Inside a Dazzlingly Original and Decidedly Playful LA Home

ADVERTISEMENT
kitchen white shelves and floor

The kitchen was designed with unpretentious materials appropriate for the house’s vintage. The bronze vessel is by Max Lamb.

The effect of the freshly honed interior and exterior envelope is buoyed by the work of AD100 landscape designer Madison Cox, who deployed a limited plant palette to accentuate the strong, graphic quality of the architecture. “The outdoor spaces are not very large, but they are essential to the experience and transparency of the house, which feels like a lantern set within a cloistered landscape,” Cox says. “All of our moves were calculated to screen and focus particular views, and to foster a sense of intimacy.”

One of Fletcher’s most powerful gestures was the installation of green wall-to-wall carpeting in the central social sweep of the living room and dining area, which effectively connects the entry courtyard to the pool garden at the back of the property. “The house originally did not have wall-to-wall, but because the gardens and the interiors have equal weight in the scheme, we wanted the carpet to feel like grass or moss,” Meyer says of his husband’s unexpected inspiration. “The carpet is Mark’s favorite thing about the house,” he adds.

Building on the verdant underfoot plane as the bedrock of their decorative alchemy, Meyer and Fletcher stocked the home with a dazzling assortment of furniture and art, meticulously orchestrated to highlight unregarded similarities that point to shared aesthetic genealogies, creating bridges between disparate times, places, and styles. Bold statements, befitting a pair of top-tier tastemakers, abound. The decor riffs on the more outré meaning of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous bon mot, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” Here, the “loose” furnishings of the house express an overt sensuality that at first feels startling and then, almost immediately, absolutely right. It is as if Fletcher and Meyer have decrypted a truth hidden at the very core of the midcentury design movement: open-plan buildings with walls of glass built to maximize exposure—what could be more sexy and intimate?

ADVERTISEMENT
Dining room with sculptural table and large art

Sculptures by Urs Fischer and Jonathan Meese rest on a dining table by Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton. A Louis Eisner painting is installed on a walnut wall that mirrors the fireplace elevation.

 Art: © Urs Fischer. Jonathan Meese. Louis Eisner/Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris.

The interior design takes a shock-and-awesome approach of oblique interconnection and unlikely affinities. Allusions spiral between the objects and art in the home, following Ryan McGinley nudes from bedroom to kitchen, Alma Allen’s bulbous organic-form tables from breakfast room to living room, bouncing between Nate Lowman’s painting based on a photo of Scarlett Johansson posing with soldiers and Louis Eisner’s J. Fred Muggs canvas based on a Mad magazine cover painted by a chimpanzee. Wright’s 1956 executive chair for Price Tower—a cast-aluminum exoskeleton that looks ready to blast off into space—sits facing Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton’s 1987 perforated-aluminum high-back chair across Chris Schanck’s 2015 Bernini-on-acid desk made of recycled objects covered in aluminum foil. At first glance this could simply be a meditation on the use of aluminum in modernism, but the fact that the three pieces span the life of the house points to the deeply intellectual apparatus at work here. Like the biblical trinity, the three pieces represent different versions of the same material, ultimately culminating in a story of resurrection.

A sense of humor runs beneath all of it. On a bedside table in the primary bedroom, an Adam McEwen drawing that proclaims “Fuck Off We’re Closed” slyly winks at a McGinley photograph of a nude woman with her legs splayed wide open that hangs above it. The juxtaposition epitomizes the spirit of the house—playful, titillating, and seriously smart. Fletcher and Meyer’s design choices unlock the id pulsing within the midcentury walls. Like the self-lubricating frames of the Matthew Barney diptych in the primary bedroom, California midcentury homes were designed not for containment but to encourage the salubrious slipping of boundaries, between interior and exterior, art and design, present and future, human and nature, body and body.

outdoor courtyard pool sculpture

The entry courtyard is planted with Japanese aralia and camellia. Sculpture by Alma Allen acquired through Blum & Poe.

Ultimately, the house reflects nothing so much as the taste and intellect of its owners, particularly Fletcher’s­—he set the tone for the project and drove the program. “Mark has one of the most incisive eyes for architecture and design I’ve ever encountered. He puts so much thought, time, and talent into the places we live,” Meyer says of his estimable partner. “This house is a testament to the clarity of his vision.”

Tobias Meyer and Mark Fletcher’s LA home appears in the AD's February 2024 issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

What's Your Reaction?

like
0
dislike
0
love
0
funny
0
angry
0
sad
0
wow
0