It is still very much Lautner’s own. The spiral staircase down to the primary suite, and the staircase down another level to the pool on its own deck, and the stone walls and sections built around enormous old trees—they all remind you of how closely this house is tied to its site, a narrow, steep slice of land that by some measures would be considered almost unbuildable. But that, of course, is what you could say about Wright’s most famous house, Fallingwater, perched over a waterfall in southwestern Pennsylvania; this house, too, both defers to nature and straddles it.
The Wolff house is in the middle of a metropolis, but for Ghesquière, it is as much a sanctuary as Fallingwater. “It is the opposite of the Paris life we have,” he says to me. “We take hikes around the Hollywood Hills and in places like the trails in Coldwater Canyon Park, and we go to the movies at the IPIC, where you can sit in comfortable seats and have a cocktail.” He has become so comfortable in his home that he has all but abandoned the office he set up for himself in a small room next to the gym. “I love to make my drawings everywhere—at the kitchen table, out on the terrace. You open the big glass doors and go out on the terrace and you forget if you are inside or outside. It is like the whole house is a studio—it is a fantastic place to work, and when we leave it to go back to Paris, it feels like saying goodbye to a person you love.”
When Ghesquière is planning one of his collections that will be shown in the surroundings of a great work of architecture, he says he thinks about what he imagines people would wear in that place. And at home in Los Angeles, he is similarly inspired by the Lautner house that is now his own.
“In my head I am inventing the perfect wardrobe for that house.”
Hair products by Rōz; grooming products by Boy De Chanel (Kuhse), Kypris (Ghesquière); hair, Benjamin Terry; grooming, Kimberly Bragalone; manicures, Ronna Jones. Produced on location by Connect the Dots. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
