Tour an Iconic Midcentury - Modern L.A. Home That’s Surrounded By Nature and Filled With Light

BY NICK MAFI, ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

Original Article Published by Architectural Digest

Before Joachim Rønning’s film Kon-Tiki was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award, before he directed the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, even before he married the activist Amanda Hearst, the Norwegian-born director had set his sights on a very different career path. “I was in my late teens when I first came across John Lautner’s work in a coffee table book and it completely fascinated me,” Rønning says. “In fact I was so taken by his designs that before I was bitten by the movie bug, I was thinking of becoming an architect.” It would take a few more decades before Rønning and his wife would come across Lautner’s work again, but this time, it would be to buy a home the influential architect had designed. 

In 1961, John Lautner designed the West Hollywood home for interior designer and concert pianist Marco Wolff. For Lautner, who had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s, the home was an opportunity to flex his creative muscles. What began as an arduous, almost vertical plot of land, resulted in perhaps the acme of midcentury-modern residential architecture on the West Coast. With this home, Lautner leaned into the primal state of nature, demanding that his audience turn their preconceived notion of domesticity on its head. It was a bold statement of how humans once lived—among the trees, the rocks, perched atop a hill—and the architect stamped his thumbprint on it. 

However, out of an abundance of respect for the original design, Rønning and Hearst Rønning would not go any further in their additions. “Every day we wake up in the house, and it inspires us in a way we can’t put our finger on,” Rønning says. “It’s in the little things: How light hits the wall at certain hours, or the way we see an angle [of the wall] for the first time. It’s not unlike staring at a Rothko, for example—you’re simply absorbed by the power. It just shows the genius of Lautner.”