LIVING IN MODERN MONUMENTS
Five answers to the question "What's it like to dwell in a work of art?"
By Susan Doubilet
(This excerpt taken from the above titled article.)
James Goldstein and his John Lautner house in Beverly Hills

Some might be taken aback by the boldness of the work by John Lautner, the architectural "bad boy" who worked in Southern California from 1940 until his death in 1995(CK). James Goldstein, a investor and basketball fanatic in Los Angeles, had quite the opposite reaction. When in the early 1970s he saw the former Sheats residence, with its massive concrete roof and breath-taking view of Los Angeles, a chord was struck. "John was rebellious and non-conformist, just like me," says Goldstein. "I had spent two years looking in Los Angeles for an unusual house with a view, and when I saw this one, I knew instantly that this was it!"
As in many of Lautner's houses, the Goldstein residence, built in 1963, seems to aim at both blending with nature and defying it. The folded concrete roof over its living room, for example, is massive: is it a tent or a cave, an outer space creature or a giant machine? This spectacular trapezoid-shaped living room, virtually continuous with a large pool deck, shares the main floor with the dining room, kitchen, and guest bedrooms, which lie in a triangular wing behind it. Stairs lead down from the central dining room to a partially roofed open-air walkway, and this brings you to the second outstanding room of the house, the master bedroom suite, built beneath the pool deck. Both major rooms take advantage of -one might almost say feed upon - the amazing Los Angeles panorama that is spread before them.
Both major rooms are enriched with clever details Lautner thought up, the kind of gimmicks that made some critics dismiss him as a trivial futurist while inspiring others to adore him for his inventiveness. The living room roof has hundreds of tiny "skylights," created by upturned drinking glasses having been cast into the concrete as it was poured. To impose no division between the interior and the pool, and to take advantage of California's easy climate, Lautner originally put no walls around the living room's perimeter. Instead, he had cooled or warmed air forced up from floor to ceiling along the room's edge, in order to modulate the room's temperature if necessary. The bedroom, in its turn, has on one side windows that look into the side of the pool, and on the remaining sides an all-glass wall that slides back at one corner to create an open deck.
"The house was in bad condition when I found it," says Goldstein. And in the 30-year process of restoring and adapting it, first with Lautner and assistant Andrew Noland, and in the last five years with architect Duncan Nicholson, he has made the house wholly his own. The house is now as bold and as sexy as its admirers (and critics) have always claimed. And it is still a work in progress.
"The house had had two unsympathetic owners since the Sheats family lived there," explains Goldstein. "In the living room, which was originally open to the deck and pool, we replaced ugly steel-mullioned windows with frameless ones. And I had Lautner design built-in concrete and leather furniture based on the architecture's triangular motif, to create a unified design scheme in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner's mentor."
The master bedroom, now both luminous and daring, had to be re-done extensively, explains Goldstein. "We bush-hammered the concrete walls to gain texture. And we completely changed the orientation of the sink and shower, so that both face the view." Sink and shower, in fact , are made almost entirely of glass, so they do not interrupt the view at all!
"John always liked to have an element of danger in his houses," says Goldstein, "and this one is no exception." If you relish risk, just step out onto the open deck at the corner of the master bedroom. It protrudes precariously over a steeply dropping hillside, not for the faint-hearted.
"We are still working on the property," continues Goldstein. "I planted a tropical garden and keep extending it as I buy up more properties around the house. I'm constructing a one-room pavilion conceived by artist James Turrell, and will build a new guesthouse, designed by John before he died.
"I guess I've always been interested in architecture. "But now, I actually feel as if I am an architect."