I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable doing it for other people, but it’s great for me.”Īs is well-known, Costos and Smith have close ties to Michelle and Barack Obama. In an age so influenced by midcentury, let’s go the other way. “Going all-in on a print is interesting,” Smith says. In the main guest room an exuberant green-and-white Brunschwig & Fils fabric is used on the walls and for the curtains of another high canopy bed, joined by a pair of sculptural pagodas designed by Tony Duquette. You might think the effect would be old-fashioned, but to me it feels modern.” “It’s the 18th century fast-forwarded to the 1970s. “I wanted to do whole rooms in prints, like Billy Baldwin did for Mary Wells Lawrence 45 years ago,” he says. For the guest rooms, however, Smith decided to get a little splashier. The pale beige of the terrace’s paving stone is echoed in the contiguous master bedroom, which is dominated by a canopy bed soaring nearly to the height of the 15-foot ceiling, with colorful accents coming primarily from the blue borders of the linens and the blue floral shams. It’s just the right amount of change to keep you peacefully stimulated.” Then you have the constant play of light across the Coachella Valley. “We’re situated perfectly in a notch in the mountain-rolling desert hills to the north, jagged peaks to the south-so it’s totally private. “From here you can’t see any other houses,” notes Costos. Broad steps cascade down to the showstopping pool, where the Mayan figure at the far end holds torches, which are lit for added drama in the evenings. This being essentially a pavilion-style villa, the indoor spaces flow seamlessly to the outdoors, with numerous openings to the long terrace that spans the back of the house. “As I was conceiving the rooms,” Smith says, “I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s essay ‘In Hollywood,’ from The White Album, where she describes important homes of the period as being ‘filled with white phalaenopsis and cymbidium orchids and needlepoint rugs and the requisite scent of Rigaud candles.’ That is the spirit we’re channeling.” The living room, where Smith and the ambassador often entertain guests, is in many ways the heart of the house. The pool area, offering dramatic views of the desert surroundings, is furnished with custom-made Brown Jordan tables and chaise longues, the latter cushioned in a Kravet fabric. Smith renovated an early 1970s Howard Lapham house in Rancho Mirage, California, as a weekend retreat to share with his partner, James Costos, the U.S. Quincy Jones at the junction of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope drives. The property, located within the Thunderbird Heights community in Rancho Mirage, offers commanding views of the improbably emerald valley floor and its many golf courses, as well as of Sunnylands, the former Leonore and Walter Annenberg estate designed in the ’60s by A. Called Ichpa Mayapan (“exclusive estate”), Lapham’s 11,000-square-foot glass-and-stucco fantasia features a hand-carved Mayan calendar in its entrance court, a façade richly embellished with stylized Mesoamerican motifs, and a keystone-shaped pool presided over by a colossal Mayan-inspired stone figure. But in the early ’70s, architect Howard Lapham, an admirer of Wright’s, created his own impressive take on Mayan Revival style, high on a desert hilltop near Palm Springs. Mayan-themed architecture in Southern California is typically associated with Frank Lloyd Wright’s astonishing 1920s textile-block structures, among them his Hollyhock and Ennis houses, both distinguished Los Angeles landmarks. This article originally appeared in the April 2015 issue of Architectural Digest.
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