimpedance scales and continuous glucose monitors at home,' explains Shah. 'We live in an incredible age where we have great data about our bodies and what's going on inside. We should be doing all the right things at the right time.’

But isn’t doing all the right things at the right time a bit… stressful? Tracking and biohacking can be non-stop and exhausting, and often, they fuel health anxiety rather than alleviating it. 'Data anxiety is a real thing, but it's also similar to saying “knowing how much gas I have in the tank gives me anxiety, so I don't want to have a dashboard built in”,’ says Shah. ‘If we turn a blind eye to this data, we can go years, if not decades, suffering from chronic health issues and not even know it until it's too late. If the data gives you anxiety, you don't have to look at it yourself. You can have a medical professional look at it.’

Enter new health spaces, such as Unbound in London; part-café, part-clinic, it combines blood, strength, fitness and recovery testing with an analysis of physical and mental health alongside a buzzy cafe and strong community.

Desert wellness – escape the city

Integratron, Homestead Valley

Nowhere do physical and spiritual health have a better chance to flourish than under the vast skies of the Californian desert. Here, other-worldly landscapes offer an exceptional dose of nature – and some wild imaginings. In 1957, after a ‘visit from aliens from Venus’, late aeronautical engineer and desert dweller George Van Tassel created a dome-shaped ‘Integratron’ to facilitate longevity, time travel and communication with outer space. The 38ft-tall cupola is a masterstroke in acoustics, mathematics and engineering and a metaphysical destination offering sell-out sound baths.

The Spa at Séc-he, Palm Springs

The Spa at Séc-he in Palm Springs is another unmissable stop on any SoCal desert wellness trip. Built on the site where, 12,000 years ago, the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians discovered mineral springs gushing out of the earth at 25 gallons per minute, the spa opened in 2023 and offers a special ‘Taking of the Waters’ ritual. Guests wallow solo in a hot tub for 15 minutes while the skin absorbs a healthy dose of sodium, sulphur, magnesium and more. High-tech add-ons such as electromagnetic blankets, salt rooms and cryotherapy chambers create a spa that is a mix of ancient and modern (Séc-he means ‘the sound of soft boiling water' in Cahuilla).

Spa City, Desert Hot Springs

It may not have the glamour of Palm Springs, but across the Coachella Valley, Desert Hot Springs has plentiful mineral waters too. These gush out of the earth at 132°F (56°C) from one well, and cold, fresh and drinkable from another – hence the area was dubbed Miracle Hill. The San Andreas Fault runs right through Desert Hot Springs, and the waters are rich in more than 30 minerals, among them bicarbonate, said to improve circulation to the extremities and relieve hypertension; chloride, which eases arthritis, rheumatic disorders and post-operative pain; magnesium for smoother skin and better sleep; sodium to diminish swelling, joint pain and aid lymphatic system; and potassium to improve skin health.

Midcentury architecture frames the scene at many of the waters, at Sagewater Desert Hot Springs Spa and Miracle Manor, which also features two Cube Rooms built by LA architect Michael Rotondi to designs by Albert Frey.

It’s all a far cry from 1941, when visitors to the Desert Hot Springs’ first bathhouse would have to sleep in their cars. In recent years the town has suffered an image problem, but two large spa developments have signed contracts on Miracle Hill, and with organisations such as Miracle Hill Spas Association hosting events, visitors are coming back. Look carefully and you can see the LA ripple effect, stirring on the waters.

Rooms at The Sun Rose West Hollywood start from £316/ €366 per night

Rooms at Montage Laguna Beach start from £1,212/ €1,401 per night

Rooms at Thompson Palm Springs start from £200/ €232 per night

For further information, head to VisitCalifornia.com 

Designed by architect John Lautner in 1962, in the Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Crest, the instantly recognisable Sheats-Goldstein Residence has long played a starring role not only in architecture history books, but also in popular culture (from The Big Lebowski to Helmut Newton photographs). Originally commissioned by the Sheats family, the house and estate were acquired in 1972 by businessman and basketball fan James Goldstein, who, recognising its importance, bequeathed it to LACMA in 2016.

Explore the Sheats-Goldstein Residence by John Lautner

The modernist architecture fabric's longevity and the site's continuous functionality and health owe much to Kristopher Conner and James Perry, of LA firm Conner + Perry, who have overseen works and designed additions there since 2015 (both had worked for Lautner's associate Duncan Nicholson, who continued working at the property following Lautner's death in 1994).

Putting their intimate knowledge of the estate to good use, the pair not only worked on the restoration of the main residence, but also completed the most recent phase of the ongoing entertainment complex project, known as Club James, which is tucked underneath the estate's infinity tennis court on an adjacent site bought by Goldstein.

It now complements the residential element perfectly, providing users with a fully functioning nightclub, including a VIP room/library, offices for the owner and his assistants, an outdoor terrace with dining and kitchen facilities, and a pool and spa.

Conner and Perry are becoming the go-to architects for Lautner restoration, having recently completed the refresh of another of the modernist's masterpieces from the early 1980s, Lautner's Castle, a private home in California.

‘What Lautner understood, and what working on the Sheats-Goldstein house proves every day, is that great architecture isn't a finished object. It's a living idea,' Perry says. ‘We've been privileged to be part of that conversation and the continuously evolving work.'

conner-perry.com

Last year, chef Daniel Patterson did something radical: He opened a restaurant in his own house, Jaca Social Club, with his wife Sarah Lewitinn. The critically-lauded dinner spot was a prelude to the couple's latest venture, Jacaranda, now open in Hollywood. Patterson, previously of Alta Adams in LA and two-Michelin-starred Coi in San Francisco, was lauded by Anthony Bourdain as one of ‘the most important voices in food,’ for his modern California cuisine. Jacaranda marks a return to fine dining, but with the relaxed dinner party vibes of the pair's at-home restaurant. Here's what to order.

Wallpaper* dines at Jacaranda

The Mood:

A uniquely refined dining experience with a relaxed, convivial atmosphere was brought to life by local architecture design firm Preen Inc. (Lucia and Badmaash). The transformation begins from the lilac-tinted floor-to-ceiling windows, that reveal a 30-seat dining room holding a commissioned painting by the Belgian-born artist Adele Renault of the restaurant's namesake jacaranda tree.

Much like a home, family art lines the grass-cloth-clad walls, but in this instance its by Lewitinn's great-uncle, Landès Lewitin –  a founding member of the New York art collective, The Club, which included Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi and Robert Motherwell. Tying the interior together is a sprawling, 15-foot metal ceiling sculpture reminiscent of a jacaranda leaf.

The Food: seasonal gems

Patterson has returned to his distinctly Californian style of cooking with a 10-course menu showcasing many foraged seasonal, local ingredients, beautifully plated with pottery by a range of talents from Etsuji Noguchi to Ella Norlin.

Some of those creations might include grilled and raw vegetables in green juice of yerba santa, or soft tofu with fresh seaweed and caviar both perfectly presented as if it was for the cover of a magazine shoot. Habanero and saffron-laced steamed Kauai prawn is followed by earthy stuffed morels that lead way to the final savoury course of pepper-crusted duck with roasted blueberries.

Another cool twist is the option to choose your own beverage pairings, from wines to to fine sake to non-alcoholic options, which include sparkling elderflower kombucha or a rare aged oolong tea from 1978. Can’t decide? The team will concoct a hybrid option for the meal.

Jacaranda has also partnered with LocoL Community in Watts (co-founded by Patterson and chef Roy Choi) and hires directly from the nonprofit’s vocational training and development program.

Jacaranda is located at 6623 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 United States

'Everything about Diane was creativity personified,' said Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather trilogy, on hearing news of Diane Keaton’s death in 2025. Keaton had played Kay Adams Corleone in the films, one of several defining roles in a career that spanned more than five decades, across acting, directing, and writing. Her performances in Annie Hall, which earned her an Academy Award, Reds, Father of the Bride, and Something's Gotta Give established her as one of the defining screen presences of American cinema. Off screen, her oversized tailoring, hats, and menswear-inspired silhouettes cemented her status as a style icon, while her New York Times bestselling books California Romantica (2007) and The House that Pinterest Built (2017) extended her influence into architecture, interiors, and design.

This summer, the Diane Keaton Collection, a four-part auction series organised by Bonhams in partnership with The Fine Art Group, unfolds across New York and Los Angeles throughout June. Comprising more than 550 lots, the sales assemble the artefacts of Keaton’s life, from iconic wardrobe pieces and film memorabilia to the books, artworks, and domestic objects that populated her homes. Here, we highlight eight standout lots that offer insight into the people she loved, the films she made, the homes she built, the styles she cultivated, and the objects she chose to live with.

David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalos) (1988-89). Estimate: US $25,000-35,000

Diane Keaton’s collection extended beyond fashion and film memorabilia to artworks displayed throughout her home, a 1926 Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills designed by Wallace Neff. A photograph by David Wojnarowicz appeared in the master bedroom alongside Western furniture and graduated Bauer pottery, reflecting the eclectic sensibility that shaped her interiors.

Created between 1988 and 1989, Untitled (Buffalos) followed a visit by Wojnarowicz to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where he encountered a diorama depicting Plains bison driven over cliffs. Having recently been diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz used the scene as an allegory for the government’s response to the epidemic. The falling buffalo became a symbol of abandonment and collective loss, themes that recurred throughout his work as he confronted homophobia, censorship and mortality. A lifelong admirer of California and the American West, Keaton also collected landscapes by Maynard Dixon and Ed Mell. Her photography book collection is also represented in the sale, with first editions by William Eggleston and Annie Leibovitz, among others.

Two framed mixed media collages by Diane Keaton. Estimate: US$1,000-1,500

Keaton’s interest in collage dates back to childhood. In her memoir Then Again, she recalled visiting the 1961 ‘Art of Assemblage’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art with her family and becoming captivated by the boxes of Joseph Cornell. ‘As soon as we got home, I decided to collage my entire bedroom wall,’ she wrote. The fascination was encouraged by her mother, Dorothy Hall, who filled 85 journals with scrapbook entries, photographs and collaged pages. Keaton carried the practice into adulthood, spending evenings making collages while trying to establish herself as an actor in New York and appearing in Broadway productions, including Hair. ‘I did a lot of collages. I couldn’t stop myself,’ she said in 2022. ‘I was really playing around with fantasies all the time.’

An original Annie Hall script. Estimate: $2,000-$4,000

An original mimeographed script for Annie Hall appears in the auction, bound in a red cover and inscribed ‘UNTITLED FILM SCRIPT / 4/15/76’, alongside two loose pages marked ‘NEW ENDING’. The 133-page document captures an earlier stage in the development of a film that would become one of the defining works of 1970s American cinema. Released in 1977, Annie Hall was the fourth collaboration between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, earning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Keaton.

The film also crystallised an aesthetic she would carry long beyond the screen: ties, oversized tailoring, hats and menswear reworked into something unmistakably her own. Allen developed the character with Keaton specifically in mind, drawing loosely on aspects of her personality and their earlier relationship. Even the title combined her childhood nickname, ‘Annie’, with her surname, Hall. Recalling the experience in her memoir, Then Again, Keaton wrote: ‘Filming Annie Hall was effortless… no one had any serious expectations.’ Allen encouraged her to ‘wear what you want to wear’, helping create a wardrobe that would become one of cinema’s most enduring style references.

A souvenir programme from the original Broadway production of Play It Again, Sam. Estimate: US$200-300

Before Annie Hall and long before her status as a Hollywood fixture, Diane Keaton starred as Linda Christie in the original 1969 Broadway production of Play It Again, Sam. Included in the sale is a souvenir programme from the production, together with a publicity photograph from the 1972 film adaptation, in which Keaton reprised the role opposite Woody Allen and Tony Roberts. The production ran for 453 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre and earned Keaton a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. It was during auditions for Play It Again, Sam that Keaton first met Allen, with their professional collaboration quickly developing into a romantic relationship. Play It Again, Sam was the first film Allen made with Keaton. The pair went on to collaborate on eight films between 1971 and 1993, including Annie Hall, Sleeper and Manhattan.

A pair of Louis Vuitton Star Trail ankle boots. Estimate: US $800-$1,200

A pair of black glazed calf leather Star Trail ankle boots by Louis Vuitton, offered in their original box and marked size 41, accompanied Diane Keaton to some of her most high-profile appearances over the past decade. She wore the chunky lace-up boots while accepting the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2017, styling them with a black turtleneck, belted silhouette, textured white jacket and her trademark wide-brimmed hat. Keaton later described the evening to The Hollywood Reporter as ‘the wedding [she] never had and the retirement party [she] never wanted’. During the ceremony, Al Pacino told his longtime collaborator: ‘You’re a great artist. I love you forever.’ The same pair reappeared at the premiere of Poms in Los Angeles in 2019, the Ralph Lauren show during New York Fashion Week in 2023, and numerous other engagements.

A Baron Hollywood’s Hat Maker black felt bowler hat with black ribbon. Estimate US$400-US$600

Few accessories are as closely associated with Diane Keaton as the black bowler hat. This example, by Baron Hats, was worn repeatedly throughout her life and career and belongs to a category of object that has become inseparable from her public image. The connection dates back to Annie Hall, where Keaton’s adoption of menswear-inspired tailoring and bowler hats helped establish one of cinema’s most enduring style signatures. In an interview with Vogue, Keaton said she owns around 40 hats, naming a plain black Baron bowler as her favourite: ‘I’ve had it for so long. It’s good – it’s dependable.’ Elsewhere, she described hats as ‘the final touch to a great outfit’. In her 2014 memoir, Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty, she wrote: ‘My hair is my hat. And my hat is my hair.’

A handwritten letter and inscribed sheet music for All I Have to Do Is Dream from Al Pacino. Estimate: US$300-$500

A handwritten note from Al Pacino and sheet music for ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’, inscribed ‘To Di / Love AL’, sit among Diane Keaton’s personal papers. The accompanying letter reads: ‘Diane. Andy, me and Don went to a restaurant in Mondello. I will call you with the name of the joint. Sit tight. Be right. Don’t fight. Love Al, Your friend.’ Keaton and Pacino met while filming The Godfather and maintained an on-and-off romantic relationship into the 1980s. Keaton later described him as ‘the most entertaining man’ with ‘the most beautiful face’. Writing in Deadline following her death, Pacino said: ‘She lived without limits, and everything she touched carried her unmistakable energy,’ adding that she was ‘unstoppable, resilient, and above all, deeply human.’

Ed Ruscha signed book. Estimate: US$200-$300

Keaton’s sale includes several artist books by Ed Ruscha, among them a signed edition of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, first published in 1963. The publication comprises black-and-white photographs of petrol stations along the route between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, with captions noting each location. The first stop was Bob’s Service in Los Angeles; the last, a Fina station in Groom, Texas. The lot also includes Nine Swimming Pools and Guacamole Airlines, alongside Sol LeWitt’s Modular Drawings. Keaton and Ruscha were romantically involved for a period, although little was made public about their relationship and both largely kept it out of view, unlike her more widely documented relationships with Al Pacino and Warren Beatty.

bonhams.com

Rudolph Schindler designed houses 'as if there had never been houses before,' famed architecture critic and writer Reyner Banham once said. Bold and exciting, it's a statement that captures the Austrian-born, California architect's oeuvre and attitude. Schindler's modernist architecture is found in great numbers in the City of Angels, a known treasure trove of modernist houses. He crafted homes big and small, designing some 100 residential projects, many radical and thought-provoking, as he sought to challenge the era's norms through his Los Angeles houses.

Who was Rudolph Schindler?

Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953) was born in Vienna into an artistic family with a deep appreciation for craft. He studied at TU Wien (the city's well-regarded University of Technology) before attending the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1911. In 1914, he moved to the USA, where he started working for Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work he discovered while still in Austria via the Wasmuth Portfolio, a folio containing 100 of Wright's lithographs, published in 1910.

Schindler worked on the Hollyhock House project in Los Angeles, among others, during his time at Wright‘s studio. Soon after, he left and completed his personal home on Kings Road in Hollywood. It marked the beginning of Schindler's mission to develop his own, distinctive iteration of modernist residential architecture.

Rudolph Schindler's architecture style

Known for his characterful residential projects, organic spaces and built-in living scenarios, Schindler stood outside the modernist mainstream of the time, which was largely represented by his fellow architect and friend from Vienna, Richard Neutra.

Schindler‘s projects broke away from the austerity of functionalism and focused primarily on the emotional aspect of architecture and the spatial character of a living environment. Influenced by Wright, his mentor, Schindler created homes that draw on the principles of organic architecture, and the influences of 20th-century Austrian architect Adolf Loos; in particular, his idea of a more vertical hierarchy of spaces, known as 'Raumplan'.

Schindler's career and portfolio

The lack of standardisation in Schindler's work and his moves away from modernism's functionalist roots led to his work not being included in the seminal exhibition International Style at MoMA in 1932. Still, until his death, Schindler built around 100 residential projects.

Schindler homes vary in style and materials, representing the architect's explorations and his architectural evolution over time. His work went through different stages, mostly defined by the materials he used – from his early 1920s concrete houses, he progressed to plaster-covered designs in the 1930s, and through to wood and stone organic creations towards the end of his career, in the 1940s and 1950s.

16 Rudolph Schindler homes in Los Angeles

Curator, architecture historian and writer Adam Štěch toured Los Angeles in search of Rudolph Schindler homes. Here, he captures for us 16 of his most exciting creations.

Kings Road House (Schindler House)

When? 1922

Kings Road House was one of Schindler‘s first independent projects. It reveals the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, but Schindler transforms that into a distinctive style of his own. Initially, the building functioned as a home and studio for the architect, his wife, Pauline, and another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace. The living space is arranged as two L-shaped pavilions around a large garden, with floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed wood structural details. With its openness and Japanese sensibility, the house is a remarkable emblem of the modernist movement. It was restored in 2003 by architecture studio Marmol Radziner. Today, it is owned by Friends of the Schindler House, with support from the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK).

How House

When? 1925

Located in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, where Schindler built many of his projects, the How House was completed in 1925 for railroad heir James Eads. It is made of redwood beams, poured concrete and stucco. Interconnected cubes contain variable spaces differing in height and atmosphere. The spaces feature overlaying forms and lines, seen more clearly in the geometric beam work of the large living room, with its iconic corner window in a subtle wood frame. Designer Taska Cleveland recently restored the house for a new owner, respecting its original soul.

Herman Sachs Apartments (Manola Court)

When? 1926

Commissioned in 1926, The Herman Sachs Apartments were built for German painter Herman Sachs. Composed of rectangles on the steep site, the complex was expanded between 1934 and 1940 to a total of sixteen cityview residences.

William E. and Stephanie Oliver House

When? 1934

Oliver House represents one of Schindler‘s career highlights. The house, built on a steep plot in the Silver Lake area, is set back on the plot and is reached by a set of steps lined by elegant tubular metal handrails. Inside, the architect created an open, flexible space with multifunctional furniture units, such as the living room seating corner with built-in tables and shelves.

Walker House

When? 1936

Walker House shows Schindler’s ability to build on awkward, even downright tricky, sites. The residence faces the Silver Lake reservoir and is elevated over the steep hill on pillars. Its geometric facade, with a variety of offset rectangular windows, faces the water, while the entrance is located on the top floor on the other side. The lower level contains bedrooms furnished with Schindler’s signature built-in furniture. Walker House was bought by journalist and modernist design aficionado Andrew Romano a decade ago, who has been working on its restoration since.

McAlmon Duplex

When? 1936

The McAlmon Duplex includes two private homes on one lot. Originally built in 1923, the structures were remodelled by Schindler in 1936. Large overhangs and a powerful use of geometry place this house as one of Schindler‘s best interpretations of International Style. It was also influenced by the Dutch movement De Stijl.

Bubeshko Apartments

When? 1938–1941

With its decorative concrete caps on the garage walls, crafted by sculptor Gordon Newell, this project evokes the precast concrete blocks of Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival architecture. The Bubeshko Apartments were commissioned by Anastasia Bubeshko and her daughter Luby.

The Samuel T. and Pauline Falk Apartments

When? 1938

Commissioned in 1938 by Samuel T. and Pauline Falk, the Falk Apartments are composed of rectangular volumes that perfectly fit into the steep hill of their Silver Lake area plot. Inside, four different living units unfold.

Guy C. Wilson House

When? 1939

Another Schindler‘s residential gem in Silver Lake, Guy C. Wilson House is a definitive example of modernist composition, with its recessed and stepped facade composed of rectangular volumes, large window openings and an unusual, overhanging roof. Inside, one can find a multi-level white space with built-in wooden furniture.

Pearl Mackey Apartments

When? 1939

Owned by the Austrian Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK), the Pearl Mackey Apartments are currently used to host artists' residencies. A crisp, white, International Style facade with large windows conceals duplex apartments behind it, featuring ingenious built-in furniture elements.

Droste House

When? 1940

Built for the Droste family in Silver Lake, this house contains one of the most authentically preserved interiors by Schindler. The green composition of overlaid and protruding rectangular volumes, typical of Schindler’s late 1930s style, stands out for its large window in the middle of the street-facing facade, which gives the house a panoramic view over the Silver Lake reservoir.

Kallis House

When? 1946

Located in Studio City, Kallis House and its art studio were commissioned by production artist Maurice 'Mischa' Kallis. One of the most organic and playful Schindler houses, it features angled walls and fittingly bespoke-designed interior furnishings. In 1993, Schindler's associate Josef Van der Kar cleverly converted the house's open patio between the living quarters and the art studio into an entertainment and family room.

Roxy Roth House

When? 1946

Commissioned in 1945 by screenwriter and actor Roxy Roth House and located in Studio City, this is another feast of late-career Schindler work, full of surprising forms and organic-inspired spaces. The composition includes a curved car shed converted into a studio. It has recently been restored by architect Barbara Bestor, following a past restoration, in 1998-1999, by architect and contractor Jeff Fink. The house is currently for sale, listed by Crosby Doe.

The Laurelwood Apartments

When? 1948

Located in Studio City, The Laurelwood Apartments comprise two terraced blocks containing two-bedroom flats divided by a central patio. The project's total of twenty units was constructed using modular techniques to address post-war material shortages.

Adolph Tischler House

When? 1950

Designed for craftsman, designer and inventor Adolph Tischler, this house is one of Schindler’s last projects in which he experimented not only with space and construction but also with colour and light. Schindler covered the main living room at the top of the structure with blue translucent corrugated fibreglass panels - this caused the light to take on a deep blue hue inside. Tischler also designed some elements for the house, including a metal fireplace.

Phillip and Phyllis Schlessinger House

When? 1954

The very last project of Rudolph Schindler can be found in Los Feliz and was completed one year after his death. The house is defined by a cascading facade, which internally helps create a cosy, organic living room area.

Milan Design Week has come and gone but, luckily, if you live in Los Angeles that is, you can keep the party going, thanks to Bar di Bello, a new Italian eatery now open in Silver Lake. The restaurant, located in the Sunset Row complex at the heart of the neighbourhood, is a seductive new concept from a team of hospitality heavy-hitters that brought locals spots like Gigi’s (now defunct), Wexler’s Deli and Nomadica. With interiors that nod to Milanese landmarks like La Scala and Negronis just as large, Bar di Bello is sure to transport you back to the streets of Brera in no time.

Wallpaper* dines at Bar di Bello

The Mood: Italian and LA icons

Bar di Bello's entrance is almost undetectable, tucked-away behind a wall of red velvet curtains. A customer slides in, and the drapes are immediately closed again to keep the ‘secret’ safe inside. Designer Dean Levin of Los Angeles-based 22RE pulled inspiration from storied establishments in LA and Milan alike, including Musso & Frank, La Scala and Giorgio Baldi as key references. ‘I’d consider them icons of Italian dining in Los Angeles,’ Levin says.

The team also culled from recent trips to Milan and Paris. A red travertine central bar is a focal point upon entry but the entire room is ensconced in deep walnut custom millwork with Afra and Tobia Scarpa sconces and Vico Magistretti chairs as a nod to Italian modernists. The lighting was a key focus in shaping the atmosphere and was incorporated into the ceiling elements and throughout the millwork, using vintage pieces to balance the more modern forms. Levin and his team wanted the transportive space to feel ‘grand yet approachable, while still feeling intimate and elevated.’

The Food: Modern Milanese

You must start the meal with a palate-opening with either a tiny-tini, or a full-version of the greenhouse martini that mixes tomato water with gin. Or maybe a giant Negroni the size of your head is more your speed.

There are plenty of nibbles while you peruse the menu from flat bread style crackers in a trio of flavors (cacio e pepe was the most interesting), to addictive, salty fried olives. This can be followed by yellowtail carpaccio and a mushroom salad, but do order the trofie alla Genovese made in-house, laden with pesto, green beans and potato. Orecchiette with ragù bianco veal, guanciale, sage, and cream is also worth the carbs.

The already signature breaded chicken cutlet is doused tableside with a sauce of shallot soubise, guanciale and capers and is enough for two people to share, ditto the osso buco with saffron risotto and salsa verde. Leaning heavily on regions from in the ‘Mother country,’ the wine list was carefully curated by partner Kristin Olszewski with a mix of California labels as well.

BAR di Bello is located at 3300 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026 United States

The Sirmai-Peterson house, which Frank Gehry and his then partner Greg Walsh created in the mid 1980s, is hidden away on a leafy estate in Thousand Oaks, a 1960s planned community north-west of Los Angeles. It’s one of the most ambitious, though little-known, of the houses that the firm designed close to home, using simple forms and materials to brilliant effect, before the commissions for the Bilbao Guggenheim and Walt Disney Concert Hall marked a radical shift of scale and expression.

Tour Sirmai-Peterson house, an early Frank Gehry design

Forty years ago, Frank was beginning to win attention from high-profile clients, but most of his commissions were still small-scale and frugal, and his practice was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Like Robert Rauschenberg and other artists he admired, Frank created assemblages of humble materials, transforming simple forms into sculptural masses and magical labyrinths. The Sirmai-Peterson house, designed for a couple from Minneapolis, is a cluster of cubes with a towering lantern that plays off the softly rolling terrain and is reflected in a tranquil pond. The material palette is basic: concrete blocks, stucco and Douglas fir, with accents of galvanised aluminium.

Flagstones lead to the understated, slate-paved entry hall, which flows into a dining area, kitchen and one of two primary suites in a linked pavilion. The house is set on a gentle slope, and steps lead down to a spacious living room, from where one descends to a second bedroom pavilion. Expansive windows frame a landscape of oaks and olive trees resembling that of Tuscany, and light filters in from above. The geometry of the plan turns the house into a cinematic experience of shifting perspectives.

A jutting balcony overlooks the pond, which is fed from a waterfall and a stream. It’s home to frogs, migrating birds and even bass that have strayed in from a neighbouring pond. An elevated walkway leads to a guest house, set on a rise, that doubles as an office. This impassive block of fair-faced concrete with huge square windows was designed by Brian Murphy, an inventive local architect, to serve as a foil to Gehry’s cubic composition.

This house and the Schnabel house in West LA that followed represent the culmination of Gehry’s early residential work. Little noticed when new, they have been overshadowed by the later masterpieces. That’s a pity, because they were radical departures from convention at the time and their power to surprise and delight is undiminished.

Brian Linder and Rick Grahn of The Value of Architecture, who handled the recent sale of the house, came with low expectations but were blown away by its complexity and the way that each room feels like a little house in itself. They didn’t have far to look for a buyer who would respect the integrity of the original design. A medical professor and his wife, who had lived thirty years in a ranch house a short walk away, were tipped off by their window washer, fell in love with the house at first sight, and snapped it up.

It represents a radical departure from their previous home and its picturesque neighbours, and there’s the challenge of fixing a leaky roof and integral gutters, but the house can now enjoy an extended life as part of the rich legacy of modernism in southern California.

thevalueofarchitecture.com

If you go to the newly opened David Geffen wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I recommend you head there later in the afternoon, when the sun is a little lower on the horizon. When I first visited at 11am, the sun was directly overhead, and Peter Zumthor’s highly anticipated $724 million, 110,000 sq ft new building struck me as a dismal, dated, inelegant brute. But when I came back at 4pm, I came to a wildly different conclusion: in that more flattering light, I saw a brilliant innovation and true gift to the city. I think both visions can be true.

Commissioned by LACMA director Michael Govan 20 years ago, Zumthor was tasked with replacing an existing 1965 William Pereira building as the home of the encyclopedic museum’s permanent collection. In 2019, the city approved Zumthor’s plan to elevate an amoeba-shaped single storey high above the ground, with sinuous walls of floor-to-ceiling glass that would span Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge. Over the years, the design evolved in the face of various obstacles, including the diversion of time and budget towards removing fossils that were discovered on site, plus the realities of American construction at this scale. Best known for the material sensitivity and rigour of his often preciously small European projects, Zumthor publicly lamented how his design had been essentialised in the process. ‘There are no Zumthor details any more,’ he told The New York Times in a 2023 interview. (Although more recently, he’s disavowed this disavowal.)

At 900ft long, the finished building has no particularly beautiful angles from the outside. Where Zumthor’s renderings featured delicately curving glass and sandy-coloured stone, reality delivered windows framed in conspicuously thick bronze with more corners than curves, sandwiched between a pair of oppressively dark, remarkably flat concrete slabs. On the interior, the same sombre concrete forms the load-bearing walls of 26 standalone galleries that look like bunkers. At the top of the entrance’s 30ft-tall outdoor stairs (optional; there are also elevators), I wondered how I ended up in a basement.

At 11am, in the shadow of concrete eaves, the 360-degree windows cast a pallid light on the interiors and a glare on the vitrines. Among 21st-century museums, glass walls are a popular gesture of public-facing transparency, and in LA, a familiar feature of domestic space. But here they could’ve been used more discerningly. The view over Wilshire Boulevard is nice, like standing on a quintessential LA overpass, or the mezzanine in LACMA’s permanent collection above Metropolis II (2010), Chris Burden's kinetic sculpture of whizzing toy cars. Then the bridge ends with an anticlimactic, panoramic view of a nearby apartment complex’s stucco.

But just like LA public life, the building really starts to come alive in the later afternoon. During these magic hours, golden rays enter the museum horizontally, warming and brightening the concrete. The curtains become luminous, casting stripes of light and shadow on the floor. Suddenly, everyone’s complexion looks amazing.

The Geffen wing is the brilliant reinvention of the museum that LACMA says it is: exhibitions are porous and make use of every wall, both inside enclosed galleries and the interstitial, oddly shaped spaces in between. Not every feature, however, is precisely as described. The press release highlights Govan’s desire to exhibit the history of the world on a single, non-hierarchal plane, where Zumthor’s amorphous floorplan invites free-form exploration. The inaugural hang defines regions around bodies of water rather than by continent, a particularly beautiful way of repositioning ourselves in the world. Hierarchies, however, are inevitable. Some galleries are designed for more traffic than others. The entrance is positioned to send visitors down the long, linear hall facing Wilshire, where their first encounters are with Greek and Roman sculpture. Mounted right at the centre, for all of Wilshire Boulevard to see, top billing goes to Francis Bacon’s famed Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), a gift from the late mega-collector Elaine Wynn.

Where the museum purports to have no prescribed circulation paths, I disagree. This is an architecture that pulls and confounds, directing towards seductively framed views. Different pathways approach the same gallery from such remarkably different angles that you are drawn back into spaces you’ve already seen. One Mediterranean gallery seems to have an inexplicable gravitational pull. At the intersection of the Ottoman, Spanish and North African corridors, it forms a vortex where visitors often ask, ‘Weren’t we just in here?’ I asked a guard if he could point to our location on a map, and he said, ‘Good question.’

The joy is very much in getting lost. Zumthor intended for the interiors to feel like a walk through a forest, but I would say the dilation and contraction of the space feels more like a medieval town’s narrow streets and town squares. Overall, the building feels very familiar, local and correct. It adopts local vernacular architecture to a museum scale and animates visitors with recurring moments of awe. Alongside the sweeping vistas of sunset over Hancock Park, the aforementioned stucco apartments actually feel perfectly appropriate. The architecture is embedded with metaphors of taking a second look in a different light. It’s a tour through the truth of LA, both its banalities and grandeur. After many years of demolition and construction, complaints and delays, LACMA has finally come home.

Since opening in Downtown Los Angeles in 2013, BADMAASH has redefined what Indian cuisine can be. The restaurant, founded by brothers Nakul and Arjun Mahendro, gained notoriety for its cheeky takes on classics, like chicken tikka poutine and masala steak frites, and has expanded its footprint with locations in Fairfax and even a London pop-up. This spring, BADMAASH has launched its third and most elevated location in Venice, California with an art-filled setting on Abbott Kinney. 'Venice has always felt like a natural extension of our brand,' Nakul Mahendro says. 'It’s a place where creativity, culture and food intersect, and we felt it was the right time to bring our illest concept here.'

Here's what to expect.

Wallpaper* dines at BADMAASH, Venice

The mood: Elevated Brutalist hideaway

The Mahendro brothers’ vision melds culinary, culture and lifestyle, brought to life by local hospitality design firm Preen (whose most recent projects include Lucia, Maydan Market and Club 88). 'We’ve always wanted BADMAASH to feel like more than a restaurant,' Arjun Mahendro explains. 'Venice has a creativity and energy that really speaks to us. It’s the perfect place to bring our next chapter to life.'

The art-filled space starts right at the entrance with an installation piece in the form of a mottled charcoal and rust concrete service table holding wines and bubbly or as the staff calls it ‘amuse booze.’

Framed by blackened brick walls, the main dining room is dark and moody with pops of colour in the tie-dyed textiles and art, including a piece in the ‘gallery’ room by Action Bronson depicting characters from the video game classic Street Fighter. Food is served on marble and bone inlay tables with a nod to India but with California twist, thanks to denim and distressed leather banquettes designed by LA-based fashion designer Guillermo Andrade. The back bar lighting was designed by John Barlow, and inspired by the chest of gold from Pulp Fiction, with ivory and gold-tinted plaster walls by Guerin Swing. The final layer of the space leads to the ‘the Cave,’ a spot that's prime for VIP dinner parties with cosy red booths and a separate back entrance.

The food: Reimagined Indian comforts

The BADMAASH brand has expanded into the retail and lifestyle, with a butter chicken sauce so good, they had to bottle it and sell it online, and you have truly arrived when your Oatmilk Chai is carried at Erewhon. The restaurants became known for serving traditional Indian dishes alongside inventive reinterpretations, along with a strong natural wine program. Fans will be happy to see many of the signatures on this menu from the serrano chili and cheddar cheese naan; chicken tikka poutine with masala fries, cheese curds and beef gravy; and Dad’s famous coconut curry mussels, along with various lamb dishes. For the first time, cocktails also take center stage with an olive-oil washed dirty martini, a mezcal margarita or the soothing date jam (made in-house) with bourbon, Madeira and lemon.

BADMAASH is located at 1616 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291, United States

The David Geffen Galleries, which will open on 19 April 2026 to members and on 4 May to the public, offer Los Angeles an entirely new way of experiencing the diverse collections of its premier art museum. Architect Peter Zumthor worked closely with museum director Michael Govan and executive architects SOM to create a sinuous sweep of concrete, wrapped in glass and elevated nine metres above the ground.

An auditorium, bookstore, education centre, restaurant, café and elevators are housed in the seven supporting blocks. That separation allows visitors to immerse themselves in art on a single floor that is naturally lit from every side. Within the void are 27 inner galleries, ranging in size from 15 to 300 sq m, containing anything from a single Qing Dynasty court robe to a dense array of classic paintings. Art and architecture conduct a dialogue in the context of sweeping views over the city and the La Brea tar pits.

Explore LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries

Zumthor is best-known for Vals Thermal Baths, two chapels and meticulously crafted European museums. The LACMA commission was his first in the US, and it gave him the chance to work on a heroic scale and with a brutalist architecture aesthetic. Some of the details in the original design were sacrificed, but plenty of distinctive elements remain. Tiny white shells are embedded in the black concrete terrazzo floor, reminding us that this area was once a seabed.

A new, silicon-based paint in tones of dark red, indigo and black coats the concrete walls of the enclosed galleries, which are lit from a narrow clerestory and Zumthor-designed wall brackets that cast a soft, even glow over light-sensitive exhibits. However, the glass walls are UV-protected, and sheer metallic gauze curtains of different densities, custom-designed by Reiko Sudo, allow fabrics and works on paper to be displayed within five meters of the glass.

The layout is a radical departure from the enfilade of white cubes in traditional art museums. That concept of artificially lit, neutral spaces is still the default setting – and it’s a recipe for fatigue. As Govan observes, it’s time to experiment. Zumthor’s building replaces an ageing, dysfunctional complex of pavilions grouped around a courtyard, begun in the 1960s as an insubstantial variant on New York’s Lincoln Center. Later additions include Bruce Goff’s idiosyncratic Japanese Pavilion to the east and Renzo Piano’s two skylit pavilions for temporary exhibitions to the west.

The new galleries provide a unified platform for constantly changing, interdisciplinary installations drawn from LACMA’s encyclopedic collection. No two galleries are alike, and there’s a constant shift of space, light levels and vistas, inwards and outwards. The irregular plan allows visitors to wander freely and make their own discoveries. Serendipity replaces regimentation in this expansive cabinet of curiosities.

The Covid shutdown of 2020 gave the 45 LACMA curators extra time to devise new strategies of display. Unable to travel, they began talking to each other about joint projects and came up with 300 proposals, which were whittled down to 80 for the initial presentation. Junior curators suggested oceans and their role in linking cultures as an organising theme. It was an opportunity for fresh thinking that rarely occurs in the museum world. As curator Nancy Thomas recalls, 'Each of us had stories to tell and knew the strengths of our collections.' Leah Lembeck, curator of European paintings and sculpture, noted the importance of listening and reconciling different visions. And Britt Salvesen, the curator of works on paper, delighted in the opportunity of 'bringing photography into the light of day'.

Nothing better captures the collaborative nature of these installations than the table-top display of ceramic bowls from different cultures and eras, which drew on the holdings of eight different departments. A newly commissioned sphinx complements a display of Egyptian antiquities, and contemporary artworks hang beside historic treasures. A few key pieces stand alone. A ceramic panel by Henri Matisse occupies the tip of a wing, framed by views of nature and neighbouring buildings. You can admire it from one of Zumthor’s leather benches and glimpse it through the glass at night.

In contrast, the Ardabil carpet, a Persian masterpiece of 1520, is shielded from direct light to protect its vivid colours and spare it the fate of its faded twin in London’s V&A Museum. There are constant surprises. A few steps take you from Hokusai prints to California car culture, exemplified in the Studebaker Avanti that Raymond Loewy customised for his own use.

There’s a refreshing lack of barriers, but vulnerable objects are displayed in Zumthor’s elegant, climate-controlled vitrines. The whole 275m-long building is mounted on base isolators, making this one of the safest places to be when LA experiences the long-awaited 'big one', and every exhibit is secured against seismic shocks. And the sense of openness is equally welcoming outside. The building offers shade on a hot day and frames views of the Japanese Pavilion and the bold geometry of Piano’s galleries to either side. The footprint of scored concrete was designed by artist Mariana Castillo Deball, with witty touches that include imprints of birds’ feet leading out of the restaurant. Major sculptures in the orbit of the galleries include Tony Smith’s Smoke, a monumental cat’s cradle.

LACMA, located halfway between downtown and the ocean, is already a popular gathering place, and it should become more of a magnet when the latest subway station opens across the street in early May 2026. Zumthor’s building will continue to stir debate, but it’s likely to enjoy broad appeal, and it could serve as an alternative model for museums that are fixated on growth.

lacma.org

Much of California's architectural legacy is rooted in the midcentury and, in particular, the city's wealth of modernist houses. Southern California has always been among the most architecturally progressive parts of the USA, especially since the 1920s, when Los Angeles experienced a golden era with the birth of the movie and entertainment industry. Linked to this, modernist architecture and design became a catalyst for a new modern lifestyle.

Explore the modernist houses of Los Angeles

It was in Los Angeles, where, from the 1920s to the 1960s, designers and architects transformed the ideas of the European avant-garde to fit the climate and environment of the American West. From the modern bungalows of Greene & Greene and the very first modernist creations of Irving Gill at the beginning of the 20th century to the pioneering and now-iconic houses of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, Los Angeles became one of the most important places for architectural experimentation, even before the Second World War.

A history of modernist houses of Los Angeles

It was in the 1950s, especially, that the city became a symbol of the American dream – a new American society of prosperity for the middle class. A specific style of midcentury modernism, based on the ideas of the Bauhaus and the rationalisation of design and architecture, was born here after the Second World War, fuelled by the country's rapid economic growth. The main aim of the modernists was to create a clear, universal system of manufacturing and building for both products and construction, which would provide the components for elevated, modern living. The Case Study House program, a series of commissions for forward-thinking homes run by the Arts and Architecture magazine, and the architects involved in it, were central to this mission.

However, more thoughts and experiments, beyond the minimalist modernism of the Case Study House program, emerged at that time. More significant strands of this movement, including organic architecture and the Hollywood Regency style, were flourishing. Architects, such as John Lautner, built lavish houses representing the American Dream.

Los Angeles beyond modernism

During the late 1960s and 1970s, the modernist dream slowly started winding down to make way for Postmodernism and, in Los Angeles, especially, Deconstructivism. The last, in particular, an experimental movement that challenged the norm, gave birth to architecture giants such as Pritzker-winning architects Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Their work symbolically brought the evolution of 20th-century architecture in Southern California to a close – preparing it for the 21st century that followed.

Tour the modernist houses of Los Angeles

Gamble House

Architect: Greene & Greene
When: 1908

Based in Pasadena, brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene were influential practitioners of the American Arts and Crafts Movement in the early twentieth century. Their residential architecture centres around sophisticated wooden construction in which complex designs were realised through elaborate joinery and framing, partly inspired by traditional Japanese aesthetics. Gamble House in Pasadena is one of their finest works and exemplary of the architects’ style.

Horatio West Court

Architect: Irving Gill
When: 1919

Irving Gill is considered a forgotten pioneer of American modernism – and not only that. His very early interpretations of functionalist principles even overtook some of his progressive European counterparts, such as Josef Hoffmann or Adolf Loos. His small housing complex, West Horatio Court in Santa Monica, highlights the architect‘s ability to connect the historical continuity of colonial and Hispanic influences with orthodox modernist principles.

Spadena House (The Witch's House)

Architect: Harry Oliver
When: 1921

Originally built as offices and a dressing room for Irvin Willat's film studio in Culver City, Spadena House is a whimsical relict of Hollywood's golden age silent movie era. Designed by art director Harry Oliver, the house, which was moved to its present location in 1926, represents a specific movement within Hollywood architecture called Storybook architecture, often influenced by European fairytale stories.

Storer House

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
When: 1924

It was in Los Angeles where architect Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with the Mayan Revival style, which he applied to several house designs during the 1920s. After his success with Hollyhock House, Wright was commissioned by other clients to deliver more glamorous residential designs. In 1923 and 1924, Wright designed four houses in Los Angeles, constructed in precast concrete modules interwoven by steel rods, today known as Textile Block Houses. One of the lesser-known examples is the Storer House.

Victor M. Carter Residence

Architect: Milton J. Black
When: 1935

One of the most celebrated architects of the Streamline Moderne style, in the mid-1930s, Milton J. Black, worked in Los Angeles, where he mainly built private homes with dynamic modern forms, as well as Spanish Colonial Revival residences. This house in Los Feliz demonstrates typical Streamline Moderne features such as white curved walls and expansive corner windows.

Entanza House

Architect: Harwell Hamilton Harris
When: 1937

John Entanza, editor-in-chief of Arts and Architecture Magazine, commissioned architect Harwell Hamilton Harris to build his own house in Pacific Palisades. The house is a unique interpretation of Harris‘s modernism. He was often inspired by the Bay Area Style and Wright‘s organicism, but Entanza's house reveals more Bauhaus and Streamline Moderne influences.

Insley House

Architect: Edith Northman
When: 1940

The much lesser-known, Denmark-born architect Edith Norman was best known for the Union Oil Stations she designed. Insley House, at the foot of the famous Griffith Observatory park, shows masterful finesse in its protruding geometric volumes on a very steep site.

Alexander and Flora Hural House

Architect: Gregory Ain
When: 1940

Gregory Ain is one of the most influential early Californian modernists, interested mainly in low and medium-cost housing. He designed a number of residences, including a house for Alexander and Flora Hural with simple lines and volumes hinting at Ain‘s involvement with the International Style.

Kimpson Nixon House

Architect: Raphael Soriano
When: 1940

Located on Long Beach in Los Angeles, the Kimpson Nixon House was one of the first projects of Californian modernist pioneer Ralph Soriano. He designed the house with a European modernist flavour and looked for inspiration in the early work of Richard Neutra, for whom he had worked.

Mutual Housing Association Development

Architect: Archibald Quincy Jones
When: 1947

In the late 1940s, young architect Archibald Quincy Jones was commissioned to design the Mutual Housing Association Development in Crestwood Hills. From the originally planned 500 houses, only 160 were built, and a fire in 1961 took out about 47. As of today, only 33 remained. In this project, Jones used his typical dynamic approach influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Dawnridge House

Architect: Tony Duquette
When: 1950s onwards

The bizarre world of Tony Duquette is revealed in his Beverly Hills home. This interior designer studied on scholarships at the Chouinard Art Institute and Yale School of Drama. At that time, he also met the socialite and decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who had a background in European classicism and Surrealism. Under her influence, Duquette established himself as a designer, expressing his boundless imagination, as showcased in his only surviving interior.

Morris House and Studio

Architect: Allyn E. Morris
When: 1958

Allyn E. Morris, one of California’s lesser-known but no less important, innovative modernists, built this house and studio for himself in 1958 in the hilly area of Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Standing on a steep slope, from street level, one encounters the red-trimmed brick wall and canopy of the carport. However, the building extends at the back into a three-floor structure descended via a red spiral staircase. With its expansive glass windows, red steel framework and cantilevered roof, Morris’ residence combines sophisticated functionalism and bespoke engineering with an organic approach to spatial layout and vibrant use of colour.

Hunt House

Architect: Craig Ellwood
When: 1957

Craig Ellwood was a highly influential American architect who, in 1953, was one of those commissioned by Arts and Architecture magazine for its Case Study Houses programme. His minimal, slender style of architecture with an emphasis on openness and transparency is exemplary of California modernism. Designed as a weekend residence for its owners, the Hunt House sits over the beach in Malibu and comprises two boxy pavilions elevated above the sand on wooden stilts.

The Jacob and Sophia Karasik Residence

Architect: Lloyd Wright
When: 1961

Located in Beverly Hills, the Karasik House was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright‘s son Lloyd Wright, whose contribution to Los Angeles architecture history is also very important. Obviously influenced by the work of his father, Lloyd Wright designed several residences in Los Angeles using perforated pre-cast blocks. Karasik Residence is one of his last projects.

Kambara Residence

Architect: Richard Neutra
When: 1960

Around the corner from his VDL House, architect Richard Neutra designed a small colony of homes in 1960. One of them is Kambara Residence, which demonstrates Neutra's typical sleek horizontal architecture, synonymous with Los Angeles building culture.

Strick House

Architect: Oscar Niemeyer
When: 1963

Built in 1963, the Strick House in Santa Monica is the only Oscar Niemeyer project in North America. Defined by an open plan interior, large floor-to-ceiling windows and punctuated overhangs, the house lacks Niemeyer‘s signature curves and rather reflects the more typical Californian horizontal lines.

Waxman Residence

Architect: Barry J. Mottif
When: 1964

Little-known architect Barry J. Mottif designed this house for his friend, artist Arlene Waxman, and her husband, Jerry. It was completed in 1964. Located on a steeply sloped site in Studio City, the house features stacked wooden-covered volumes revealing the influence of the organic architecture of John Lautner, whose studio Mottif was an intern in.

Stevens House

Architect: John Lautner
When: 1968

An absolute master of American organic architecture and unconventional residential designs, John Lautner was responsible for some of the best midcentury buildings created in California. Malibu is home to several of his designs. One is this beach house built by Lautner in 1968, the year he realised his famous Elrod House in Palm Springs. The house features two curved concrete shell structures set at opposing orientations.

Kappe Residence

Architect: Ray Kappe
When: 1965–67

Although Ray Kappe was one of the leading Californian modernists, his work remains relatively unknown. The architect, who was also a co-founder of the prestigious Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), became a master in creating spacious residential architecture, focusing his efforts on designing private houses. The Kappe Residence, built for himself and his wife Shelly, is the result of his interest in both the sleek, geometric lines of modernism and the harmony between dwelling and nature, as promoted by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Norton House

Architect: Frank Gehry
When: 1984

Designed in 1984 for artist Lynn Norton and writer William Norton, Norton House is technically not modernist, but rather represents the essence of Gehry‘s pioneering deconstructivist period. Composed of different volumes and materials, the structure is a seemingly chaotic assemblage of rooms with a studio set atop a pillar.

Al Struckus House

Architect: Bruce Goff
When: 1982

With the Al Struckus House, the master of organic architecture, Bruce Goff, left a powerful legacy. His final built project, and his only private residence in California, is a playful but commanding union of space and form. One of the most original architects of his generation, Goff completed the design just before he died in 1982. His client was aeronautical engineer Al Struckus, and the project is set in Woodland Hills.

Schwartz House

Architect: Pierre Koenig
When: 1994

Built in 1994, Schwartz House is an example of the late career of one of the most influential Californian architects, Pierre Koenig. Known mostly for his Case Study House number 22 (Stahl House), Koenig remained loyal to modernist minimalism and structural simplicity until the end of his career.

Sharon Osbourne has listed the Los Angeles home she shared with her late husband, Ozzy Osbourne, for $17 million – eight months after the rock legend's death. The sale marks the end of a decade-long chapter for the family in the exclusive Hancock Park enclave in Los Angeles.

The couple bought the property in 2015 for $11.85 million. They had previously listed it in 2022 – first at $18 million, later reduced to $17.5 million – before withdrawing it when plans for a permanent move to the UK were shelved. It is now being shown to pre-qualified buyers through Carolwood Estates.

Designed in 1929 by architect A.K. Kellogg, the 10,200-square-foot Tudor-style mansion is a piece of Hollywood history. During their time there, the Osbournes undertook a careful restoration, honouring the home's early 20th-century character while introducing modern comforts. Sharon reportedly found the original kitchen ‘too modern’ and had it redesigned to better reflect the property's heritage.

Interiors lean into a Mediterranean revival spirit – grand, layered and theatrical. A curved staircase rises from the entrance foyer beneath an enormous chandelier, while richly detailed ceilings, ornate fireplaces, wood-panelled rooms and antique furnishings create an aristocratic, eccentric atmosphere.

The lower-level screening room is cloaked in red velvet, channelling old Hollywood. It features a remarkable fireplace covered in celebrity signatures, including one from Elvis Presley, added when the home was owned by radio host Frank Bresee. Spaces like this serve almost as private archives of the property’s star-studded history.

Elsewhere, a chef's kitchen opens to a family room and breakfast area, and flows outward to a covered outdoor entertaining space with a pizza oven and barbecue. Lush gardens surround a swimming pool finished in hand-laid mosaic tile. Upstairs, four ensuite bedrooms are anchored by a primary suite with dual bathrooms, dressing rooms and generous closets. A self-contained guest apartment sits above the garage, and an elevator connects all floors.

The overall effect is not the sleek, glass-heavy aesthetic of today's luxury market, but a European-inspired estate with an unmistakable rock-and-roll soul.

The Hancock Park mansion is listed with Carolwood Estates for $17 million

Take your shoes off, because the lavish Los Angeles mansion shown in Sabrina Carpenter’s new ‘House Tour’ music video is for sale.

The six-bedroom, 10-bathroom party palace at 1851 Stanley Avenue, dubbed the Disco Volante Estate, is located on a hillside lot in the Hollywood Hills. The modernist-inspired mansion – which boasts an infinity pool and a subterranean nightclub – was completed in 2023 by Vantage Design Group and designed with a party-loving client in mind. ‘The only budget was there was no budget,’ the home’s listing reads.

The 13,000 sq ft house, therefore, provided the ideal setting for Carpenter’s Bling Ring-esque ‘House Tour’ video from her recent album Man’s Best Friend. In the video, the singer and her accomplices (played by actors Margaret Qualley, who co-directed the video with Carpenter, and Madelyn Cline) frolic around the property, tiptoe up the floating stairs, take a dip in the infinity pool, shimmy inside the massive walnut-clad walk-in closet and jump on the primary suite’s circular bed.

According to the house’s listing, the design was inspired, in part, by Brazilian modernism and features a sumptuous palette of African slate, which clads both exterior and interior walls; green onyx, which surrounds the double-height front entry, the fireplace and a freestanding bathtub; walnut and travertine.

Other jaw-dropping details include the pristine swimming pool, a sunken pool terrace lounge with a firepit; and an outdoor kitchen. The feature that’s most worthy of a pop superstar? A secret, lower-level nightclub, complete with mirrored panels, a tiger onyx DJ booth and a cluster of disco balls

The estate is currently on the market for $36.8 million. Or, if you choose to lease, it will set you back $165,000 a month. You'll have to bring your own pineapple air-freshener, though.

If there’s one thing that Wallpaper* does well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence. Here are the best new houses of March 2026.

A house between mountains

Set between Brazil’s Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueira mountains, Valley House is architect Beatriz Meyer’s family home. Built on a rural plateau, the single-storey, horizontal structure is designed to blend into its landscape rather than dominate it. It’s divided into three volumes using glass, stone and carbonised timber, balancing transparency and solidity, while open-plan interiors emphasise light, airflow and connection to nature with pergolas and apertures framing views. The house embodies Meyer’s vision of calm, sustainable living, rooted in place.

Read about it here.

A Gujarat behemoth

Amaltash, a 12,000 sq ft home in Navsari, India, combines technical precision with cultural meaning. Designed by Veeram Shah, it embodies Le Corbusier’s idea of the home as both a ‘machine for living’ and a space rich in symbolic meaning. Climate-responsive design drives its form, with solar strategies shaping layout, patios cooling interiors, and large windows – the house operates as a micro-ecosystem, with rainwater harvesting and greenery replacing lawns. At the same time, it draws on Gujarati traditions. Crafted with local materials and artisan collaborations, Amaltash merges sustainability and heritage.

Read about it here.

A Canadian forest retreat

Nestled in British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, the Passive House Forest Retreat is a highly sustainable home designed to rigorous environmental standards. Its treehouse-like structure sits lightly on a forested slope, featuring a cantilevered volume that frames expansive views while creating a sheltered space below. Dark cladding and natural materials allow it to blend with its surroundings, while precise construction ensures top-tier energy performance. Interiors, meanwhile, complement the architecture with refined detailing and sculptural lighting.

Read about it here.

An unusual floorplan

Trim House in Vilnius, Lithuania, is a striking triangular residence shaped by unexpected planning restrictions. Originally designed larger, the project was reduced by 40 per cent after new regulations limited building size. Rather than compromise, architect Robert Konieczny reimagined the design into a compact, angular form centred around a courtyard. A spiral staircase leads to upper-level bedrooms and a terrace, while expanded outdoor space improves daylight and connection to the surroundings. The enforced ‘trimming' ultimately enhanced the project, proving constraints can inspire innovative architectural solutions.

Read about it here.

A modernist landmark

Designed in 1946 by Rudolph Schindler, the Kallis-Sharlin Residence is a modernist hillside home in Los Angeles. Built into a slope overlooking the San Fernando Valley, its layered volumes, terraces and glass walls blur indoor and outdoor boundaries, and distinctive features include a butterfly roof, clerestory lighting and rich materials like mahogany and Douglas fir. Recently restored and listed for sale at $6.35 million, this cultural monument stands as a lasting example of a modernist architecture that harmonises innovation, landscape and human experience.

Read about it here.

A bright red villa

Villa Jevany in the Czech Republic boldly contrasts its forest setting with a vivid red façade. Designed by Architektura, the house intentionally stands out rather than blending in, creating a dialogue between man-made form and nature. Built into a sloping site, it appears single-storey from the road but reveals additional levels below. Inside, a central staircase leads to a spacious living area with forest views, while irregular windows reference abstract art. Divided into active and quiet zones, the home balances striking visual identity with functional, family-oriented design.

Read about it here.

A timber house

Orchard House in Cheshire exemplifies thoughtful rural architecture. Designed by Studio Bark under strict UK planning rules, the home demonstrates exceptional design quality while remaining modest and energy-efficient. Its S-shaped plan spans two levels, with living spaces elevated for views across a restored orchard. Timber construction, passive design strategies and local materials reduce environmental impact, including parquet flooring made from a tree on-site. Over time, the house has blended into its landscape, aided by weathered cladding and revived planting, now representing a balance between contemporary, sustainable living and deep connection to place.

Read about it here.

A traditional Kyoto residence

House in Narutaki is a sensitive renovation of a traditional Sukiya-style home in Kyoto by kooo architects. Respecting strict preservation norms, the design maintains the building’s historic character while adapting it for modern living. Original tatami spaces were reconfigured into three flowing zones, including a garden room and connecting passage, while natural materials, sliding doors and handcrafted details preserve cultural authenticity. The result is a calm, minimalist home that honours Japanese tradition while providing a refined, contemporary living experience.

Read about it here.

A Jacques Couëlle-designed home

This organic modernist home near Cannes, originally designed by Jacques Couëlle in the 1960s, has been carefully refreshed by Miriam Frowein Interiors. Distinctive for its sculptural, fluid forms, the house exemplifies Couëlle’s ‘architecture-sculpture’. The renovation respects his vision, using organic shapes, earthy tones and handcrafted elements throughout, as well as mid-century-inspired furnishings to complement rather than compete with the architecture. The design approach allows the building’s expressive form to remain central while enhancing comfort and livability for contemporary use.

Read about it here.

A hidden island escape

Euthea, a house on the Greek island of Meganisi, is designed to disappear into its landscape. Created by Ateno Architecture Studio, it is partially buried and covered by earth, making it nearly invisible from above. As the first structure on its peninsula, the project prioritises minimal environmental impact – built with local stone and earthy tones, it blends seamlessly with its surroundings. Interiors are arranged to frame sea views, enhancing the sense of isolation and immersion in nature. Even functional elements, like a brass drainage pipe, are treated poetically, reinforcing the home’s quiet, thoughtful integration.

Read about it here.

Popular Japanese-Brazilian global concept Sushisamba has opened next to the Kimpton La Peer in the West Hollywood Design District. The multi-level outdoor space and an intimate indoor private dining room are a departure from the other incarnations of Sushisamba in London, Dubai, Singapore, Milan, and beyond.

Wallpaper* dines at Sushisamba Los Angeles

The mood: Energetic, design-forward patio

Designed by Dizon Collective, a jaw-dropping open-air entrance opens into a central courtyard with over a dozen booths and tables across two levels. At one end sits a large circular bar; at the other, a stage for live performances and DJs. Pops of orange run throughout: from bar-lounge sofas to seating in the main dining area, which is set against brightly painted wall murals by Long Beach surfer and artist Steve Fawley, whose wave-like strokes bring bursts of primary colour. A bubblegum-pink wall sculpture by Brazilian artist Daniel Boccato adds a playful contrast.

Paying homage to Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, the space features lush greenery outdoors, but don’t overlook the intimate indoor area. Here, a private elevator and dedicated VIP entrance lead to a secluded dining room with hand-painted, textured gold-leaf wallpaper, alongside a sushi bar and robata grill counter. Overhead, globe lights in varying shapes by Neal Studio in San Diego complete the look.

The food: Japanese, Peruvian, and Brazilian mix

Led by executive chef Maxwell Terheggen and Corporate Chef John Um, the three kitchen concepts span a robata grill, sushi master, and Peruvian ceviche specialities. Top starters – perfect at the cocktail bar – include yellowtail taquitos, crisp mini shells filled with fish in a spicy ají panca sauce, and green bean tempura. Skewers are made for sharing, ranging from seabass to filet mignon, served over chunky Peruvian corn kernels.

The signature sushi rolls are generously sized with inventive combinations. The standout is the Samba LA Roll, created exclusively for this location, featuring Japanese A5 Wagyu, soft-shell crab tempura, chestnut purée, tomato chimichurri, and a balsamic soy reduction. Purists, meanwhile, may prefer to keep it simple with sashimi, nigiri, or hand rolls. For something more substantial, the Brazilian seafood stew is ideal for sharing, brimming with shrimp, squid, sea bass, mussels, and clams in a rich blend of coconut milk and dendê oil, served with chimichurri rice.

Meanwhile, the bar menu is overseen by mixology veteran Devon Espinosa, who brings tropical, frothy, and fruity pina colada-type concoctions, along with new spins on stronger negroni and paloma-style cocktails. There are also non-alcoholic offerings featuring homemade Brazilian lemonade or matcha over a cooling long block of ice.

Sushisamba Los Angeles is located at 639 N La Peer Dr, West Hollywood, CA 90069, United States

Basic.Space.LA returns to Los Angeles for an invitation-only shopping experience through 29 March with a variety of things one might find at a curated design event. There’s also one thing you normally won’t: a full Paul Rudolph house for sale.

Rudolph’s Walker Guest House was constructed in 1952 on Sanibel Island in Florida and remained there until 2019, when it was purchased by art collector Peter Galliaert. The house was moved to Yucca Valley, California where it’s remained in storage until this rare appearance.

Basic.Space offered an exceptional centerpiece to its first iteration last year, a Jean Prouvé gas station shipped from France. Jesse Lee, founder of Basic.Space, explained, 'When we were planning for year two, we wanted something that couldn’t be less impressive than last year.' He recalls meeting with Galliaert and telling him, ‘I would love to showcase this and possibly sell it.’

Upon receiving Galliaert’s blessing, the 650 sq ft home, made primarily of plywood, was essentially cut in half, put into shipping containers and reassembled on a plaza outside of the Pacific Design Center. The home can be yours for $2 million.

The Walker Guest house was an early landmark in Rudolph’s career, an exemplar of his crisp but airy Florida work before he turned to complex concrete in northern climates. The house has often been leagued with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth and Philip Johnson’s Glass houses . It is rigorously geometric and yet more adaptable and eccentric than either. Its wooden exoskeleton (doubled to look like steel profiles, but actually humble wood) blurs the boundaries between inside and out while also providing a frame for full-window length wooden shutters, which can be raised to provide four ad hoc porticos, or lowered to offer privacy. Highly nautical 35 kg cast ‘cannonballs; serve as counterweight to each of those shutters.

Architects Raha Talebi and Paul Vantieghem were enlisted to plot out the reassembly and rehabilitation of the house for the temporary installation. As Talebi explains, 'Our task was really to make sure it’s as well aligned as it was in 1953 even for the temporary install.' Some of their remediation is designed to last; they noticed that the cannonballs had contributed to slight buckling of the outrigger beams so they integrated steel plates to mitigate this.

They didn’t paint the wood connecting the two halves, a slight nod to the fact that the house is only temporarily being reassembled here. Most interventions were designed to be faithful to the original: ‘The one thing that we could do to inherit qualities from its position in Florida is to just respect the orientation. So it’s placed at the Pacific Design Center in exactly the way it was in Florida,’ Vantieghem explains.

There is also a more unusual consultant on the project: A$AP Rocky. The rapper, producer and founder of the interior design studio HOMMEMADE is providing additional decor to the house, adding, as Lee explained ‘contemporary flair while respecting the historic interior.’ These pieces include a Memphis Carlton bookcase, a Pesce dining chair set, and a Kris Van Assche bronze. It’s part of broader effort to mix up various ages and types of design around the house, from classic cars staged by LÁrt de l'automobile around the house to contemporary streetwear, musical instruments, classic and new furniture, and much else.

It’s an unlikely setting for a Rudolph house, one which casts not just it, but everything around it in a different light. Lee explained, ‘If you’re a die-hard Paul Rudolph fan you might be following this but 99 percent of people coming to this might have never seen a Paul Rudolph House. It’s all about contextualizing among other things we have.’

Michelin-starred Swedish chef Marcus Jernmark, who made his mark at Aquavit in New York, has opened the doors to his first stateside restaurant. Lielle, which takes its name from Jernmark’s daughter, sits in the heart of Beverlywood, right behind the new Cameo Beverly Hills hotel.

Wallpaper* dines at Lielle, Los Angeles

The mood: date night in a wine cave

Designed in partnership with Lovers Unite (Bar Etoile in Melrose Hill), the 42-seat subterranean space is lined with snug wine-toned leather banquettes and custom cherry wood tables – make sure you are dining with someone you don’t mind sitting close to. The vaulted ceilings are lined with cork and vintage Scandinavian lighting, which sets the tone of fine European craftsmanship but with a laid-back, SoCal sensibility and an upbeat mixed soundtrack of global pop hits. Jernmark’s wife, Andrea, also collaborated with Lovers Unite on the design, including handcrafted details showcased in her hand-sewn linens and kintsugi ceramics.

The food: best of California ingredients with a European touch

This is a four-course tasting menu crafted by a Michelin three-star chef. However, don’t expect overly formal service; instead, you can look forward to a relaxed, family-style dining experience. The California Bistronomy menu changes with the seasons, but one consistent highlight is the bread program. According to Chef Jernmark, ‘It’s the programme we have been working on the most.’

The miso sourdough is salted and fermented for 36 hours before being served with fresh butter. Each Monday, the ‘milk man’ delivers the ingredients, and then the kitchen works for two hours to churn and paddle the butter to achieve a creamy consistency. You’ll also find butter featured in an emulsion dip served with fresh radishes, providing a crisp contrast. Other dishes may include an artichoke salad dipped in lemon water before serving, or grilled abalone served over Luna rice from Sacramento, complemented by a fermented mushroom sauce and fried Brussels sprouts topped with Beluga caviar.

For pasta lovers, the spaghetti features hand-cut charred noodles finished in a sauce made with yellow tomatoes and Girl & Dug Farm yuzu zest, topped with Santa Barbara sea urchin.

For dessert, you can enjoy a creation that lies somewhere between a brioche and a bread pudding. This dish is layered with caramelised pumpkin seeds, honeycomb, tea, and sea buckthorn sorbet, and is served alongside ‘No Bad Vibes’ small buns baked with cardamom sugar, cream, Indonesian rum, and black tea.

Lielle is located at 9575 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90035, United States

Rudolph Schindler, like many of his contemporaries, championed a philosophy of harmonising architecture with the natural environment. Few projects embody this ideal as vividly as the Kallis-Sharlin Residence – a modernist gem that, from the outside, looks a bit like a treehouse. Now on the market for $6,350,000, it remains a striking testament to Schindler’s vision.

Designed in 1946 for artist and film art director Mischa Kallis, the residence is dramatically embedded into a hillside overlooking the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Its layered volumes, cascading terraces and expansive glass walls trace the contours of the land, dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior.

Inside, the home is defined by dynamic geometries, unconventional angles and a fluid spatial arrangement that encourages movement – all hallmarks of Schindler’s work. One of its most distinctive features is the butterfly roof, whose clerestory openings bathe the interiors in soft daylight, lending each space a dappled, constantly shifting atmosphere.

Schindler’s use of rich, natural materials – mahogany and Douglas fir across walls, ceilings and built-in furnishings – imbues the interiors with warmth and texture. Outside, grape-stake cladding helps the residence blend effortlessly into its wooded hillside setting while enhancing a sense of privacy.

Beyond its architectural pedigree, the home offers an impressive array of amenities. Four fireplaces anchor the principal living spaces, while a spa-like steam shower and mahogany soaking tub evoke the feel of a private retreat. A glass-enclosed office, private bocce court and a swimmer’s pool with adjoining jacuzzi further enrich the property’s appeal.

Designated as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #860, the Kallis-Sharlin Residence underwent a meticulous multi-year restoration between 2017 and 2022, led by acclaimed designer Barbara Bestor and architect Jeff Fink in collaboration with current owners Susan Orlean and John Gillespie. Orlean, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book, was famously portrayed by Meryl Streep in Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation.

The home’s integration with the landscape, combined with its architectural ingenuity and careful restoration, ensures its continued relevance – not merely as a historical artefact, but as an exploration of how architecture can coexist with the natural world.

The Kallis-Sharlin Residence is listed with Carolwood Estates in partnership with Knight Frank.

There is a physical quality to Amoako Boafo’s paintings that distinguishes them immediately within contemporary portraiture. His figures hold a composure that recalls the long history of painted portraiture, though the surfaces that describe them remain unmistakably contemporary. Skin is not brushed into being through careful layering of paint; instead, Boafo works directly with his hands, pressing pigment onto canvas with his fingers so that gesture and contact remain visible across the surface.

That decision emerged through experimentation early in his practice, though it has since become central to the way his portraits articulate presence and individuality. The technique allows the body of the artist to remain visible within the work, creating a direct correspondence between the act of painting and the depiction of the sitter. Boafo reflects on the method with clarity: “When I started painting with my fingers, I learned to trust myself and my process more and learned to love and appreciate my paintings differently.” The intimacy of that process continues to shape the works' atmosphere today.

The immediacy of touch gives Boafo’s portraits their distinct material character, though it also produces something more conceptual. Each painting appears aware of its own provisional nature, as if the image might still evolve in the presence of the artist. 'I developed a more intimate connection to my work,' he explains. 'My paintings that surround me look like I could always improve them, change or adjust them. It’s a reflection of my life, there is always room for improvement.' Rather than presenting identity as fixed, the paintings register identity as something in motion, responsive to experience and time.

Boafo’s practice has continued to expand beyond the canvas, particularly in the spatial environments that have framed his recent exhibitions. His current exhibition in Los Angeles, presented at Roberts Projects in collaboration with architect and designer Glenn DeRoche of DeRoche Projects, extends this interest through an installation that reconstructs the physical architecture of his studio in Accra. The exhibition places a group of new paintings within this recreated environment, inviting viewers to experience the work within the spatial conditions that shape its production.

The decision to reconstruct the studio in Los Angeles is not a theatrical gesture. It reflects Boafo’s broader interest in collapsing the perceived distance between where art is made and where it is exhibited. The exhibition, therefore, functions as both presentation and translation, bringing the atmosphere of Accra into dialogue with the international gallery context. The approach builds on ideas developed in his London exhibition at Gagosian last year, where architectural intervention similarly framed the paintings and foregrounded the social and spatial context in which they were produced.

Although Boafo’s profile has expanded internationally in recent years, the artist has remained based in Ghana, a decision that continues to inform both the psychology and the visual language of his work. His connection to place is neither symbolic nor strategic; instead, it operates as a daily framework through which relationships, community, and observation are sustained. 'I was born and raised in Ghana, so it’s only natural that I moved back to my base,' he says. 'Living and working here reminds me of where I come from, how continually inspired I am by my people, and how invested I am in building my community. This is reflected in what and how I paint.'

That sense of responsibility to place has also shaped Boafo’s growing involvement in initiatives that support emerging artists. Later this year, he will act as the inaugural mentor for the Maison Perrier Art Prize, an international competition designed to support new artistic voices through financial support, mentorship and a residency programme based in Accra. The prize includes a €40,000 award, a six-week residency and the opportunity for the selected artist to collaborate on a limited-edition packaging project.

Boafo describes his decision to participate in the initiative in practical terms, framing mentorship as an extension of the work he has already been undertaking within Ghana’s artistic community. 'I enjoy being the first one to do things; that was persuasive enough,' he says. The reasoning also extends beyond the symbolic value of the role. 'It’s important to invest in artists with money but also with time and resources. Working with Maison Perrier in that capacity is a continuation of what I’ve been fortunate to do over the past few years.'

Central to the programme is the decision to locate the residency in Accra, a move that reflects Boafo’s ongoing efforts to position the city as an active site of international artistic exchange rather than solely a source of emerging talent. Through initiatives such as dot.ateliers, the residency programme he founded in Ghana, Boafo has already begun developing structures that allow artists, curators and patrons to work directly within the local creative ecosystem.

For the artist, the intention is clear. 'I want Ghana to be part of the conversation when it comes to places of influences in the art world,' he explains. The ambition extends beyond recognition of talent. 'Ghana is a source of talent and, more importantly, a trusted source for such exchanges and collaborations.' In this context, the Maison Perrier residency becomes another step within a broader effort to develop the country as a meaningful point of connection within the global art landscape.

Boafo often speaks about legacy in terms that prioritise continuity over individual recognition. For him, the impact of a practice is measured through the networks, opportunities and institutions it leaves behind. 'Whatever is done intentionally serves the work of legacy,' he says. 'By consistently strengthening my community through building spaces, networks and careers, I believe that many more will take the initiative to either build upon what I have started or create their own.'

That perspective places his work within a larger framework that moves beyond portraiture alone. The paintings remain the most visible expression of his practice, though they exist within a broader system of cultural investment that includes architecture, mentorship and institutional development. Boafo’s figures continue to command attention through their presence and composure, yet the wider project increasingly centres on how that presence can translate into long-term support for artistic communities.

Applications for the 2026 Maison Perrier Art Prize close on 31 March 2026. Emerging artists can apply through the Maison Perrier website.

For close to four decades, the Baldi family has been a force in LA’s local Italian dining scene. From Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica to e.Baldi in Beverly Hills, the family-owned and operated business, could easily rest on its laurels. Instead, owner and chef Edoardo ‘Edo’ Baldi has evolved again, opening a deeply personal, upscale Tuscan steakhouse inside the flagship Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills.

Wallpaper* dines at Baldi at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills

The mood: Tuscan estate in Beverly Hills

The entrance sets the tone for family and community gatherings, where a mural depicting an Italian dinner party scene, designed by Drawing Room NYC, anchors the space. The transformation of the former cavernous Jean-Georges restaurant was carried out by Ezequiel Farca Studio.

The 180-seat restaurant – including a bar, main dining room, enclosed patio, and private dining room – manages to feel warm and intimate thanks to woven lanterns, leather booths, deep woods, terracotta, and rich natural tones. Taking inspiration from chef Edo’s home in the Chianti countryside, not far from the Tuscan coast where he was born and learned to cook from nonnas, olive trees line the different spaces.

The food: Tuscan spirit with plenty of prime beef

The Tuscan cooking philosophy is simple: less is more. Yet that is not what first comes to mind when perusing the steak section of the menu. An impressive array of USDA Prime beef from some of the top ranches, alongside Wagyu cuts from Japan to Australia, is minimally seasoned with herbs and spices before being cooked over an olive-wood open flame, allowing the meat to shine.

Standout pastas include lobster linguine with spicy tomato and the swoon-worthy sweet corn tortellini with mascarpone and truffle butter. For a lighter option, try Dover sole with lemon sauce, the fan-favourite sliced artichokes with fennel and mild pecorino, or chicken meatballs with Niçoise olives. Plan ahead for dessert if you want to order the pancake soufflé for two with rum and Grand Marnier sauce, as it takes 20-30 minutes to prepare.

For a more casual evening at the bar, some of e.Baldi’s classic dishes come into play, including thin, crispy-crust pizzas and lightly fried shiitake mushrooms with pecorino tartufato – a 36-year Baldi tradition. Wherever you take a seat, set the tone with a citrusy spritz made with Malfy Limone gin, limoncello, and Prosecco, or the Negroni Classico di Baldi with Malfy Gin Originale, St. George Bruto Americano, and Carpano Antica vermouth. Alternatively, opt for a glass from the wine programme, which spans Italy’s most celebrated regions.

Baldi at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills is located at 9850 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90210, United States

In Los Angeles, Hollywood is a neighbourhood just as much as it's a dream. Even if you haven't snagged an invite to the 98th Academy Awards, held at The Dolby Theatre for the last 25 years, there are still plenty of dazzling venues in Hollywood and beyond to experience the magic of the silver screen. Whether you're looking to see a blockbuster or take in an indie flick, these are the very best independent cinemas in Los Angeles.

Six of the best independent movie theaters in Los Angeles

The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood

This glorious Egyptian Revival theatre opened in 1922 with the premier of Robin Hood, starring silent film star Douglas Fairbanks. Over the decades, the theatre fell into disrepair but was restored to its original glory three years ago by architect Peyton Hall. 'Entertainment architecture' is how Hall described the historic building, with its impressive forecourt, coloured murals, concrete pharaoh heads and golden sunburst design resembling an Egyptian necklace. If you're not captivated by the Egyptian Theatre's design, you'll inevitably be drawn to the films it screens: it's just one of five cinemas in the US with the ability to run rare nitrate film.

Where to talk about the movie after: Swirl a martini glass at Musso & Frank Grill just steps away, where audiences have been convening in its red leather booths since the theatre’s inception.

The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood is located at 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028, United States

Gardena Cinema

Not much has changed for Gardena Cinema since it was completed in 1946 beyond its name. First opened as the Park Theatre, the Gardena features 800 seats and just a single screen. It remains family-owned-and-operated by Judy Kim, who took over from her parents. The theatre’s most distinguishing feature is the marquee in mismatched red, blue and orange lettering, revised weekly by hand. Tightly-packed titles demonstrate the eclectic programming, occasionally adhering to a theme. Urban Thursday, the second Thursday of every month, is dedicated to films celebrating LA. Y2K Fridays, the third Friday of every month, practically applies pink lip gloss through the screen with 2000s-era favourites.

Where to talk about the movie after: The neighbourhood is home to a plethora of restaurants imbued with warmth. Sushi Sonagi is an omakase that leaves diners inspired, while Gardena Bowl Coffee Shop prioritises the comfort of Hawaiian dishes inside a bowling alley.

Gardena Cinema is located at 14948 Crenshaw Blvd, Gardena, CA 90249, United States

The Lido Theater

Located just a two-minute stroll from the ocean, this 1939 Art Deco structure in Newport Beach is accentuated by Streamline Moderne motifs, pastel Catalina tiles, and marine life murals that wrap the auditorium. The programming is family-friendly, emphasising comedies, romances and the classics.

Where to talk about the movie after: Located a few steps closer to the Pacific, The Bear Flag Fish Company serves ceviche, poke and sushi as fresh as it comes.

The Lido Theater is located at 3459 Via Lido, Newport Beach, CA 92663, United States

Landmark’s Nuart Theatre

Rely on this West LA arthouse cinema for a good time. The movie palace opened in 1930 and is known for its dazzling three-panel Art Deco marquee. But in 1986, the theatre pivoted to showcase indie, documentary and foreign films. The Nuart Theatre also reliably shows cult classics, including raucous screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Dressing up, of course, is encouraged.

Where to talk about the movie after: Take a seat at one of the many wonderful Japanese restaurants along Sawtelle Boulevard, such as Kojima or Tsujita.

Landmark’s Nuart Theatre is located at 11272 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025, United States

Ojai Playhouse

Recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, this Mission Revival single-screen house is situated at the four corners of downtown Ojai, California. Constructed in 1914 to show silent films, the building features a stucco exterior and terra cotta tiles. Due to Ojai's strict dark sky light ordinances, the cinema relies on krypton gas rather than neon to light the marquee. But that doesn't make the sign – or the theatre's programming – any less illuminating. Pop by on any given night to take in everything from new indie films to '90s favourites. One attraction not to be missed: David Lynch’s personal La Marzocco GS3 espresso machine in the lobby.

Where to talk about the movie after: Next door, Rory’s Place has cemented itself as a leader in Ojai’s culinary scene with an emphasis on local seafood, produce and wines.

Ojai Playhouse is located at 145 E Ojai Ave, Ojai, CA 93023, United States

Vidiots

Though its name has changed multiple times over the years – The Yosemite Theatre, The Eagle Theatre and briefly, The Pussycat Theater– this pink-tinged space has cultivated community in Northeast LA since 1929. Vidiots Foundation, which first opened as an alternative video store in Santa Monica in 1985, took over the building just before the pandemic, rehabilitating its Juliet balconies and original proscenium arch around the screen. Rent a DVD down the hall from the theatre or dance in front of the screen as a musical or concert film rolls.

Where to talk about the movie after: Discuss that cliffhanger at one of Eagle Rock’s beloved bars, either savouring a bright aperitif at Capri Club, or sipping a refreshing lager between pinball games at Walt’s.

Vidiots is located at 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041, United States

In the heart of Los Angeles's Koreatown, one might not be expecting to find a restaurant where traditional Italian classics are recreated through the lens of Korean ingredients, but that unique culinary mash-up is exactly what you will find at Lapaba – a portmanteau of La Pa(sta) Ba(r). As the brainchild of owner and beloved local restaurateur Robert Kim, who was inspired by Korean café culture and Italian pasta bars to create a unifying concept that is simultaneously unexpected and yet familiar.

Kim also had help from the ‘Queen of Pasta’ Nancy Silverton, of Michelin-starred Osteria Mozza and Pizzeria Mozza fame, who worked as a consultant on the project. More Mozza alumni came aboard, with husband-and-wife chef duo McKenna Lelah and Matthew Kim bringing this delicious Korean-Italian eatery to life.

Wallpaper* dines at Lapaba, Los Angeles

The mood: a pasta bar with a Korean soul

George Kelly, founder of Kelly Architects, began working on the project with Robert Kim in 2021, following his first visit to the abandoned historic building, which required a complete ground-floor renovation.

The furniture and interiors were produced in Italy by Costagroup in collaboration with the architects. A central counter spans the room in fluted oak, topped with polished Carrara marble. Large-format stone flooring, smooth plaster walls, and vertically-laid ceramic tiles complete the palette. The lighting scheme combines sculptural pendant fixtures that highlight the materials and architectural geometries – including an interior window, framed in emerald green tile, where diners can see their pasta being made.

Rather than relying on artwork, the space draws expression from its architectural textures and custom details, from the bamboo-clad bar front to a rope-like light fixture hanging from the ceiling. Keepsakes and decorative objects line the shelves, while a wall display of more than 300 bottles anchors the bar at the front of the restaurant.

The food: a seamless blend of two of the world’s most compelling cuisines

Kim has been instrumental in bringing a series of food and beverage concepts to this pocket on the western edge of Koreatown. At Lapaba, the pasta-making process is fully on display, from sheeting and cutting to hanging.

Classic pasta forms the menu's foundation, but with a Korean twist. There's orecchiette with sausage, cheesy corn agnolotti, and the option to elevate dishes with an Orra caviar supplement of sustainably sourced Siberian sturgeon.

Elsewhere, Italian staples are reworked with Korean ingredients – supplì filled with kimchi and Spam; rice cakes dressed in cacio e pepe; and Korean fried chicken lifted with Calabrian chili heat. To finish, opt for the black truffle soft serve or a line-up of soju-matcha cocktails, options that demonstrate Lapaba's irreverent blend of precision and playfulness.

Lapaba is located at 558 S Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90020, United States

If there’s one thing that Wallpaper* does well, it’s houses – spotlighting architecturally arresting gems from around the globe and spanning the spectrum of modern design. Our inboxes are overflowing with news of the world’s most boundary-pushing architectural projects, and we strive to bring you the very best.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence. Here are the best new houses of February 2026.

A leafy Hampstead home

A timber-clad extension in Hampstead, London, immerses a family in nature, fully opening onto a lush garden to create a flexible indoor-outdoor living space. The architect, Mata, worked carefully around mature trees, collaborating with arboriculturists to protect roots while extending the home’s ground floor. Glazed walls, tapered stainless-steel undersides and bespoke furniture blur the boundary between interior and exterior, while thoughtfully-crafted terraces and furnishings ensure functionality without compromising the natural setting.

Read about it here.

A minimalist Spanish house

In Gijón, Asturias, Casa Guadalupe by Hanghar blends minimalist aesthetics with prefabricated industrial methods. Its lightweight steel frame and modular panels allowed rapid assembly – in just 48 hours – on stilts, reducing site disruption and preserving the landscape. The house follows the terrain, opening to panoramic rural vistas while maintaining a restrained, methodical architectural language. The project demonstrates a flexible, sustainable approach to 21st-century housing, balancing precision, spatial quality and landscape connection while challenging conventional ideas about prefab homes.

Read about it here.

An Australian architect’s home

Stephen Collier’s home in Scarborough, south of Sydney, sits on a triangular plot near a railway, organised around a central courtyard. Constructed from steel framing, fibrocement walls and tiled floors, it features movable furniture and joinery that allow spaces to be reshaped according to season or activity. The courtyard, open or enclosed, includes a Teppanyaki stove and Japanese-style bath, connecting indoor living to nature. Elevated on concrete columns with operable hatches, the house is responsive to its bush setting and local climate. Designed over 21 years, it balances privacy, playfulness and immersion in the environment.

Read about it here.

An immersive Nova Scotia residence

Perched on steel stilts between rocky inclines, Omar Gandhi’s East River Residence in Nova Scotia embraces its rugged coastal surroundings. The linear structure frames views of the Atlantic Ocean and surrounding forest, while cedar and metal cladding complement open-plan living, yoga spaces and cosy timbered bedrooms. Expansive windows connect interiors to terraces and patios, fostering a strong sense of connection to the outdoors. This is enhanced by the way that the building follows the site’s natural topography, touching only lightly on the land.

Read about it here.

An icon of British modernism

This month, Six Pillars, a Grade II*-listed home in Dulwich designed by Valentine Harding with Tecton in 1932-34 and restored by John Winter in 2000, came on the market. This classic example of British modernism spans 3,500 sq ft over three storeys, and retains original features such as chevron parquet flooring, steel-framed windows and an art deco fireplace. The angled plan creates fluid living spaces including an open-plan kitchen, principal living room, four bedrooms and a rooftop retreat, while the minimalist façade, clerestory windows and six cylindrical pillars define its iconic profile.

Read about it here.

A modern Utrecht house

In Utrecht, a 1992 house by Mart van Schijndel reimagines elements of a former glass warehouse in bold modernist terms. Awarded the Rietveld Prize and now a municipal monument, the home features a lavender-and-grey plaster façade, two trapezoidal patios and folded plywood furniture designed by the architect. Light floods the open living areas, blurring indoors and outdoors, while a mezzanine suite offers a tranquil escape. The house reflects van Schijndel’s innovative vision and Dutch modernist traditions, and is now awaiting a new custodian.

Read about it here.

A green retreat in Paraguay

‘A Forest in the House’, designed by Equipo de Arquitectura in 2025 on Ypacarai Lake, Paraguay, is a 260 sq m indoor-outdoor retreat inspired by jazz. Three pavilions surround a fenced garden, connected by patios, with the main house containing kitchen, dining and living areas. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors integrate the lush landscape, while concrete floors and roofs create terraces and continuity. Trees are incorporated as design elements, and natural light and wind animate the spaces, resulting in a fluid, playful environment existing in perfect harmony with its tropical surroundings.

Read about it here.

An architect-designed Paris apartment

In Paris’s 11th arrondissement, Cyrus Ardalan renovated a 65 sq m apartment into a minimalist, industrial-leaning home. West-facing light fills an open-plan living area that combines lounge, dining and office zones, connected to a glass-paste kitchen. Two courtyard-facing bedrooms, a shower room and integrated storage maintain the home’s clean lines, while custom plywood furniture and a pivot door conceal or reveal the workspace. The apartment reflects Ardalan’s blend of modernist minimalism, functional architecture and craft-inspired materiality.

Read about it here.

Tradition meets modernity in Ukraine

The Reed Roof Guesthouses in central Ukraine, designed by YOD Group, reinterpret traditional hata-mazanka huts in a contemporary, minimalist style. Each self-contained unit features curved glass facades, tall thatched roofs and concrete cores, creating airy, light-filled spaces, while heat pumps and air conditioning ensure year-round comfort. Inside, organic furniture and tactile carpets connect residents to the surrounding landscape, creating a serene, sensory experience.

Read about it here.

An LA gem on the market

Ray Kappe’s Kappe House (1967) in Pacific Palisades, LA, spans 4,157 sq ft over seven levels on a sloping Rustic Canyon site. Interlocking redwood beams, vertical concrete supports and vast frameless glazing define the midcentury modern home, which includes a double-height living room, glass-walled office, built-in timber furniture, lap pool with spa, sauna, and multiple terraces. The house, which was once described as ‘the greatest house in Southern California’ by the LA Times, was owned by the Kappe family until 2025 and has been listed for $11.5 million.

Read about it here.

'It goes back to who we are as Black people and our story,' says gallerist Tanya Weddemire about 'Here Now and Then', an upcoming Los Angeles art exhibition on the Black Diaspora’s lived realities, memory and enduring legacy. 'And I think our stories are forever evolving, whether then, whether now and whether here.'

Organised by Weddemire’s eponymous New York-based gallery in partnership with Hamilton-Selway Fine Art in LA, the exhibition features work by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gregory Saint Amand, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley and Moses Salihou.

Curated by Weddemire and Ron Valdez, director of Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, the show opens during this year’s Black History Month and coincides with Frieze Los Angeles. We caught up with Weddemire to find out more.

Discover 'Here Now and Then' in Los Angeles

Wallpaper*: Tell us about the artists and artworks featured in the exhibition.

Tanya Weddemire: For this exhibition, we thought of bringing together blue-chip artists, emerging and established artists. When you look at the work of Kehinde Wiley, Julie Mehretu, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, you can see that their work to date has also created a pathway for emerging and established artists in the marketplace, including Candice Tavares and O'Neil Scott, Floyd Strickland, and Gregory Saint Amand.

There is significant connectivity in the work. Jean-Michel Basquiat is of Haitian descent. Gregory Saint Amand is also a Haitian artist. And in his work, you will see he talks about 1804 [the year Haiti declared independence from French colonial rule], which is very prevalent; it's always remembering the Haitian revolution [from 1791 to 1804] but also still paying homage to being a child.

But then you also have O'Neil Scott, who paints from a realistic perspective in finding the light within us. [His] man in the astronaut helmet [alludes] to the Tuskegee Airmen [the first African American military aviators in the United States Air Force] and their mission.

And I think when you look at the work of Candice Tavares and Mickalene Thomas, there's that connectivity of wood. Mickalene Thomas uses a range of mixed-media elements in her work. There's paint, there's probably paper, and there's probably fabric as well. And then in Candice Tavares' work, you see a lot of different exotic woods combined with glass.

I think, with Floyd Strickland and Julie Mehretu, it's also about how they incorporate paint from a textual perspective to a realist perspective. And that is what really brought Ron Valdez and me together to collaborate on this beautiful show.

W*: Can you expand on the show's exploration of what it means to exist in the present moment while carrying the histories, migrations, and inherited narratives of the Black diaspora into the future?

TW: Think about migration, for example, how slaves were brought up from Africa to America. We brought our stories with us as well. [But] our stories were still not being told. So I think at this point, you have these amazing artists that are really talking about those issues, whether it's identity or loss of memory, and bringing those things back and really focusing on the current issues at hand.

Look at Floyd Strickland's piece about Cain and Abel. One was the good son and the other was the bad son, but still, they were both humans. He weaves that into a discussion of the gang situation in LA, and I think for us it's about merging stories and making them current so people can better understand how we, as Black people, are living.

W*: What else should we know about the exhibition?

TW: I want to highlight the essence of collaboration. I think collaboration is very necessary, especially in the art market. [With the invitation from Ron Valdez to stage the exhibition at Hamilton-Selway Fine Art], I have an opportunity to showcase the artists that are represented by my [New York] gallery in Los Angeles. Collaborations help us share our story and message through partnerships and across different locations. That's what I'm really excited about for this particular show: highlighting the connectivity among our artists and working within gallery spaces.

In addition, we wanted to select an organisation we can support, as we are working within the Black Art diaspora. We chose American Friends of Jamaica because they are one of the many non-profits working to support the rebuilding of Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa, so this also has a philanthropic component.

'Here Now and Then' is on view at Hamilton-Selway Fine Art, Los Angeles, from 25 February to 15 March 2026, hamiltonselway.com

tanyaweddemiregallery.org

The art of a good party will be on display during Los Angeles Art Week. Silencio, the subterranean private Parisian club designed by the late David Lynch, is popping up at the West Hollywood EDITION for a three-night residency of curated club nights from 24-26 February.

Just in time for Frieze LA 2026, the residency marks Silencio’s first time in LA – the city that inspired Lynch’s vision for the club as seen onscreen in Mulholland Drive (2001). Invited guests will dance under a ceiling glittered with 400 disco balls to the sounds of iconic English party-starter DJ Harvey, multi-hyphenate DJ-producer VTSS and an unnamed special guest, hosted by LACMA Avant-Garde, Tom of Finland Foundation and BFF-slash-cultural critic podcast How Long Gone (co-host Jason Stewart, who DJs as Them Jeans, will also perform).

'Silencio’s distinct cinematic quality has always felt reminiscent of Hollywood,' says Frank Roberts, vice president of brand experience for W and EDITION Hotels. 'To welcome it to Los Angeles, the city where David Lynch imagined Silencio in the first place, feels like closing a circle. The West Hollywood EDITION was built for moments like this.'

Each of the mid-week festivities will have a distinct energy and atmosphere, ranging from euphoric disco to hard-hitting techno, with an audience made up of members of the contemporary art and creative communities. Like Silencio in Paris, the pop-up at EDITION asks guests to abandon their expectations at the door and head down a conspicuous entrance into a subterranean space that blends the worlds of dream and reality.

It seems like half of Los Angeles migrates to Palm Springs, California this time of year, between events like Modernism Week, the Palm Springs International Film Festival, world-famous tennis matches and music festivals. Now they have another excuse: Beaton's. Located behind its sister eatery, the ever-buzzing Bar Cecil, Beaton's helps to further transform this once-sleepy stretch of town into the place to be.

Wallpaper* dines at Beaton’s at Bar Cecil, Palm Springs

The mood: Chic Parisian salon

Lead partner John Janulis – also the creator of Bar Cecil (with fellow partners Richard Crisman, Jeff Brock and Phillip Conner) and the art-filled Villa Royale hotel – brings a craftsman’s hand to the space. A carpenter by trade, he is responsible for the rich mahogany panelling throughout.

The cascading, tufted red velvet ceiling draws on travels to The Ritz in Paris – delightfully over-the-top – complemented by leopard-print carpet and treescape wallpaper. Vintage Venetian-inspired chandeliers cast a warm glow over a striking black-and-white photograph of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. Nearby, an image of Kate Moss standing on a table in Paris – a favourite of Janulis – mirrors the room’s energy. ‘We actually had Linda Evangelista sitting at that table, right underneath that image, last week,’ he adds.

On any given night, hotelier Jeff Klein (of Sunset Tower and San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood), alongside the likes of Kelly Ripa or James Marsden, might drift in past the front patio – now one of the most requested seating areas. The team has expanded the terrace, wrapping it around the building in a gesture inspired by Los Angeles’ Chateau Marmont.

The food: Bar classics or a full steak affair

Like the interiors, the cocktails carry a sense of occasion. The house Singapore Sling is made with director Paul Feig’s Artingstall’s London Dry Gin, while lead bartender Nick Turner – clad in a pink dinner jacket – treats mixology with near-scientific precision. Ice is imported from Japan in elongated spheres for highballs such as The Portrait in Pink, a clarified strawberry cocktail that takes eight hours to prepare with a dedicated ‘bar scientist’. A Spinzall centrifuge clarifies the liquid – in this case vodka – before kaffir lime leaves are infused using a nitro charger.

A selection of Bar Cecil signatures remains – from deviled eggs to caviar service – but Beaton’s asserts its own identity. Standouts include pigs in blankets filled with Wagyu cocktail franks, spicy duck bao buns and a classic spaghetti Bolognese. After 9 pm, the menu shifts towards late-night indulgence: a prime beef burger with Gruyère and onion demi-glace on brioche, or steak au poivre with shoestring fries, followed by a decadent chocolate mousse with crunchy Valrhona pearls.

As the evening deepens, so too does the soundtrack – moving from alternative '80s and English new wave into hip-hop classics. Many Bar Cecil regulars – from Scarlett Johansson to Jon Hamm – continue the night at Beaton’s, ordering steak tartare, onion tart and another round of elaborate drinks as the atmosphere tips into something more electric.

Beaton’s at Bar Cecil is located at Plaza Del Sol Shopping Center, 1555 S Palm Canyon Dr UNIT F, Palm Springs, CA 92264, United States

The arrival of the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles in 2019 affirmed what many—particularly Angelenos—had known for a while: the California city had risen to become a major hub for global contemporary art. And just like other Frieze iterations around the world, as well as similar large fairs like Art Basel, the event quickly ballooned into a wider cultural moment that spans a week of programming, exhibition openings and across the sprawling metropolis.

The first edition of Frieze LA was held at the Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood, but the annual anchor for LA’s unofficial art week moved to Santa Monica in 2023. This February, the fair returns for its seventh edition and will run from 26 February to 1 March, 2026, with the first two days as VIP previews before opening up to ticketed guests. It will take place alongside several major exhibitions at the city’s top cultural institutions, including the Getty, Hammer Museum, The Broad, and MOCA that visiting art lovers can enjoy while they’re in town. Many LA-based galleries will participate at Frieze, or the concurrent Felix Art Fair, while a handful have planned exhibitions in their own spaces that will open over the same weekend. Here's everything you need to know.

What is Frieze LA?

The renowned contemporary art fair was founded by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the creators of Frieze magazine, and held its first edition in October 2003 in Regent's Park, London. The annual show was later joined by Frieze Masters, dedicated to art created before 2000, and expanded to New York in 2012. The LA edition's debut in 2019 was shortly followed by Seoul in 2022, and the following year, Frieze also acquired The Armory Show in New York, and EXPO Chicago—creating a constellation of events that run throughout the year.

This year, Frieze LA will feature 95 galleries from around the world, with well-known names such as Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, Pace Gallery, White Cube, David Zwirner and many more on the roster. The LA art community will be represented by a large contingent that includes Matthew Brown, Château Shatto, Commonwealth and Council, Anat Ebgi, David Kordansky Gallery, The Pit, Roberts Projects and more. Curator Essence Harden is returning for a third consecutive year to curate the ‘Focus’ section, which includes 15 emerging US-based galleries.

Where is Frieze LA?

For its seventh edition, Frieze LA will take place at the Santa Monica Airport, located two miles inland from the city’s famed beach and pier. A vast temporary tent will be erected in an open-air parking lot to host the gallery booths, and provide a venue for a robust talks program and awards ceremonies. Across the airport campus, a series of site-specific installations and activations will also be free and accessible to the public.

Top things to see during Frieze Los Angeles 2026

Alicja Kwade at 303 Gallery

If there’s one Frieze booth number to bookmark, it’s 303 Gallery’s (B20), where a solo presentation of works by Polish artist Alicja Kwade is bound to be a fair highlight. Kwade’s combinations of richly coloured, almost planetary stone spheres with bronze replicas of everyday objects, like a monobloc plastic chair or a shopping bag. These pieces examine mass consumption and proliferation in today’s society, placing the weight of the world onto its most humble or commonly used items.

Felix Art Fair

Established in 2018 and now in its eighth edition, the Felix Art Fair is taking place 25 February to 1 March at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The fair is considered a more relaxed alternative to Frieze, and will feature 57 galleries that include 18 with a presence in Los Angeles—Megan Mulrooney, Albertz Benda, and Weinstein Gallery amongst them—and over 20 first-time exhibitors. The 2026 fair will also mark the launch of The Felix Podcast, a new audio project hosted by LA-based collector Dean Valentine—who co-founded the fair Mills and Al Morán—and journalist Janelle Zara.

The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House

The Future Perfect continues to update and expand its presence at the Goldwyn House, a storied 1916 mansion at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. During Frieze, the collectible design gallery is unveiling never-before-seen spaces within the residence, including its private residential quarters. Now known as the Goldwyn Guest House, this area will feature works by Sarah Solis and Pinch, as well as Bocci lighting that will extend into the landscape. Meanwhile, the newly unveiled kitchen is hosting a group exhibition titled 'Jugs,' comprising 30 artists’ interpretations of the humble water vessel. Other rooms across the expansive building will exhibit Lindsey Adelman’s Illuminated Mobiles II series of ceramic canopies and hand-blown glass orbs inscribed in gold enamel, Collection Particulière’s US debut of new furniture designs, new pieces by Chris Wolston and a bedroom outfitted by Orior.

'Made in L.A. 2025' at Hammer Museum

Frieze weekend will be the last chance to catch the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition dedicated to artists practicing across the greater Los Angeles area. This seventh iteration spotlights 28 multigenerational participants who are working in film, painting, theater, choreography, photography, sculpture, sound, and video. All of the artists were chosen for the way in which they represent and engage with the city, particularly in terms of attitude, and together create a patchwork portrait of LA’s cutting-edge art scene. On view through 1 March.

Ingrid Donat at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Swedish-French artist Ingrid Donat’s first solo showcase in Los Angeles will involve a selection of sculptural furniture pieces imbued with influences spanning Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and a range of global craft traditions. Titled ‘Tatoo,’ the show demonstrates her signature mark-making techniques in materials such as leather, bronze and fabric. As the centrepiece of the exhibition, the rounded Commode Tatoo is covered in square, geometric patterns that resemble reptile skin, while the Banquette aux Caryatides et Scarifications incorporates wax-cast bronze figures into the slender frame of the upholstered bench. The show runs 26 February to 30 May at Carpenters Workshop Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard.

American architect John Lautner designed over 200 architecture projects during his career, which began in the 1930s with an apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright. He then started his own firm in Los Angeles in 1938.

Most of John Lautner's work was realised in California, including the development of his famous Googie-style coffee shops in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Garcia House, and perhaps, his most famous home, the Sheats-Goldstein Residence in the hills of Los Angeles. It is also in LA that local firm Conner + Perry Architects was recently tasked to restore and remodel one of the late architect’s masterpieces from the early 1980s, ‘Lautner's Castle’.

Step inside Lautner’s Castle with us

Positioned along the topography of a steep hillside, the home features an array of cylindrical stone turrets along the south face. These are both structural and architectural, illustrating Lautner's philosophy, which emphasises natural materials, blending stone, steel, glass, and wood, and a harmonious relationship with the landscape.

With extensive experience working on Lautner properties, including the Sheats-Goldstein residence, Conner + Perry Architects started on the Lautner's Castle restoration project in 2019. Principals Kristopher Conner and James Perry were entrusted to make modern enhancements that would not disturb the original modernist architecture, while also meeting the needs of a 21st-century family lifestyle.

The home unfolds with a wide curving hallway and a ribbed wooden ceiling that spans the entire upper floor. Just outside the front-facing windows, copper elements on top of the beams replaced the white painted metal that will age more congruently with the house.

In the living area, a dramatic linear LED wood structure of single-ply wood-veneer fins hangs from the ceiling over the dining table, theatrically illuminating the exposed timber ceilings. ‘I conceived of it as a dragon for Lautner's Castle,’ says Conner. ‘The house has a nautical feel. The roof structure, to me, feels like the hull of a ship turned upside down. We actually replaced the entire roof, so when we ripped it off, you could really see the details. This thing was built like a ship with these diagonal boards, creating a unitised structure.’

The team also brought in chrome eyeball lights to enhance a sense of direction in the entryway. These cast a light on the Douglas fir wood panels, which were completely stripped and refinished in the majority of the house.

In the living room, a custom cream sofa designed by the architects morphs from a daybed to a formal sitting area. Its supports were made with glulam Douglas fir (same as the house beams), and the integrated table at its heart is fabricated from solid slabs, taking inspiration from the house, its materials and geometries.

One of the most fascinating architectural features is that each of the cylindrical stone columns hosts a programmatic element. One in the living room contains a functioning wet bar, while the kitchen one is a built-in pantry. These pillars also help frame the city and canyon views that unfold beyond the exterior balcony that runs the length of the property; and you might just spot a herd of deer sauntering around the hillside.

‘What’s interesting about this house,’ says Conner, ‘is that in most of Lautner's houses, where there's a view, the architecture really opens up to the view in a very dramatic way. But here, I think there is much more of an interior focus on the house. The skyline views get framed in these spaces between the stone [cylinders]. The drama is the two terraced balconies. He takes those lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright about compression and expansion, and increasing the drama.’

Expansive windows offer natural light and frame the lush green surroundings. The skilful use of warm woods and stone flooring continues to the exterior (where it was refurbished), further blurring the lines between indoors and outdoors, in the spirit of Lautner’s philosophy and approach.

The kitchen was actually renovated by Conner and Perry’s previous mentor, and a Lautner associate, Duncan Nicholson, around 2013, so this area stayed pretty much true to the original, including the island constructed out of a stone slab with an edged treatment.

There was no hood for the [stove] range, but the architectural duo added discreet slots in the ceiling and a commercial vent fan on the roof. ‘This is telling of our approach to the restoration of the house; everything was, where possible, just a minimal intervention, trying to preserve the architecture as much as [we could],’ says Conner.

On the first-floor interior, among a host of interventions by Conner and Perry, the library transitions into a media room (featuring a hidden state-of-the-art A/V system, a projection screen and integrated audio), a custom-built-in sofa, and shelving that supports the room's functionality. The chevron wood flooring was replaced ‘like for like’ according to Conner.

In the primary suite, the original sunken tatami mats were replaced with a custom platform bed with integrated nightstands, and wall sconces that blend into the vertical-grain wall panelling with Lutron lighting. In addition, an original small office off the hallway was converted into a second walk-in closet featuring a rotating clothes rack.


The bathtub in the primary bathroom with its canyon view was completely revamped, replacing an old fibreglass jacuzzi with a new custom Corian soaking tub, a hardwood tub deck and hardware from Vola, along with a privacy shade.

A water closet, adjacent to the already showstopping stone-cylinder primary shower with its dramatic circular skylight that frames the clouds, was refurbished and a new skylight was added. At the vanity corner, a custom-carved double-bowled vessel sink was installed after it was carved out of a boulder by Stoneland, USA, in the valley. Its rare size meant it took a year to procure.

Throughout the home, the original bathroom tiles were maintained, including in the powder rooms, where skylights were added. Here, lighted fixtures were updated to modern LEDs that are colour-adapting, so you can simulate different types of daylight. A dedicated make-up station was added to the primary bathroom area.

A restored spiral staircase is covered in an updated version of the original Italian red wool carpet and leads down a lower level where three more bedrooms and a bonus guest-game room are. The original second-level bedrooms were lacking in light, so Conner and Perry transformed the old guest bedroom by placing larger windows in the corner looking out onto the surrounding garden and incorporating intricate millwork, such as the built-in headboard with drawers, floating shelves, and a wardrobe.

‘We expanded this window all the way down to the floor, so you could see so much lush greenery, and then the views,’ says Conner. Outside this guest room is a hybrid piece of furniture serving as both a deck and a bench. ‘It's really just about creating that intimate relationship with the garden here.’

A jack-and-jill set of two bedrooms and a bathroom is now joined by the game-guest room. Frosted glass doors bring in more natural light. The original concrete floors were redone with concrete micro-topping product in keeping with the Lautner philosophy of trying to blur inside and outside in a cohesive manner.

On the exterior, Conner and Perry extended the architecture into the landscape, providing little pockets or vignettes to spend more quality time outside, including a dining table and concrete bench, an outdoor kitchen with a barbecue grill. An old storage closet was converted into a cabana bathroom with a nearby outdoor shower.

Working with the pool’s original structural engineering, the noted Lautner collaborator Andrew Nasser, Conner and Perry carved out an expansive deck beneath the pool – an area that was previously inaccessible. This becomes a third level for the home, cantilevering out of the hillside. Here, you will find a wooden infinity deck featuring a stone fire pit, a long built-in concrete bench, and custom lounge chairs by Conner + Perry Architects. ‘All of this used to be a barren dirt hillside,’ adds Conner.

Providing both shelter and dramatic canyon views, the space offers a unique perspective of the underside of Lautner's bold cantilevering structure. ‘We were very careful not to have a guard rail. We added these planters and this little hiking trail that loops back around the property.’

The exterior landscaping outside was previously sparse. It is now lush with a cactus garden at the front and a hillside at the rear. The latter splits off into walkways flanked by a mix of native plants and a pop of Bougainvillaea for colour. ‘We've spent years developing this. Now, there are almost these little microclimates and a fern grove where it's shady,’ says Conner.

In the end, one of the biggest challenges for the architects was navigating the generous landscape element in this project without detracting from the original architecture. As in all of Lautner’s most significant works, a key concern was the relationships between human being and space, space and nature, and that enduring ethos has been well preserved at Lautner's Castle.

conner-perry.com

Back in 2023, Wallpaper* singled out the vibrant, intricately detailed and strikingly unique work of Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gun Min, naming him one to watch. Two years on, that prediction has proved prescient: exhibitions are selling out, major galleries are borrowing works from Nazarian/Curcio – his representing gallery – and Min is launching his third solo presentation there. ‘Strange Days of a Quiet Sun’ opens on 21 February 2026 and runs until 28 March at the LA gallery.

The exhibition introduces a new body of paintings alongside a monumental, double-sided folding screen, extending Min’s distinctive visual language of swirling colour, dense compositions and highly ornamented surfaces. Embroidery, beading and hand-applied materials enrich his canvases. Yet alongside this maximalism, Min sharpens his symbolic focus. Lush botanical settings function as immersive stages in which human figures, animals and emblems converge. Motifs of the sun, the tree, the animal and the body recur, distilling historical, political and emotional tensions.

The exhibition’s title borrows from astronomy, where a ‘quiet sun’ denotes a cyclical period of diminished solar activity. Min reimagines the term as a metaphor for sadness and estrangement. In one painting, a blackened sun – adorned with onyx stones and black lace – hangs within a turbulent, saturated landscape. This oscillation between seduction and threat becomes a defining theme of the exhibition.

It is felt in Min’s folding screen, composed of eight individually hand-painted, embroidered and beaded canvases, drawing on the traditions of Japanese byōbu and Korean byeongpung. One side unfolds into a kaleidoscopic landscape in saturated colour; the reverse offers a subdued, near-monochromatic image of a tree.

Animal imagery plays a pivotal role in Min’s practice, often evoking pursuit, sacrifice, endurance and transformation. Since 2019, he has returned repeatedly to the tiger, invoking the Korean tiger, a potent symbol in folklore and nationalist iconography. In Tiger as Saint Sebastian, the animal’s staging recalls the religious drama of Peter Paul Rubens, inverting and reworking Western art-historical convention. Throughout ‘Strange Days of a Quiet Sun’, Min fuses references from Western and Eastern art histories more broadly, European hunting scenes colliding with East Asian landscape traditions.

Queer narratives are equally central. Min’s treatment of the male nude within dense, overgrown landscapes positions figures as partially concealed, casting the viewer in the role of voyeur. In one painting, a nude figure is violently embraced by a bear, its claws drawn, blood rendered in shimmering red beads. The image hovers between intimacy and brutality, underscoring the precarious entanglement of pleasure and threat.

Political histories surface intermittently yet insistently. Works such as Beyond the Struggle Narrative (Okinawa) reference the enduring presence of US military bases abroad. In Secret Map of Camp Garrison, Yongsan and 7 Flavors of Magic Candy Tree, branches incorporate stitched imagery, beadwork, pigment and hand-drawn maps based on Min’s visits to Camp Garrison in Seoul in 1997, when it housed a major US military base.

Across the exhibition, botanical abundance becomes the connective tissue binding intimacy and aggression, history and fantasy, beauty and violence. Far from idyllic, these lush environments operate as charged terrains for dense symbolism. Through his elaborate visual language, Min carves out a decisive and unmistakable place within the contemporary art landscape.

'Strange Days of a Quiet Sun' , 21 February-28 March at Nazarian/Curcio, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles

Nearly two decades ago, Wallpaper* correspondent Paul McCann and photographer Laura Wilson took a tour of the Kappe House in Pacific Palisades, along with another of the architect’s projects, the 1972 home and office of psychotherapist Dr Esther Benton in Brentwood.

Kappe, who died in 2019 at the age of 92, co-founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture (better known as SCI-Arc) with the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis.

A pioneering architectural educator as well as a practising architect, many of his houses have featured in films and TV shows over the decades, helping shape the public perception of Californian modernism (the Benton house featured in Californication, One Hour Photo, Cruel Intentions, among others).

Kappe’s wife, Shelly, died in early 2025 at the age of 96. A prominent architectural historian and academic, Shelly Kappe used her role as a writer and curator to showcase some of the key players in modern LA’s architectural history.

Of all the architect's projects – including the Triesch Residence near Berlin – Kappe's own residence is perhaps his most famous. Designated a Cultural Historical Monument all the way back in 1996, the LA Times once called it ‘The Greatest house in Southern California’, and it's easy to see why the architectural legacy of this particular project has been so enduring.

Set on a sloping site in Rustic Canyon, the Kappe House is arranged over no less than seven levels and covers some 4,157 square feet. Kappe’s spatial genius is in evidence from the get go, with steps leading up from the road, threading past mature trees to the front door, set beneath a cantilevered canopy – which doubles up as a balcony for the floor above.

Formed from vertical concrete supports criss-crossed with vast redwood beams, the house is a true interlocking puzzle. The entrance level houses Kappe's glass-walled office, reached by a bridge above the carport.

From here, stairs lead up another level to the centrepiece, a double-height living room flanked by a raised den on one side and the kitchen on the other, each overlooking the sunken living space in the middle, furnished with distinctive blue seating in the house’s heyday.

A multiplicity of views up, down and across are available from this one space, with low level voids, vast frameless glazed and high-level clerestory windows maximising the interplay between the beams and the walls.

Rich detailing abounds, from the built-in kitchen with its timber worktops, exposed concrete walls and terracotta flooring, and the primary bedroom, with its sunken fireplace, desk and recliner, flanked by views out to the canyon vegetation beyond. Natural planting is offset by rock gardens, as well as a lap pool with spa, sauna and cabana.

The house has five bathrooms and another four bedrooms, with walkways that take a vertiginous path across the sloping site as well as huge windows that are filled with a view of abundant greenery.

The main suite occupies the house’s northeast wing, with a further collection of three bedrooms in the more private south-east wing. Throughout the house, much of the furniture is built-in, custom-designed by Kappe himself.

As luck would have it, the realtor in charge of the sale, luxury estate and architecture specialist Ian L.Brooks, had the pleasure of assisting the late, great Julius Shulman when he shot several homes for Wallpaper* back at the turn of the century. Now Brooks has come full circle, offering this spectacular home to the market for the first time since it was built.

Priced at $11.5m, Brooks tells us that ‘we went into multiple offers within three days of being on market... [The house] a work that is disciplined and deliberate, yet seemingly free and effortless, where traditional spatial boundaries are erased,’ he enthuses, ‘it’s been described as a work of art that is both essay and poem.’

For once, the realtor hyperbole is justified, and Brooks’ contention that the Kappe House delivers a ‘continuous symphony of direct and indirect dappled light that animates the house from sunrise to sunset’ is no exaggeration. The Kappe House awaits its new custodian.

The Kappe House is being sold by Ian L.Brooks, Berkshire Hathaway Santa Monica, IanBrooksEstatesGroup.com, @Sir.IanLBrooks, DesignerEstates.com

Historic Hermon, since 1903, is an LA neighbourhood situated south of Highland Park and north of Monterey Hills. Last Word Hospitality – the team behind popular staples Found Oyster, Queen's Raw Bar & Grill, and Rasarumah – has brought its convivial brand of dining to the area.

Wallpaper* dines at Hermon’s, Los Angeles

The mood: a neighbourhood gathering place

Hermon’s is housed within a former Art Deco church banquet hall, still carrying the warmth and comforting essence of a place designed for gathering, set against hickory floors. One of the most sought-after seats is at the U-shaped bar, clad in dark, caramel-glazed tiles, and surrounded by an all-booth dining room with linen privacy curtains. Tables feature textured, patterned tops inlaid with Castelli marble, from rosewood to red onyx, sourced from Proper Tile & Stone in LA.

Holly Fox of Last Word Hospitality worked closely with colour consultant Kate Hoffman to select Raindance, a pale green by Benjamin Moore, for the interior walls. These are lined with antique lighting fixtures and a mix of vintage artwork spanning the early 1800s through to contemporary pieces, all set within a Craftsman-character space. Textured pottery dotted throughout is by ceramicist Patrick Hicks, including handled vases holding floral arrangements inspired by Nigerian Nupe pots.

The food: American cuisine with a chophouse heart

Blending comfort with craft, the kitchen is led by chef-partner DK Kolender, alongside culinary partner Melissa López. Wine director Evelyn Goreshnik has curated a dynamic list, while friends from Day By Day Hospitality (Eric Alperin and Angus McShane) developed the cocktail programme.

Start with the house martini, also available as a ‘tiny tini’; ideal if you want to explore multiple options, from a yuzu margarita to an espresso martini finished with hand-whipped coffee cream and smoked Maldon sea salt. The choose-your-own-size cocktail format extends to a daily daiquiri made with seasonal fruit, alongside an off-menu ‘snaquiri’ designed for two.

For something to anchor the drinks, the loaded potato fritters – topped with a cloud of cream cheese, bacon, chives, and parmesan – are a standout.

On the menu, dishes creating the most noise include the gooey ‘Ode to Chez Cheeseburger’ with soubise fondue and bordelaise onions; a two-sheet lasagna vongole; and Josper coal-fired proteins such as charred vermilion with almond ajo blanco, pickled grapes, and mint gremolata, or a grilled ribeye with chermoula. Desserts lean nostalgic, such as the lemon baked Alaska and a shareable skillet chocolate chip cookie with vanilla ice cream.

Hermon’s is located at 5800 Monterey Road, Los Angeles, CA 90042, United States