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).

23
Milwood Mansion
Scott Mayers, Designer
Venice, California, 1989-ongoing
Exploded view
2009
65” x 26”
Ink on paper; UltraGiclée print by Nash Editions

From the collection of Scott Mayers

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.

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.

The drawings on the opposite page and below show my thinking as we went from drawing the one house to the pair of houses.

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.