Legendary Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer, architect of the capital city Brasília, has built only one residential structure in the United States, where he was long banned because of his leftist political associations. Despite his global fame, the Santa Monica house he designed in 1963 was hardly known even to Southern California’s Nikon-strapped aficionados of midcentury modernism.
Sited on a bluff overlooking a golf course and the Santa Monica Mountains, the expansive one-story house, with a 14-foot-tall glass-walled living room, gradually became destabilized by seismic shifts in land values. Several years ago a developer bought the 4,600-square-foot house, planning to raze it to build one twice the size. The application for a demolition permit finally triggered the attention of the landmarks commission, which issued a stay of execution, putting the preservation community on alert.
Michael and Gabrielle Boyd heard about the endangered house the day they were closing on the sale of their town house in Manhattan (see Architectural Digest, December 2001). Michael Boyd was on the plane the next day, and the couple signed papers within the month—“The developer was a good sport about it,” says Gabrielle Boyd, referring to the not-so-hostile takeover. The couple soon decamped with their extensive collection of modernist furniture, their vast library of design books, their two boys and their passion and immediately set to work drawing up plans.
The Boyds are not your usual fixer-uppers. In their enlightened obsession with midcentury modernism, they have become sequential house collectors, choosing the specimen building and moving to the city where it is located. “Essentially, we’ve been on a quest,” says Gabrielle Boyd. “We’ve wanted to live in an environment that’s a comprehensive, avant-garde whole, from the furniture to the house. It’s all art to us.”
So far, the quest has taken them through three houses, all of which proved to have drawbacks, and they hoped their fourth, the sole American Niemeyer design, would be the happily-ever-after home. The glassy, indoor-outdoor pavilion, with a flat roof suspended by an exoskeletal superstructure, was part of a very sensible floor plan that harbored a swimming pool in an outdoor room at the rear. Avant-garde edge intersected with livability.
The architect, now 97 and still practicing in Rio, had designed the house for Anne and Joseph Strick, who admired what Anne Strick calls his “high-flying, imaginative architecture.” The couple and Niemeyer agreed on a scheme, based on a T-shape plan. “We were very specific about details—a high ceiling in the public spaces, low in the private and level changes in the living area,” she recalls.
But after 38 years, it came time to sell, and, although no architectural changes had been made, the house needed some attention. The Boyds brought their cumulative expertise to Santa Monica, along with a sense of mission. “We wanted to protect this work and bring it back,” says Michael Boyd. “We loved that it was by Niemeyer and that it was relatively undiscovered. Unlike our previous houses, it didn’t come charged with the expectations of a lot of people who knew it inch by inch in all its phases. We felt less inhibited here.”
Fortunately, the Boyds had bought into a well-built house that needed no remedial restructuring and easily took on the polish. The couple proceeded with a light touch, fixing up surfaces cosmetically. In the master bedroom, they changed the wallcovering; in the master bath, they installed a white-terrazzo floor and a pink washbasin and tub, retrieved from an architectural salvage yard. To emphasize the Brazilian lineage of the house, the Boyds replaced the linoleum floors in the living, dining and kitchen areas with palmwood.
Their passion for design is grounded in their reading: “First come the books, and then come the pieces,” says Gabrielle Boyd. Their extensive library surpassed the capacity of the original study at one end of the living room and spilled over into the garage beneath. In their only addition to the house, the Boyds converted the garage into a library and extended its walls toward the street for a new garage.
Lining the east side of the lot from the front to the back are the bedrooms, flanking the kitchen; the stem of the T defines the main living area. The kitchen and dining terrace anchor the loft-like volume of the living area, with a fireplace at the far end. “The bedroom suites are intimately scaled and flow out into that T intersection,” says Gabrielle Boyd. “Spatially, it’s perfect for a family.”
Furnishing the house was the easy part, simply a matter of choosing pieces from the couple’s collection of furniture—designed mostly by architects and dating from 1900 to 1970. The Boyds live with the sturdier specimens and leave the more fragile pieces in the library.
The restoration was not rote but interpretative, especially in the garden. “The vegetation was very important because the meaning of the design was based on inside-outside living,” says Michael Boyd. “Besides, we wanted to bring out the sense that this is a Niemeyer building and imbue it with the feeling of the Brazilian landscape. In Brazil, plants attack from all sides.”
Michael Boyd chanced by an auto body shop in Altadena whose owner had a sideline of clearing yards and collecting tropical plants and trees. The Boyds bought out his whole collection, and now palms and ferns populate a front and back yard paved with curved paths that wind between ink-drop formations tiled in broken travertine.
For the Boyds, the house finally satisfied their need to live in a design that was avant-garde yet performed well for their family. “We’re living in a sculpture, and the sculpture works perfectly,” Michael Boyd says. “It’s minimal, clean and Constructivist but actually functions as a residence.”
“The design makes us live differently,” adds Gabrielle Boyd. “When we’re inside, we’re outside with the plants.”
In other houses, the Boyds found themselves living from repair to repair, project to project. “A vintage house is like a vintage car,” Gabrielle Boyd says. “You’re never done. Between the plumbing and historical accuracy, we never had any other kind of life. Here, the great surprise is that it’s so easy to tend the house, and yet we can lock the door and go on a trip.”
“Our quest is complete,” says Michael Boyd, summing up their architectural biography. “It quenches our thirst for modernist architecture, and it improves the quality of our lives. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing left to do. You look around, and everything you see is a manifestation of a great idea that inspires us in our day.”
