Hollywood Modern: Houses of the Stars

The homes of the discerning Hollywood stars, from Grouch Marx to Leonardo DiCaprio.

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This book looks at the intersection of celebrity and design, through the case of twenty-five houses designed by great architects for their informed, trend-setting, and extremely famous clients, in Southern California. Included are gorgeous photos of the houses as well as little seen informal portraits of the stars and wonderfully detailed texts that tell the story of these members of the glitterati, touching on film, fashion, architecture, and the everyday lives of legends. Hollywood Modern spans the modern era, from moderne homes of the 1930s, through mid-century modern designs, to the present day. Hollywood Modern touches on the many moods of modernism. From Ed Niles Johnny Carson House in Malibu, which creates a ficus tree forest that extends from the garden directly into the house, to the machine-age austerity of Richard Neutra's Von Sternberg House, (later owned by The Fountainhead author Ayn Rand), to A. Quincy Jones' crisply, elegantly ultramodern Gary Cooper House in Holmby Hills, these houses edit, rearrange and direct our point of view much like the carefully composed version of reality we see in motion pictures. These different styles co-exist as modernism and stand in distinct contrast to the Mediterranean villas and Spanish Colonial manses of early Hollywood.