A DUPLEX IN MALIBU

These two houses right on the beach in Malibu belong to a man who was once an L.A. County lifeguard (and still is — as a Seasonal). So he knows how important it is to build somehing that will stand up to the elements! The exterior has no wood and very little paint exposed to the salt air. With copper roofs, gutters, and downspouts, slate shingles for the siding, and marble everywhere, even the lower floor can be cleared of furniture, in case the sea ever breaks over the seawalls, and even then, the damage would be minimal.

When considering drawing the house, only the one on the left existed. While the owner was in the process of building the other one for his father to live in, I decided to wait and to draw them both.

These cleverly compact houses are decorated with an easy combination of rattan furniture and personal mementos from a busy career in television. “A lifeguard will always find a way to live close to the water,” the owner has told me. His houses are excellent examples of how to do this.

KAPLAN / BENNETT HOUSE

A lovely lady I know lived for many years in this house in the hills near Mullholland Drive. After the death of her husband and in declining health, she was no longer able to occupy the house, but missed it terribly. Her son asked me to do this drawing to recall the house for her.

In accessing the building, we discovered a cache of blueprints which indicated that when originally built, the house was a “midcentury” design with a low-slung roof clad with a metal “shake” roof.

Over the years, there had been several additions made as well, giving the house an erratic roofline.

When the house was remodeled in the early 90s, a single gigantic gable roof was placed over the entire house, resulting in two attics—the original one and the remodeling one (best seen over the garage).

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S MEYER MAY HOUSE

I have long been a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. The incredible cunning of his forms is something that has always been a source of delight to me, and for a long time, I had felt that my doing a drawing of one of his early Prairie houses would be the Mt. Everest of drawing. I cannot imagine a more challenging subject.

I began by looking for an example of this period of Wright’s career that was in prime condition. The Meyer May House in Grand Rapids, Michigan had undergone an extensive, exhaustive (and expensive) restoration in the early 80s by Steelcase Inc., and it is open to the public.

So I collected all the pictures I could find of the house in books, then began my Preliminary drawing. I sent this to the heads of Steelcase, saying that I wanted to draw the building from life. They allowed me to do just that, and one fine Saturday, I showed up there, and they gave me the keys and said, “We’ll be back in three hours. Have fun.”

I figured the best way to get all the photos I wanted to work from in so short a time was to videotape it. So that is what I worked from. By forwarding and rewinding and still-framing my way through the three hours of footage I took of every single nook and cranny in the place, I know the house pretty well. I could even can tell you how many dust bunnies are under the bed in the Master Bedroom (there aren’t any). I did paint chips for the wall colors, all the courses of bricks are accurate, I did pencil rubbings of all the stained glass windows—everything. I even got core sample notes taken from a well in the neighborhood from the Geology Department at the University of Michigan, so I could tell you what each strata of soil under the house is (well, I have it written down someplace).

I decided to stick with the pose from the preliminary, but doing the new drawing was to start all over again. My proportions were all wrong. I also became fascinated with the staircase, which hides the entry door. So many levels and tricks of space and scale in so small a space. I also had a fine time with the skylights over the living room windows—in my opinion the most distinctive feature of the house. They have somehow always reminded me of a row of belt buckles—something clothing oriented anyway, and it is the prominence of this shape—you either love it or hate it—that has, I think, caused many people to overlook this design.

THE MILWOOD MANSION

For my first big drawing in color, I chose the Milwood Mansion in Venice, California. On a long skinny lot, three bungalows had been built between 1916 and 1926. The current owner initaially lived in the back house (on the left), while renting out the others. As the tenants moved out, he took them over, remodeling the old garage into a dining room and (from left to right) a kitchen and greatroom, bedroom, and office and consulting room. All this is linked together by wooden decks between buildings.

Here, the outside and the inside really co-mingle! With no air-conditioning and no screens on the doors or windows (“I have never been bothered by any bugs” the owner says), the outdoors have been decorated with a collection of hundreds of swag lamps hung in the trees. The owner is a collector of all sorts of objects, which he is constantly moving around and editing, painting rooms over and such. I decided not to try to update all the changes made, so this is the Mansion frozen at a particular point in time.

MS ZUIDERDAM

My family likes to take cruises together now and again. On one such cruise to the Caribbean, the weather turned gray, so I began sketching notes for this drawing. I was fascinated by the clamshell covering over the main pool area, and the fact that my parent’s stateroom was directly underneath, while my sister and niece bunked in one inside cabin and my nephew and I in another. The naval architecture of cruise ships is a funny combination of perogatives—diversion within a sometimes harsh environment. Glitz and steel plates.

MY HOUSE IN UTAH

Feeling pretty good about working with pen-and-ink, I embarked on this drawing to commemorate this mid-sixties house I bought in Utah. Very Wightian in its own way, the house was clad with Roman brick and painted board-and-batten on the upper part, and cedar shake shingles that had been there so long, these wonderful mosses were growing on them. A stream ran through the back yard. . .

Drawing this house was super convenient, because if I lacked a detail, all I had to do was get up and sketch it, then return to my drawing board (see just beyond the garage). Alas, I had to move on from here. Having this drawing made it a lot easier to leave it.