High life
Uplifting restoration at John Lautner’s 1962 Garcia House in LA
Uplift at John Lautner’s Garcia House
Perched nimbly on one side of the Hollywood Hills along Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, John Lautner’s futuristic Garcia House is one of the most enduring specimens of the midcentury modern movement. Completed in 1962 for the jazz musician, conductor and Hollywood composer Russell Garcia and his wife Gina, the almond-shaped house is as well known for the steel caissons that hoist it 60ft above the canyon below as it is for its part in 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2, where it appears to come crashing down in a foul blow to the film’s villains.
Special effects and celebrity aside, the Garcia House, which is, in fact, standing tall and well, now serves as a piece of living history, with its V-shaped supports, parabolic roof and stained-glass windows. The house’s current owners, entertainment business manager John Mcilwee and Broadway producer Bill Damaschke, have been on a mission to restore and revive the house since they purchased it in 2002, while living there full time.
Wallpaper* first reported on the house in our January 2009 issue (W*118), when Mcilwee and Damaschke were enjoying the fruit of their ambitious restoration efforts. ‘When we first saw the place in 2002, it was a little bit of a shambles,’ recalls Mcilwee now. ‘It was 25 years of neglect. Structurally, the house was perfect. The whole house sits on caissons and not one part of it touches the ground. However, the roof was a big issue because it had deteriorated,’ he continues. ‘There was a leak by a window and it ate through a portion of the house. We came in, took out some old carpet, painted the house and lived in it for a year. That was critical for us because we would have made different decisions if we had tried to do the work before we moved in.’
Aided by the expertise of architecture firm Marmol Radziner, which oversaw the renovation of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs among many other gems of the era, the couple were fully committed to restoring the house to as close to its original state as they could get it.
‘We did not change one piece of its footprint. We didn’t do anything that compromised the structural integrity,’ says Mcilwee, who has served on the board of The John Lautner Foundation since purchasing the house. ‘In fact, there was an owner in the 1980s who had removed some load-bearing walls and we put those back.’ Whenever there was a question, they deferred to the original plans, which were passed on by the house’s previous owner, the actor and director Vincent Gallo.
From reinstating the terrazzo floors and restoring the light fittings, some of which hang from 40ft up, to rehabilitating the 55ft expanse of windows and even reducing the interior square footage upstairs to maintain the original transparency of the house, Mcilwee and Damaschke’s painstaking renovation feels natural and seamless. Complemented by an eclectic, earth-toned assortment of contemporary design pieces that were selected with the advice of interior designer Darren Brown, the rejuvenation of the Garcia House transcends time. ‘A lot of the things we did made it feel symmetrical and original,’ says Mcilwee. ‘We have people coming to the house and asking if we had to renovate much. It’s the biggest compliment, and the craziest thing, because we had to do so much work.’
Rather than stopping there, the couple have continued to dedicate time and effort to expand»