Tour Anjelica Huston and Robert Graham’s House in California

This article originally appeared in the April 1996 issue of Architectural Digest.

Robert Graham's two great loves—Venice, California, and Anjelica Huston—seemed mutually exclusive. Since 1971 the noted Los Angeles sculptor has worked in studios set among the cast-iron arcades of the scruffy, ready-for-anything beach town, just yards from the fire-eaters, chainsaw jugglers, gyroscope surfers, skateboard dancers, and all-around abracadabra men of the boardwalk. Here, poets and muscle men commingle in a republic of freewheelers that for decades has nurtured many Los Angeles artists who are collected internationally. The woman in Graham's life, however, lived above the city on Mulholland Drive, miles away and a world apart. Would she ever come down from the hill?

They held their wedding reception on a small vacant lot next to his studio, the site of a former bank, where Meryl Streep, Mick Jagger, and Warren Beatty celebrated with Westside artists and architects, including Ed Moses, Tony Berlant, andFrank Gehry．但在度蜜月的新婚庆典和Oaxaca, living with Huston turned Graham into a reluctant commuter. He joked that for each year of shuttling between the Mulholland house and the Venice studio, he could have spent twenty-seven days on a beach in Hawaii. The couple considered moving and looked at many houses. Nothing married their different worlds.

During their honeymoon they had stayed at the El Presidente, a sixteenth-century convent transformed into a hotel, and it gave them the idea that a courtyard house, even in hyperactive Venice, might make Anjelica feel less exposed. After more fruitless house hunting, the beach town began to make sense: Her work didn't tie her to any one place, but his foundry committed him to Venice. Besides, Graham owned the nuptial lot, and it was still vacant.

They decided to build ahouseof their own, and he would play architect to her client. “Creating a house is almost like making a portrait or sculpture—you reflect the person,” Graham says. “Sometimes designers can't do it because there is no one to hang the portrait on. But when you have someone like Anjelica, all the lives are there. You color them in.”

Anjelica, of course, is the Maerose ofPrizzi's Honor,Lily ofThe Grifters,and Morticia ofThe Addams Family,an actor who grew out of her identity as the daughter of the legendary writer-director John Huston and granddaughter of actor Walter Huston into a name of her own. Her latest endeavor is directing: She has just completedBastard Out of Carolina,a film for television.

Robert Graham first became known for his mischievously erotic miniature tableaux—couples caught romping on large beds in small acrylic boxes. He went on to realistic, anatomically detailed bronzes—classical nudes appear airbrushed in comparison—done by the lost-wax method and cast in recent years by rehabilitated gang members from the neighborhood. “I built the house for Anjelica,” says the sculptor, looking prophetic with his mane of gray hair, “and she's a tough client.”

“I told him I like arches, domes, white, and plaster,” Huston responds. “I like iridescence, and I like light. I like Mediterranean, balconies, and terra-cotta. I like circular things, I like wood, I like nature, I like farm animals, I like eggs.”

“So that's how we started,” nods Graham. “The client liked eggs.”

The two- and three-story house that Graham designed for his spirited wife stands hard by the street, like a town house. A cobra-shaped cowlick at the parapet rises mysteriously behind a high terra-cotta-colored masonry wall with a three-ton stone wedged over the entrance gate. The solid fence isolates the yard in complete privacy so that visitors stepping through the gate into the garden already feel inside the house. From the outdoor walkway a wide courtyard works as an exterior room and functions as the heartspace of the place, offering elemental pleasures—the shade of a mature coral tree, the stillness of water in a lap pool, and a patch of sky squared off by tall white planes. Patinated walls, troweled by hand, and flesh-colored floors give the sense of a structure sensuously crafted. The broad windows and doorways induce strong breezes: A leaf pushed by the wind skates across the terra-cotta tiles. You feel the design on your skin.

It would be easy to think of this courtyard house as Mexican, but Graham, who was born in Mexico, simply reworked an ancient architectural archetype when he devised the plan (the construction documents and general contracting were done by John Cordic) according to his and Huston's needs and the restrictions of the site. The parsimonious fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lot, its location on a brassy street and the desire for privacy led him to circle rooms around the site like a wagon train. He also discovered what the turn-of-the century California architect Irving Gill realized many years ago: A traditional building of white masonry walls, once stripped of its decoration, quickly becomes modern. As a sculptor, Graham pushed the purity of the forms, sculpting the sphere, cylinder, and vault that Huston wanted so that the California sun casts them in light, shade, and abstraction.

Several rooms adjoining the courtyard blur the boundary between inside and out. Wide, deep ledges at the kitchen windows invite food into the patio and guests into the kitchen. A row of French doors opens to a vaulted living room bookended by two outdoor walls of pure color brilliantly frescoed by New York artist David Novros: The intense Los Angeles sun seems to vaporize the yellow green and dark sepia, which shimmer in the light.

一个staircase leads to the master bedroom and to the roof of the kitchen, which acts as a land bridge to Huston's studio in the rear half of the house. Though most rooms—the basement billiards room has its own mien and orientation—of this introverted design face into the court, the house rises to the view: “There's more Venice the higher you get,” says Graham. From the master bedroom, a keyhole window singles out passing specimens of Venice's human parade. On the third floor, a guest bedroom reached by an exterior staircase offers Edward Hopper vistas of the surreal, washed-out Venetian streetscape, with distant panoramas of Los Angeles's colorized sunsets. The upper floors also overlook Graham's roofscape—the dome capping Huston's bath, the vault of a staircase—and the cubic massing of the entire house. Balconies bring the interiors to the exterior, as though introducing each room to the others.

The studio next door in which Graham lived and worked for years once belonged to Doug Wheeler, a pioneer in California's light and space art movement. Wheeler experimented with apertures and baffles to sculpt light, and Graham learned the effects of the manipulations, bringing those notions to the design of his new house. Some of the openings are shaped so that they feather incoming light across their natural plaster surfaces; others are tapered at their edges so that they appear to have no thickness, abstracting portions of the sky. In the master bedroom, a square oculus in the pyramidal ceiling is topped by a floating white plane washed in light seeping from the sides. The plane catches the blueness of nightfall and the red of sunsets. “I wanted the light from the sky at dusk,” says the sculptor.

The house, then, is less about shapes than about light materialized by surfaces. “Plaster works better than paint for that,” observes Graham, who left the walls natural. The result is that the house, like his bronze torsos, comes to life in light. “The house changes all the time. On a gray day, it becomes paperlike, like Strathmore board. With a blue sky, it gets hard, and some walls and ceilings incandesce. On foggy days, it dissolves and disappears into the sky.”

It was into this context of Graham's artistic concerns that Huston moved her furniture, not rushing in but fearing to tread. “I felt like a writer confronted by this beautiful vellum notebook that you then have to occupy,” she says. “This is the first house of my own with a strong character, but I grew up in a strong house, so I know proper respect for them. The first night sitting in the living room reminded me of our drawing room in Ireland, at St. Clerans, which was grand rather than big.

“我是用来装饰,”她继续说。“这是那t old sixties gypsy thing when I modeled and had to make a place my own for four days—you know, scarves draped over shades, rat packing. I do it on location in my trailer, and I feel good—it's got to smell like me first.”

Huston furnished her new house with objects that amount to a personal diary, and the ensemble turns the architecture into a home. “They're very real and important things from her mother and her father that she's lived with for years,” says Graham. “She didn't just go out shopping.”

演员穿过房子,引入派ces as though they were members of the family. “My father salvaged this tapestry of a harlequin from a restaurant that was closing in Paris and hung it in his room in Ireland,” she says. “These inlaid Moroccan chests were Mother's.” The gold halo of a Greek Orthodox icon glimmers near a statuette centered on a desk: “The Oscar is mine.” In the bedroom, a carved angel given to her at birth by a family friend hovers above the bed. A painting by Morris Graves is an abstraction of her mother, the ballerina Enrica Soma, who died in a car accident when Anjelica was a teenager.

If the furniture is a diary, the family album hangs in the billiards room, an engaging space perfumed by an adjacent cedar closet. Drawings of Huston by her father are displayed near pictures of father and daughter at all ages. A black-and-white photograph depicts Somaen pointeon a New York rooftop with her own mother and father, an Italian restaurateur. A portrait of Soma alone, wearing three strands of graduated pearls and smiling like the Mona Lisa, once graced the cover ofLifemagazine. The picture hangs next to an energetic Jasper Johns number painting, surrounded by more photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and Annie Leibovitz.

“Until the last two weeks, everything was covered with plywood,” Huston says. “We were going on blind faith that the cumulative effort and all the decisions would work. And it was raining constantly. When we took the bandages off, it finally all made sense.”

The house Graham designed for Huston may be 5,500 square feet, but it is a house that he has reduced to limpid simplicity. Bob on the bedroom balcony and Anjelica on the balcony of her study can speak across the coral tree to one another, and their voices carry in the quiet as a fountain murmurs below. Anjelica came off the hill into a house that wraps intimately around their relationship.

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