House stepping down a hill featured in Architectural Digest

Barbara Bestor knows her way around a historic California property. Over the years, the principal and founder of Los Angeles–based AD100 firm Bestor Architecture has been the mastermind responsible of restorations and sensitive additions to 20th-century gems such as John Lautner’s 1956 Silvertop—a feat of engineering in Silver Lake known for its UFO-like concrete roof—and Rudolph Schindler’s 1946 Roth Residence, where she renovated the carport. So perhaps it wasn’t such a surprise when Bill Macomber and Annie Weisman Macomber—he’s a producer at Fancy Film; she’s a writer and producer of shows like Desperate Housewives and Physical—called to say they had purchased and renovated Raphael Soriano’s 1936 Lipetz House, but they needed more space.

Not just any new build would do. Bestor and her clients wanted to create a place that would feel connected to its predecessor as well as the ground it stood on. “I wanted to extrude the hillside, in a way,” Bestor says. “To take this organic shape and make it into something abstract.” The result is an airy, indoor-outdoor structure with board-formed concrete walls and a sculptural and zigzagging white roof made from prefabricated scissor trusses. “It’s meant to look as if it’s stepping down the hill,” she explains, “a bit like a slinky.” Macomber points out another charming visual narrative: “There’s a nautical theme to the Soriano house, with its rounded prow living room, and we designed the low whitecaps of the new house to be its sea.”

photo by Bruce Damonte