Recent Home Tour Highlights
By Lizzie Garrett Mettler
As co-owner and creative director of the vintage home decor emporium TINI, short for This Is Not IKEA, Alexis Hadjopulos has won fans with the kind of quirky sensibility and lack of pretense that is defining a new breed of Los Angeles tastemaker: the populist connoisseur. A mix of high and low, vintage and modern, designer-label buys and garage-sale finds plays out in his house, where chalk graffiti provides the backdrop for a piano that Hadjopulos affectionately calls “the Elton John.” An Eero Aarnio bubble chair hangs in back. Click here to see more ... (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
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When Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Ennis House in 1924, he immediately considered it his favorite. The last and largest of the four concrete-block houses that Wright built in the Los Angeles area remains arguably the best residential example of Mayan Revival architecture in the country. Click here to see more of Wright’s Ennis house (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)
By David A. Keeps
Fashion designer David Meister and Hollywood talent manager Alan Siegel live somewhere over the rainbow. Almost everything in the couple’s home is a shade of gray. The chameleon-like nature of the gray means that afternoon light lends elegance to the sitting area, painted in a Benjamin Moore color called Mocha Cream. The living room beyond, meanwhile, takes on a golden cast thanks to a paint color called Ashen Tan. The overall effect: sophistication, serenity and a spotlight on views and prized possessions instead of walls. Tag along on a celebration of gray ... (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
By Emily Young
For a former doctor’s office in Los Angeles, it was an experimental operation: Gut the interior and make the layout more livable as a residential retreat, but bring back vestiges of the building’s former life, such as the “X-ray in use” sign in the open kitchen. The result is an unconventional face-lift that’s colorful and contemporary, with a shot of eccentricity. Join the tour ... (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)
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By Sean Mitchell
Of more than 100 houses that Ray Kappe has designed over his long and distinguished career, the one he designed for himself and his family in Los Angeles’ Rustic Canyon is the most important. “Maybe the greatest house in Southern California,” Stephen Kanner, the former president of American Institute of Architects’ Los Angeles chapter, said in a 2008 interview. That year, when the Home section polled architects, historians, academics and critics on Southern California’s best houses of all time, the 1967 Kappe residence landed at No. 8, ranked among classics by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Charles and Ray Eames. Join the tour ... (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
By Lisa Boone, Los Angeles Times
When it came to remaking their Laguna Beach house, Mark and Cindy Evans wanted to create the ambience of the California missions they loved while making room for their favorite pastime: shopping flea markets. The couple call themselves the Flea Marketeers, and their eclectic home now is an entertaining mix of early California Monterey-style furnishings with collections of San Jose and Tlaquepaque pottery, Mexican yard art and their favorite Laguna Beach plein air paintings from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Asked if anything in the house is not from a flea market, Cindy jokes, “the bed and the coffee maker.” Join the tour ... (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
By Emily Young
Parisian-born artist Alix Soubiran could live quite happily without a stick of furniture. “A chair can be wonderful, but walls are what you see all the time,” she says. “To me, walls that create a story or a mood are the starting point.” Soubiran’s own wallpaper designs transformed a ramshackle 1923 duplex in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles into the charming home she shares with husband Joe Mauceri, a film and TV director and writer, and their infant daughter, Monica Moonshine. Pictured here: the dining room, where Soubiran’s playful side comes out. Click here to see more ... (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
By Debra Prinzing
Lisa Little was working toward her master’s at the Southern California Institute of Architecture when she and husband Phil Brennan bought a tiny lot in Venice that barely fit two tiny houses: an 850-square-foot bungalow built in 1905 and a 450-square-foot rental built in 1912. The goal: Keep the scale and period feel of the facade, but make the interiors larger, more modern and more functional. Click here to see more ... (Katie Falkenberg / For The Times)
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By Frank Nelson
They are called the Moody cottages, about three dozen pixie homes built in the 1930s and ‘40s in the Santa Barbara area by sisters Harriet, Mildred, Brenda and Wilma Moody. With ceilings slanted to an extreme, windows irregularly sized and rooms configured in odd shapes, the homes are whimsical -- if now downright eccentric. But as Moody cottage owner Christine Hoehner attests, what the cottages lack in size they make up for in history, character, magic and charm. Here, Hoehner climbs the storybook stairs while her dog, Emily Dickinson, sticks around for her photo op. Join the tour here ... (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
