The Arts District loft is home, workshop and office in one, the latter function has been gradually formed out of the dining room table and its surroundings. Every item in the loft was part of the owners’ former’s homes – salvaged objects, antiques.

Kristan and Scott have a great eye for style, even their business idea supposedly came from guests often trying to buy an item or two….

Schubert’s “garage” is breathtaking. Beautiful. Exquisite. But where are the tools, the work benches, the girlie calendars? Schubert concedes that it isn’t a typical, oil-on-the-floor garage, and he’s comfortable with that. “I wanted to create a backdrop for the car as a piece of art,” he says.

“I like very pure, minimalistic, empty space,” the German-born Schubert says. Think polished concrete, lots of glass and halogen lighting. “I like to be in a space where things line up and nothing stands out.”

It’s not just a Ferrari though: Schubert used to have a Maserati in there too, if only for a few photo shots.

One wall is covered in Homasote, a special type of recycled paper-fiber board, with a single-tier bookshelf built in. Two walls are floor-to-ceiling glass with retractable exterior shades to cut down on the afternoon sunlight. Overhead, the central skylight is artfully bisected with an aluminum enclosure for halogen lights.

To avoid exhaust fumes when the car is started, Schubert built a hydraulic ramp into the floor. The ramp tilts up about six inches at the front, enabling the car to roll back across the bridge and into the street before it’s started.

Further proof that the automobile role as machine has been abandoned in favor of its status as objet d’art: There are no wrenches, screwdrivers or battery boosters lying around – and Schubert will need them if the Ferrari remains true to form. Such a garage is consistent with the fact that modern cars are largely inaccessible to the tinkering, shade-tree mechanic. Most people never open the hoods of their cars. Instead, this garage has a lovely modular couch, two Dodo recliners by Toshiyuki Kita, a metal and stone coffee table and a flat-screen TV on tracks that can traverse the length of the room. “People in L.A. care so much about their cars and then the cars wind up stuck out in garages,” says Schubert, whose garage truly brings the car into the living space.

There has always been good reason to separate cars from living space. Cars are kind of stinky and oily. In modern cars, the passive reeking of gas and oil has largely been overcome by strict clean-air requirements that limit out-gassing. Soon, emission-free electric cars will “really open up the design of houses,” says Schubert, so that people will be able to drive directly into the home. It would make unloading groceries easier. Schubert looks forward owning an electric car, and his garage is pre-wired for a high-capacity charger and has 49 solar panels on the roof. But the electric car will have to sleep elsewhere. The Ferrari, he says, “has found its permanent home.”

At a glance, all the space you can go and see each of the units stay open publicly . Stresses in the living-room shelving unit, multifunctional and created specifically for this space. Perhaps living in the fashion district in Los Angeles, inspired part of design and decoration of the whole area, full of industrial buildings, abandoned warehouses with art galleries and fashion showrooms. The loft is in a fashion manufacturing building built in 1916 and has been declared local landmark. The spirit of the old city inspires the design.

The recovery and conversion of materials giving other use is a passion of Chris. Stresses the coffee table that he made with wood from pallets, creating a solid piece and maintained over time. Thousands of men’s details stand out in this unique space: the movie screen that unrolled takes up the entire wall, the sober and neutral color palette, the industrial touch, lack of decorative …

One bedroom completely minimalist and uncompromising color , a rack full of clothes exposed male, a bar open kitchen-office, view facilities and spaces without walls …

A project full of personality and a clear commitment to the industrial design and functional masculine touch of this young designer, who makes his creativity, a real home.

From the street, 7691 Mulholland Drive has an unassuming presence. A twisting driveway is the only indication of the 5,800-square-foot structure below. Situated on steep incline, the design meets the challenges of the terrain and physical constraints of its L-shaped lot, presenting an optimal solution to a unique set of conditions. Its sunken nature not only guards against the harsh western sun, but also serves to maximize energy efficiency. As a result, the house seems to gently cascade down the hillside, allowing each level to have an unobstructed panoramic view of the landscape.

The slope of the site informs the organization of the interior, with a privacy gradient that flows downward through the various levels and terminates at the guesthouse. The upper levels hold the main living spaces and encourage interaction by maintaining a visual connection to each other, with the bedrooms and more intimate family spaces tucked below. Access to the outdoors is maximized by utilizing the rooftops as decks.

The home can be accessed in two ways. An attached two-car garage provides a private entry through the kitchen, while guests approaching the residence from the street are invited in by the majestic staircase leading up to the front door. The thirty-six foot descent is minimized by the expansive unenclosed steps, with the western edge serving as a platform for seating or display.

The kitchen, dining area, and lounge are located to the right of the entrance where a staircase lures you down to the aptly named grand room just one half-level below. This vantage point offers a truly incredible view of Los Angeles, drawing you out to the upper deck complete with an infinity pool.

Another set of stairs leads from the grand room to the private quarters below. Here, the building peels away to form a small courtyard, allowing sunlight to seep in and illuminate the hallway. A path of light guides you from a home theater on one end to a modest family room and two bedrooms, connected by an exterior deck. The master suite is separated by another half-level descent and extends the entire length of the floor plate. It includes a spacious bathroom and wine room, creating an isolated ambiance that encourages a state of repose. On the lowest level rests the guesthouse. Secluded from the main house, the guesthouse features a private entrance, bathroom, and kitchenette.

The design aesthetic represents a departure from the traditional architectural styles in Los Angeles. While the project seeks to reflect the complexities of a fast-paced environment, the tone of house is one of simple living.

The Master bedroom and bath are encased by glass sliding doors with the very best stainless steel barn door system and German hardware. The master bath has a Waterworks sculptural tub. A large section of the loft could serve as one or two extra bedrooms, w/existing second designer bathroom and closet already in place.

Buy it now  

About 50,000 Burners, as attendees of the annual Burning Man festival are called, were expected to journey to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada this week for days of revelry in a makeshift city where art is everywhere but showers can be hard to come by. The festival, which began on Monday and runs through Monday, sold out in advance for the first time in its 25-year history.

Among those attending this year are neophytes Rachel Horn, a Los Angeles interior designer, and Justin Kreizel, her husband and business partner, who gutted and renovated a 180-square-foot 1969 Airstream trailer for the trip. The trailer, which they found on Craigslist for $5,000, has a working kitchen and a full bathroom, a living room, a bedroom and plenty of storage space. (Their budget for the entire project, including the trailer itself, was $20,000; as of this writing, what they actually spent had not been determined, but Ms. Horn said they had “gone way, way over budget.”)

The couple splits their time between Los Angeles, where they have an interior design firm and a showroom for Rachel Horn Home, their furniture and accessories line, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Ms. Horn grew up, and where they have another office and a retail store. Ms. Horn recently spoke with a reporter as she and Mr. Kreizel rushed to complete the interior design for the Airstream in California, for its maiden voyage to the festival.

How does it feel to go to Burning Man for the first time?

It’s definitely a big trip, especially if you’re a person like me who’s never even been camping. That’s part of the reason I’m providing myself with such a comfortable cocoon.

Why haven’t you ever been camping?

My parents were not campers — they were expatriate hippies who were living in New York and moved to Mexico, and had this very bohemian lifestyle. They just took us on trips in their tricked-out Volkswagen van. My dad put a Porsche engine in the van so it would go quite a bit faster than the normal 1972 VW van would, and so that it would run an air-conditioning system and an awesome stereo.

Then you have been car camping.

Well, we never slept in the car. Maybe it’s just that we didn’t have time to actually camp. We were always picking up and moving.

Have you done this kind of gut renovation to a home of your own before?

Top to bottom, in terms of gutting the space and starting over? Yes. But we have redone every single house we’ve ever leased, and we tend to move a lot because I like to be in different houses and do more projects. I get bored in a space when it’s done.

What was your vision for the Airstream interior?

It’s this beautiful, serene, elephant gray environment that has all these nomadic touches, and it’s really comfy and inviting.

What do you mean by nomadic touches?

The big thing is the Moorish influence — we have Moorish arches that separate the spaces. I’ve chosen Moorish-inspired fabrics, and then we have some wonderful lanterns and other accessories that are Turkish- or Persian-inspired.

So the design elements are meant to evoke nomadic cultures, as opposed to “We got this couch because the fabric is durable and we’re going to be tromping around in muddy boots”?

Actually, I have one bucket outside for muddy boots, and one bucket that you rinse your feet in before you come in. So yes, nomadic is about bringing in all the different cultures that were at some point or another, or still are, nomadic. But it isn’t really built to withstand a serious nomadic living situation. It’s luxe-nomadic.

Are the buckets part of the design?

They are. They’re galvanized buckets. They have to travel inside and then just be pulled out.

Most of the work you do is for clients with large homes. This must have been a big change for you.

Yes, that’s one reason this Airstream has been such a challenge. Most of our houses are over 10,000 square feet. That’s not to say we wouldn’t take projects that are smaller, because we do everything, but somehow we end up mostly doing very big homes. The average size of a master suite bathroom is the size of this Airstream. It’s made me really have to think differently about what’s going in.

I picked this gorgeous bamboo floor that I was just in love with. Well, we get the sample, and just one small piece of it was incredibly heavy. I loved it, I was so excited about it, I was all ready to order it. And Justin said, “It’s gorgeous, but we can’t use it. I can tell right now that by the square foot it’s going to be too heavy. You can’t add 500 pounds to this thing, the whole thing only weighs a few thousand.”

Do you have air-conditioning?

Oh, yes. We installed a fabulous, heavy-duty recirculating air-conditioner — it recirculates the air from the inside, and doesn’t bring in any air from the outside. That was something we specifically did for Burning Man.

For someone who has never been camping, Burning Man seems like a pretty extreme experience. What made you decide to go?

Justin has always wanted to go to Burning Man, and we have friends who go every year. There just has never been the right time — we either had too much work, or we were traveling. We have the time right now, and so he said, “Let’s do it.” And that’s the whole reason for the Airstream. I can definitely go be in the desert for the whole week, but I can’t just go and be in a tent. I definitely need a little something to hide in. Well, not hide — but a place to call home.

What are you going to do with the trailer after Burning Man?

I’m excited to go camping more. My husband calls it “glamping.”

What exactly does that entail?

I think having a bed, a shower and a cappuccino machine are requirements for glamping.

The owner said

 I love modern design mixed with vintage inspirations. My goal was to create a space that would inspire creativity, reflect my lifestyle and showcase my work. As a jewelry designer, I’m constantly inspired by color, texture and the ability to transform metals. Transforming this loft space into a modern jewel box was like creating a new piece of jewelry.

When you start with a cold, concrete rectangle filled with odd spaces, you need to add elements of color and texture to soften and warm the space.  No interior construction was necessary. The simple fix: Incorporating texture through fabrics, paint and great light fixtures.

We began with an obvious fix: Paint the walls my favorite blue. The use of tone-on-tone color defined by various textures and finishes was key to transforming the space. It was important to create clearly defined areas for workspace and  showroom.  We incorporated a fabric curtain to act as a divider and to soften the room. We used vintage lamps and furniture that I already owned and great vintage lighting from Orange, one of my favorite stores in Los Angeles.  More vintage touches and colorful artwork added to the transformation.

The upstairs conference room before the makeover, and  …

… the upstairs area after. This is where my team and I brainstorm and look over designs for the coming seasons.

The kitchen before the redecoration, and ...

... after. The concrete floors now have a dark, glossy finish with a marbleized look.

The office.

The entrance area before the makeover, and ...

… the view from the entry after. To separate the front parlor and showroom from my design studio and workshop, we used that simple trick of hanging beautiful metallic blue drapes and some vintage tables to create the illusion of two rooms. Wall shelves also help maximize the floor space.

We mixed textures and added vibrant color with touches of vintage chic.

The goal: A modern, inviting design studio and showroom for private customers and stylists to visit — and an inspirational space in which I love creating and working every day.

The sleek, octagonal design, arguably the boldest work by the singular architect John Lautner, is considered a masterpiece of California Modernism and is beloved by cultists of midcentury design.

But the Taschens saw dirty, disco-era, wall-to-wall carpet on much of its 2,200 square feet, an old aluminum door, smudged windows and seven layers of paint on what was originally a gently austere, exposed brick wall.

Still, it was love at first sight,

says the laconic German, wearing a red Muhammad Ali bathrobe as he shows off the place on a hazy morning. The backlist of Taschen’s company — from homoerotic nudes to the original Lutheran Bible — includes books on Modernist homes, the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman, the works of Richard Neutra and the Case Study houses. Some of the titles, along with dozens of art magazines, are scattered around the house and its unobtrusive furniture.

Today, the place is serene and airy, with a simple, light-wood openness that suggests midcentury Scandinavian crossed with a ski chalet, and views that are pure Southern California.

“I bought it right away — as fast as possible,” says Taschen.

Frank Escher, who was brought in as restoration architect, vividly remembers the place’s condition.

“I have to give Benedikt credit for seeing past the disrepair and sad state the house had fallen into,” he says. “It looked like a rundown motel. It had been rented out for 10 to 12 years; it was like the ultimate party house.”

In fact, during much of that decade, the place had been on the market. “It was for sale for so long,” says Taschen, “that it was even in a ‘Simpsons’ episode: a house with a for-sale sign.”

There was no market for that house,

says Julie Jones, the Realtor in the sale, who had watched the place languish after she listed the house. “Everybody loved Spanish, and then shabby chic came in.” Midcentury houses “would sit and sit and sit — you couldn’t give ’em away. People would want to see the view, and that was about it.”

The fate seemed unjust for a structure the Encyclopedia Britannica had judged

the most modern home built in the world,

and which had appeared in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double.” It’s hard not to see the house, which sits on a 29-foot-high, 5-foot-wide concrete column over a long-considered-unbuildable Hollywood Hills site, as a hovering flying saucer or a prototype for the 23rd century architecture of “The Jetsons.”

But the 1960 house is very much a work of its time and place.

Alan Hess, an architectural historian and author of “The Architecture of John Lautner,” considers Chemosphere as perfect an expression of Southland culture as Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Case Study house and the finest work of Neutra and R.M. Schindler.

Chemosphere was characteristically Los Angeles of that time because “it didn’t have to look like a house,” says Hess. “It was an architecture newly defined. It could take on its own brand-new shape. It displays the optimism of its time: that technology can be used to solve any problem, just as Century City and Googie’s,” the Lautner-designed Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, did. “The West would not be possible without technology: Water, electricity, everything that it took to overcome dryness and distance was dependent in some form on technology.”

Hess finds the house fascinating partly because it was built for a couple and their four children. “And yet whenever that house is used in the movies, it’s always a decadent bachelor pad,” Hess says. “You have the reality of Southern California life, and the image of Southern California life, summed up in one house.”

It’s not the only contradiction the place contains.

“From the outside it looks like a spaceship which you cannot enter,” Angelika Taschen says from Berlin, where she now lives. (The couple were finalizing a divorce at the time of this article’s publication.) “But if you go inside, it feels very cozy … very Zen and calming. Maybe because you are floating above the city, above reality in the sky. You feel disconnected from the planet and completely free and happy.”

The house is the product of a fortuitous union of architect, client, time and place. Leonard Malin was a young aerospace engineer in late-1950s L.A. whose father-in-law had just given him a plot north of Mulholland Drive, near Laurel Canyon. The land was leafy and overgrown, with extravagant views of the San Fernando Valley.

“My philosophy at the time was, most people work their whole lives to build their dream house,” Malin says from Arizona, where he’s constructing a new home. “Why not build it now, and pay for it for the rest of my life?” This was a time, during L.A.’s postwar expansion, when a middle-class client could build in the Hollywood Hills on a modest budget: Malin had $30,000 to spare.

The only catch: At roughly 45 degrees, the slope was all but unbuildable. The plot may have remained empty had Malin not approached Lautner, whose work he knew from a nearby house. Lautner, a brilliant but reputedly prickly man, sketched a bold vertical line, a cross, and a curve above it. “Draw it up,” he told his assistant Guy Zebert.

Though Lautner could appear imperious, a quality he may have learned from his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, he was also a deeply practical and hard-headed problem-solver. Lautner didn’t see the house as a flying saucer but as a sensible solution.

However counterintuitive the scheme, it was also one of very few imaginable that allowed the plot to be utilized. And because of a concrete pedestal, almost 20 feet in diameter, buried under the earth and supporting the post, the house has survived earthquakes and heavy rains. (The house is reached by a funicular.)

“What was great about Lautner,” Benedikt Taschen says, “is that he had this dualism about nature and the city.” He says the home’s northern edge, which contains the bedroom and his office, is very quiet. “It’s pure nature, with all kinds of animals: skunks, bobcats, coyotes, deer. They are not shy; you almost have nose prints on the window.

“And here,” Taschen says, walking toward the living room window that faces the Valley’s homes and skyscrapers along the 101 Freeway, “it’s all city.”

Taschen admires the bold dichotomies the architect worked with. “That’s the characteristic of great artists: They can make things simple.”

Hess points out that Lautner’s embrace of Modernist innovation and organic forms made him a more interesting architect but also contributed to his obscurity during much of his career. During the 1950s and ’60s, the starker, cooler Modernism of the Bauhaus and of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reigned in intellectual circles, especially in Europe and on the East Coast.

“Organic Modernism was just as modern in its use of materials,” Hess says, “but it had a different sense of space, which was flowing. The way a building was put together was like a tree or a flower or a cave — natural forms. Wright was one of the founders of that approach to Modernism, and Lautner brought it to Southern California.”

Even out-of-state critics and scholars who could appreciate the sharply angular California Modernism of midcentury didn’t know what to make of Lautner’s merging of the modern with natural forms. “So they ignored him,” says Hess, “or put him in the category of undisciplined, far-out, do-whatever-you-want California architecture.”

Escher, the preservation architect, considers Lautner “the missing link between the classic Modernism of the Case Study Houses and the work we now associate with Los Angeles — the more expressive, more sculptural forms. Frank Gehry has said that as a student, he considered Lautner to be a god.”

Unlike a lot of the more didactic and theory-driven homes of Modernists from Le Corbusier to Philip Johnson, it’s actually pleasant, most of the time, to live inside a Lautner. The homes don’t force their inhabitants into an ant farm’s existence the way some houses do. Le Corbusier called his homes “machines for living in,” and sometimes they felt that way, with their narrow hallways and rigidly prescribed paths.

Chemosphere is bisected by a central, exposed brick wall with a fireplace, abutted by subdued seating, in the middle. One side of the house is public, with a small kitchen and blended living and dining rooms including built-in couches below glass windows. The house’s private half includes a master bedroom with bathroom, small storage and laundry rooms, an office made of two children’s bedrooms, and an additional bathroom. Despite being more compact than many new single-family houses, it has most of the essential elements.

Angelika Taschen, a PhD in art history, knew the house from Shulman’s photos before she saw the real thing. She worried it might be difficult to live there.

She said that besides limiting her trips out of the house because of the funicular, living there didn’t alter her behavior. “Day-to-day life is really easy,” she says, often easier “than in a conventional home where the architect has not thought so much about every single detail.”

Lautner, despite his reputation as having a strong personality, worked hard to suit his clients and their inner lives.

Angelika describes the place as having a spiritual impact, almost like a church. “With this house he found and expressed this almost religious spirit with a perfect architectural language in general, but also in detail.”

Benedikt likens the house to an eagle’s nest. “You feel safe. It’s warm and human, not a cold place. You would not expect it from outside.”

The only consistent problem with the house, Taschen says, is that its technology often fails in subtle but frustrating ways. “Every day there is something not working,” he says. “The maintenance is 10 times higher than in any other building. Everything is much more complicated. To get cable or Internet, they have to come 10 times.

It’s like having a vintage car — a ’55 Mercedes. More difficult. But they have a personality to them, ya?

In Escher’s first meeting with Taschen, the restoration architect pointed out which pieces were original, which needed to be replaced, and which details deserved restoration. “He interrupted me in about half a minute and said in German, ‘Herr Escher, why don’t you do what you think is right?'”

For Escher, a native of Switzerland who loves the rational, structure-inspired work of Lautner, Neutra and the late Pierre Koenig, this was a gift from the gods. His firm, which he runs with partner Ravi GuneWardena, had been partly inspired by classic California Modernism, and here he could delve into a great Modernist’s original conception. (Escher wrote the first book on Lautner a few years after moving to Los Angeles in 1988, and oversees the John Lautner Archives.)

The architect describes the job as a philosophical challenge.

“I think the hardest thing was developing an intellectual strategy for how to deal with it,” Escher says, calling the task, “a combination of research into history and technology, and to some degree into Lautner’s psychology. You can’t be afraid of a house like that: You have to, in some cases, be kind of forceful.”

The forcefulness was balanced with the architects’ own “sensitive and careful” respect for Lautner’s intentions: The goal was to undo the damage previous tenants had exacted, and to simplify. The restoration team removed layers of paint, paneled the walls with the same shade of ash wood used for the original built-in couches and cabinets (some of which needed repair or restoration), and replaced the fixed-paneled windows with frameless glass.

“We wanted to make it as invisible and elegant as possible,” says Escher. “That’s something that’s important to all our projects: We don’t try to draw attention to a detail. It should disappear.” GuneWardena compares the process to “pruning a garden, to reveal the clarity of the structure.”

They also tried to match what they thought Lautner would have chosen if he’d had access to contemporary workmanship and a larger budget: The original drawings, for instance, described a floor of random broken slate, but the day’s technology would not allow the stone to be cut thinly enough to keep from destabilizing the house. Escher’s restoration ran the flagstone pattern inside and out, across the bridge that connects the front door to the funicular.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing art into the house, difficult when a home already exerts a bold personality.

“The Taschens originally wanted to have more period pieces,” Escher says. “But we didn’t want the house to be a museum of the 1960s.”

Today, Chemosphere is furnished sparely with clean-lined pieces including Eames chairs and a coffee table and an oval Florence Knoll dining room table. Taschen commissioned the suspended lamps of bent plexiglass strips by Cuban-born L.A. artist Jorge Pardo and the pastiche rug designed by German painter Albert Oehlen.

“These Lautner houses are like custom-made clothes,” Escher says, “so you really have to find the right tenant for them. Taschen was perfect for the house — he immediately grasped what the house was about, and he was entirely open to our ideas for the place, like ripping out the glass and commissioning pieces by artists.”

During the first few years the Taschens lived there, the house became locally famous for their parties, where photographer Bill Claxton and his model wife Peggy Moffett would carouse with porn stars, jazz musicians and director Billy Wilder.

These days, now that Taschen has an office in Hollywood and a bookstore in Beverly Hills, the place has reverted to being, mostly, a house for him and fiancee Lauren Wiener. He canceled plans for a guesthouse designed by Rem Koolhaas at Chemosphere’s base because he feared it would visually compete with the main house. His only major plan is to replace the bird-cage-like funicular with a more open one.

Taschen remembers going to a Beverly Hills open house where “a fashionable Hollywood film star” was selling his Neutra home. The young actor, in the publisher’s estimate, “had robbed the soul of the house. If you make tiny changes that don’t fit the integrity of the house, you destroy it. It’s like a movie where you add a scene of someone with a mobile phone in 1958, or a style of shirt or car that wouldn’t have existed until years later.

“It’s the responsibility of the owner to preserve it for future generations,” Taschen says, “because a house like this doesn’t belong to one or two people: It belongs to mankind.”

The Chemosphere restoration won an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy as well as the approval of its original tenant.

“Today there are materials that weren’t available then,” Malin says. “The place is much better than when I was in there — and it’s in keeping with Lautner’s vision.”

Taschen says it’s hard to get bored with the place — despite the rain this winter — since the enormous windows offer an expansive view on the world. “It’s like a wide-screen movie,” he says. “Always changing.”

That the Ennis house garners so much reverence from the architecture community makes its current status all the more remarkable: for sale since June 2009, price reduced from $15 million to $7,495,000. Prospective buyers have shown much interest, according to listing agent Jeffrey Hyland, president of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, but as of yet, there have been no takers.

The house has long been an expensive proposition. Set on nearly an acre in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., the home — three bedrooms and three and half baths, plus staff quarters that push the listing to 6,000 square feet — cost $300,000 to build, about $3.8 million today, adjusted for inflation.

Wright’s client was Charles Ennis, the owner of a men’s clothing store in downtown L.A. and an enthusiast of Mayan art and architecture. For each of Wright’s houses built with concrete blocks, or textile blocks as they are often called, Wright designed a custom pattern. For the Ennis house, the pattern was a Greek key. Within the interlocking form, it’s possible to interpret a stylized “g” — perhaps an allusion to the Masonic Order, of which Ennis was a member, and the organization’s symbol, the compass with the letter “g” in the middle representing God.

Wright had used concrete in monumental projects, but in the 1920s it was still considered a new material, especially for home construction. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminum molds to create a block 16 inches wide, 16 inches tall and 3 1/2 inches thick. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position. The double-wall construction called for exterior blocks and interior blocks to be set about 1 inch apart, and estimates of the total number of blocks deployed by Wright have ranged from 27,000 to 40,000.

It was an experiment in the functional and artistic possibilities of concrete, which Wright believed held potential as a material for affordable housing. The phrase “textile block” came from the way vertical and horizontal steel rods were woven through channels in the concrete, a technique that was supposed to keep the blocks knitted together and held in position. The net visual effect was nothing short of monumental.

But although the Ennis house was grand in scale and historic in sweep, it remained “highly livable,” said Janet Tani, whose father, Augustus O. Brown, owned the property from 1968 to 1980.

One gets to experience the changes of light throughout the day and how that impacts interior spaces on a large scale,

,Tani said.

She noted how one side of the house seems to hover above a growing metropolis, while the other side points toward Griffith Park’s undeveloped hills and land “that looks like it must have looked 500 years ago,” she said. “By walking a few feet, one can be in a completely different environment.”

Karrie Jacobs, an architecture columnist and the founding editor of Dwell magazine, remembered visiting the Ennis house in 2005, sitting at the dining table and watching hawks circle over L.A. She said it’s her favorite Wright house, partly because it represents an evolution from the beginning of Wright’s career, when the architect “was still a 19th century Midwesterner.” His early Prairie Style houses tended to hunker down, low and dark.

“By the time he designed the Ennis house in 1923, he’d lived and worked in Tokyo and built several houses in L.A.,” Jacobs said. “He was more cosmopolitan and less afraid of sunlight. And Ennis is strangely, monumentally, vertical, with its double- or triple-height rooms. Usually, in Wright houses, I feel a little claustrophobic, a little trapped in the man’s tightly choreographed conception of domestic life. But during my one visit to Ennis, I felt as if I was in a different world, someplace I’d never been before — and maybe someplace Wright had never been before, either.”

The house, Jacobs said, doesn’t fit neatly into Wright’s oeuvre or any other architectural timeline. “I think of it, affectionately, as Wright’s San Simeon,” she said.

Residents included John Nesbitt, known for his radio and film series “The Passing Parade,” who owned the house from 1940 to 1942. He had Wright design a 20-by-40-foot swimming pool and convert a storage area off the entry into a billiard room with a fireplace. These 1940 additions also included Wright’s plans for furniture, window treatments and rugs.

In his drawings for Nesbitt, Wright renamed the house Sijistan, after a 10th century Persian palace. Although none of the furniture was built, several chairs were later produced for an owner of Wright’s Storer house, another textile block design.

Tani’s father was the last private owner of the Ennis house. To ensure its safe keeping, Brown created the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, now the Ennis House Foundation. The home sustained serious damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, then was briefly red-tagged after the torrential rains of 2004. The next year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Ennis house as one of the most endangered landmarks in the country. The Ennis House Foundation has stabilized a buckling retaining wall and made other repairs, but a significant investment in restoration will be required before the house can be the grand residence it once was.

Tani recalled how the house always managed to make visitors marvel.

“Shortly after we moved into the house, I came home from school one day and saw Edmund Teske standing outside on the sidewalk looking at the house,” she said, referring to the photographer known for his work with Wright. “I went inside and told my mother about Teske’s presence. She told me to go outside and invite him in, which I did. He was absolutely thrilled.”

Wright likely would have been thrilled, too. In 2009, 50 years after his grandfather’s death, Eric Lloyd Wright announced that the Ennis House Foundation was putting the landmark up for sale. A private owner, he said, would be better able to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy.

My

grandfather designed homes to be occupied by people,

his statement to The Times said.

His homes are works of art. He created the space, but the space becomes a creative force and uplifts when it is lived in every day.

The Edison, that you can find in the basement of the Higgins Building in LA, was once home to the city’s first power station. Built by brass-baron Thomas Higgins, who had a dream: to move downtown to LA’s then-vacant west part, where Wall Street West is today. Of course, the center of the city was to be his own building, sporting all advances of science: lightning-quick electric elevators, lighting, clean running water. However, this was 7 years before LA had its electric grid, so Higgins needed an own plant.

This is the one. After it’s start, it was in use for a few decades, but later it’s been left to decay.

That, until Andrew Meiran (an interesting, Tim Burton-esque figure) and his partner bought it to restore it’s glam and create a legendary club in its place. The place, that took 3 years and 2 million to build, is an ode to the industrial revolution and the endless optimism of the era.

The builders preserved everything they could: the steam engine and the line of generators from the ’30s are al there, together with the original piping. The turbines been found in a bad condition, but after thorough cleaning they are on display too – cut in half, so while you sip your cocktail, you can have a look inside. The DJ’s cabinet is in the place of the former chimney entrance. All new pars built – the steps of the entrance, or the central bar – all have the same style.

After the opening in 2007, The Edison quickly became a cult place. The designer Meiran only heard of steampunk a week after the grand opening. The ‘industrial cathedral’, together with its victorian, gothic and art deco elements is one of the best examples of this style.

The Well

The Lab

Tesla lounge

Music room

The Main bar

Generator room

Game room

Ember parlour

And a map of the whole place