Designing Hollywood

Culotti does have some telling preferences in the types of entertainment people she works with. First on the list are "up-and-coming young celebrities with new money," she says. "They take risks and they're lots of fun." Second are directors, for reasons already stated. Third are "huge celebrities with great big budgets." There are reasons, of course, that A-list stars are not first on the list. "There are trust issues with these people because they get taken advantage of so much," says Culotti. She understands that, and has her own solution for the problem. "I let them go to my factory," she laughs, "and see their furniture being made."

• THE ANTI-VON STERNBERG OF ARCHITECTURE •

The very word architect conjures up images of egomaniacal, authoritarian artistes who resemble dictatorial directors with whips and megaphones. They pooh-pooh your objections to their aesthetic encroachments on the livability of your own home and then, at billing time, make you feel like Washington Redskins owner Edward Williams, who'd famously complained that free-spending coach George Allen had exceeded the unlimited budget he'd given him.

Certain Hollywood players might so want the cachet of a Frank Gehry or Richard Meier that they let the maestros call the shots, but most people at that level, especially in the entertainment world, are used to having their own vision accommodated. And, in any case, the majority want a look that goes after the timeless qualities of traditional design instead of leaving them to live on a cutting edge.

"It's more important to create moods than monuments," says architect Richard Landry, whose clients include Eddie Murphy, Frank Mancuso, Rod Stewart, Sugar Ray Leonard and Michael Bolton. Like Culotti, Landry likes working with entertainment people for more than monetary reasons and has a generous attitude toward them. "They're fun, and they're optimistic, and they're very high-energy," he says. Landry is a congenial man himself, which sets him apart from many in his field and makes him especially successful with Hollywood. "I am not the kind of architect who tells people, 'This is where you will live,'" he says. He does not even tell them what style they should live with. The most remarkable thing about Landry, who was born in a small, rural town in French-speaking Quebec, is that, while he has a major, worldwide practice and name recognition, he is without a signature style. If someone adores L.A. modernist legend John Lautner, or contemporary postmodernists Luis Barragan or Ricardo Legorreta, he will design them a house that borrows whatever core element in those definitive styles the client is drawn to. If, and this is much more common, someone wants Wallace Neff resurrected, Landry will do a contemporary version of the Spanish Revival style that Hollywood has always loved. It won't be Wallace Neff or even neo-Neffian--there are houses to be bought if you actually want one--but they will have the romance of Neff, along with the catering kitchen, living-room-sized bath and other 21st-century showbiz amenities.

Landry appears to be very skillful at getting wealthy people's divergent fantasies into three coherent dimensions: Haim Saban, who made his fortune off the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," loves sushi and can now eat it to his heart's content in a large, serene tatami-matted Japanese-style dining room overlooking a Zen pond--all within a traditional and quite grand property having no other Japanese elements in it.

It would be easy to accuse Landry, in the abstract, of doing "theme park" architecture or, worse, carrying on L.A.'s mishmash tradition. But Landry is sought after for his taste and inventiveness, not as a shepherd of excess. He's on Architectural Digest's list of the Top 100 architects and interior designers in the world. In his versatility, he's come to know more about trendiness in Hollywood than most. "A few years ago," he says, "everybody wanted a Tuscan villa. Nobody even knew what that meant, but they wanted it. Now I see a Tuscan house and I can tell you what book it came from." These days, says Landry, "everybody suddenly wants Andalusian," which, in case you are not up on it, "resembles Spanish colonial but is more ornate."

Landry's clients, including his Hollywood clients, love his work, and people whose names cannot be mentioned line up for his services. Landry is fond of pointing out that the only complaints he gets are from people who tell him that strangers keep ringing their doorbells to find out who designed their house.

• OVERNIGHT PARADISE •

"I'm not the big shot I once was," says landscape architect Garett Carlson wryly. Truth is, he is at the very highest level of his profession, but has scaled back his efforts after a long, amped-up stretch during which he created total outdoor worlds for Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, John Candy, and Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews. Though he has created many Xanadus, he himself chooses to live in a very quiet, very beautiful, ultranatural habitat that's deliberately un-grand in the way that a sensitive person who's seen quite a lot of grandness might want things.

Carlson works in a medium that encompasses grass, stone, trees, shrubs, flowers, walls, gates, driveways, paths, gazebos, waterfalls, houses, views and pools, among other things. To Hollywood, he's a multimedia magician, really, because he can take a barren plateau of dirt bought with the proceeds of the latest blockbuster and have it graded, banked, walled and planted within months to look like it was always there, a perfect, poetically balanced landscape that doubles the beauty and value of whatever mansion happens to sit within it. Carlson is the one who introduced to contemporary Hollywood the concept of horizon pools (also known as infinity pools), which have one side that merges seamlessly with the distance in a truly lovely effect of continuous space. Thanks to him, infinity pools have become the must-have item for the very privileged, but he is quick to point out that he didn't invent the idea--he borrowed it from John Lautner, who himself borrowed it from Europe.

Ideally, Carlson begins with something quite unsexily called "site planning," which amounts to making sure the architect doesn't put the house where architects are inclined to put houses--smack in the middle of the property--and developing the shape and texture of space right down to the last fern. The finished landscape should have, says Carlson, "space with no boundaries" and "seclusion with energy." With an already developed property, it's sometimes necessary to do drastic things to achieve these essential qualities--like, "move the pool." People who look at Carlson's before and after shots must be tempted to just hand over their checkbooks, because he really does make it look like it was God, not a high-end landscape architect, who made things look this way.

But before handing over their checkbooks, even top-level celebrities are likely to have gulped. If you've ever wondered what the largest amount of money you could probably spend on your own pool is, here's the number: $250,000, which will give you a nice swim spot with waterfalls and grottoes you can float into. Numbers like that one can put you into shock, but Carlson points out the benefit realized by one client, who bought a property for $2 million, spent $4 million redoing the house, spent another $1 million on the landscape, then sold the whole thing for $13 million. If you wonder how, besides requesting swimming grottoes, you can spend a million on your lawn, part of the answer is this: unless you want to wait 10 or 15 years for your trees to grow (double the length of many careers in Hollywood), you have to buy fully grown trees, which can run $15,000 apiece.

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