By Lucie Young
Photography by Edmund Barr

The millionaire businessman Jim Goldstein lives in one of America's most architecturally daring homes, perched 400 feet up in the Hollywood Hills. Guests enter over giant stepping stones in a pool filled with Koi carp. Several visitors have accidentally fallen in. One woman tried to sue when she slipped and cut her leg. 'Now I stand back from the door when I greet people,' Goldstein says, "so they won't look up at me and miss the last step.'

Such are the trials of living in a modern masterpiece. It was built in 1963 by the modernist architect John Lautner. When the original owners divorced shortly after the house was complete, the new ones, who apparently had as much taste as the Visigoths, painted the interior hippie-ish yellow, green and black.

Goldstein bought the house in 1972 and in the late 1970s he embarked on a 25-year restoration and expansion project. He took the brilliant initiative of inviting Lautner to update the interior, then added a lush tropical garden to the surrounding hillside. And now work has been completed on a garden-folly-cum-art-installation which took 13 years lo build, and cost Goldstein several million dollars.

When Goldstein is passionate about something, he takes it to extremes. The house renovations have transformed the interior into an ultra-futuristic-looking Bond lair. If you press the wrong switch in any of the bathrooms, the ceilings retract, very possibly leaving you standing in your birthday suit with a bunch of
bananas dangling surreally overhead. Doubling as extreme high-tech bathroom
scales, the floorboards in the dressing-room automatically sense your weight.

The main wardrobe features an industrial-size electronic clothes rack that twirls at the touch of a button to expose Goldstein's remarkable collection of peacockish clothes (he is a regular at the Paris fashion shows, where he collects outrageous designs by the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Roberto Cavalli: think silk shirts slashed to the waist, fur jerkins and distressed leather jeans.

The main house is now beautifully preserved and has featured in several films, including the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski. the heist movie Bandits and most recently in Charlie’s Angels: Ful! Throttle. Its winged concrete roof is studded with amazing tiny skylights (Lautner embedded drinking glasses in the ceiling to let in shafts of dappled light, which Goldstein has since replaced with clean, new versions in the same style). But the house's piece de resistance, according to the project architect Duncan Nicholson, is that ‘it has a very strong roof structure which gives it a powerful sense of shelter. The light comes in from all sides, which makes you feel like you are outside.' Nicholson worked with Lautner on the house until Lautner's death in 1994, and then took over the renovation and new construction.

The original windows, which had steel mullions that partially obscured the views, were replaced to provide a seamless wall of glass. Newer technology allowed for enormous sheets of unframed glass that slide back and forth without visible tracks. The downside is that people, Goldstein included, have accidentally headbutted these invisible walls (he confesses that he was distracted by the sight of the model Gisele Bundchen, who was being photographed in his bedroom for an advertising campaign).

In Goldstein's lush, two-acre garden, which clings to an almost vertical hillside, a viewing terrace made from a triangle of cantilevered glass makes you feel as if you are floating in thin air. Lautner had originally planted the garden with indigenous plants - pine, creosote bushes and chaparral - but Goldstein thought the result drab, so he hired the landscape architect Eric Nagelmann to put in thousands of tropical plants, including 25 varieties of banana tree.

Spryly descending the 230 steps of his garden path. Goldstein explains that each 10 feet of concrete path took one month to build. At the bottom, we reach his latest project, the folly/art installation Skyspace, conceptualised by the American land artist James Turrell and realised by Nicholson. The local authorities had said the plot could not be built on. 'It was the most complicated and exciting space I have ever built,’ Nicholson says.

From the outside, Skyspace looks like a cross between a giant concrete brioche and a nuclear bunker. Inside, the feel is of an expensive isolation tank with gently curved titanium white walls and a floating floor which has a halo-like glow of coloured light emanating from underneath. Five thousand LEDs and 500 incandescent lights are concealed around the perimeter and they can wash the walls with a symphony of hues ranging from Astroturf green through sorbet pink, lemon yellow, violet, scarlet and teal. These artificial colours also affect the appearance of the sky outside. 'Like music, the changing colours really affect your emotions.' says Turrell, a portly man sporting a wide-brimmed hat.

Two window-like openings - one big, one smaller - are pitched so high up that the only thing you can see is the sky. The smaller opening is closer to the horizon and through it the sky appears lighter and more striated. In the larger window, on sunny days the sky becomes a pool of intensely saturated azure. 'The effect is like seeing up a chimney,' Turrell says. 'You can see the stars inside before you see them outside.'

In 30 year, Turrell has built 23 Skyspaces, around the world, including several in Britain. But goldstein’s is the most virtuoso design to date, thanks to Nicholson and Goldstein's obsessive attention lo detail. It is the only one in
concrete, and it is one of just two to feature an elaborate computer-controlled lighting system.

Goldstein is so delighted with the result that he trots down the hillside twice a day to check on his installation. '1 never knew there was so much to seeing,' he enthuses. Sometimes he brings friends, "Everyone's mouth falls open. They can't believe what they are seeing.'

It is a fabulous talking point, of course, and Goldstein has made it all the more of an attraction by positioning a cocktail bar outside the pod and a music system inside. There is also a leather bed recessed into the floor - perfect for sleepovers in what is surely one of the world's most awe-inspiring guesthouses.