In The Spectacular Beverly Hills Residence, Landry Design Group Merges Modern Architecture And Luxury Hotel Aesthetics For A Virtuoso Result
Named Best Architecture Single Residence at the 2024-2025 International Property Awards, this architectural masterpiece designed by Los Angeles-based Landry Design Group (LDG) with interiors by Philip Nimmo, marks a grand fusion of French chateau style and modern architecture in a single unified structure.
“The client wanted to create something modern, something different,” says Design Director Mark Savary of LDG, the esteemed firm known for designing exceptional residential works of both scale and ambition. “He wanted the best house in the world.”
To that end, inspired by the owner’s background as a hospitality entrepreneur and his penchant for the iconic Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the South of France, the architects used classic symmetry and order with simple forms as the basis for the expansive project, blending the different architectural concepts with astonishing seamlessness. The result combines the elegance of a sophisticated hotel, ideal for extensive entertaining, with the warmth and graciousness of a family home.
In keeping with a fine French hotel, the home facilitates a soaring sense of arrival, its debonair circular driveway with modern water features an impeccable prelude to a strikingly symmetrical, limestone-clad edifice highlighting strong geometries, vast glass, water walls behind circular screens and light slots in the limestone for a lit-from-within exquisiteness.
The owner calls the house Papillon (French for butterfly), symbolizing a new life, and the theme is subtly repeated theme throughout, from the 9-foot butterfly sculpture “Dream Machine” by Rubem Robierb to the opalescent butterfly door handles by Savoy Studios. Most breathtakingly, this motif is seen in the 18-foot-long spiral chandelier by Philip Nimmo and Windfall Contemporary, an ethereal array of 350 hand-blown glass butterflies swirling at all different heights in the showcase foyer. More set piece than space, the foyer is carved out of a simple block form and highlights a gorgeous glass-topped rotunda and two double staircases with book-matched marble plinths for beautiful bouquets.
The home’s layout is another conspicuous hat tip to hotel hospitality. Moving through the central core on the main level, the floor plan flows into a sweeping common space anchored by a sculptural grand piano from Hungarian virtuoso Gergely Boganyi (one of only three in the world at the time). To the left of the space, the dining area showcases an alluring wine feature wall, backlit with herringbone shelving, as well as a 22-foot-long dining table designed by Philip Nimmo. The adjacent great room, meanwhile, combines a clubby living room and a lounge area for a warm and gracious social space that opens to the rear yard with a “grand lawn” and covered loggia via a retractable 50-foot expanse of glass.
Just off the central core on the main level are more intimate spaces including home offices, a home theater, and a guest bedroom plus two fabulous kitchens, one for family and the other a large, professional-grade chef’s service kitchen that, in premium hotel fashion, is well equipped with open displays for an array of food and drink items—ideally arranged by the owner who loves to cook. Upstairs is the province of the bedrooms, including the glamorous primary suite with a generous outdoor deck and adjoining living spaces, plus a pair of sumptuous primary baths, each one an oasis swathed in stone.
Not only is presentation everything in this house—it is everywhere too. Even at the basement level, where in addition to a golf simulator and a music room, is one of the most smashing spaces in the whole place, the wine room—a haute homage to the hospitality influence, highlighting the dark hues of wine bottles and a reflective ceiling that stretches the space vertically for a sleek, sexy vibe.
Philip Nimmo’s own high-end hotel background and his previous collaboration with the owner were crucial to achieving the museum-quality interior.
“We have learned to work well together,” Philip Nimmo says of this aesthetic kinship. “If there was 100 samples of grey fabric on his table and the same 100 on my table, we would probably pick the same grey. In many ways, we completed each other’s thoughts.” And yet, “You have to be disciplined when you’re in the hotel business,” Philip Nimmo adds. “There’s a real structure to it that we both understand.”
Philip Nimmo better than most.
To the home’s primary material palette of rough-cut and smooth stone and painted champagne finishes he added black reflective glass, suede wall coverings, and various marbles from Sequoia to white quartz. He designed most of the furnishings throughout and incorporated luxury pieces from the likes of Fendi Casa and art from boldfaced names Damien Hirst, Helmut Newton and more.
The interior reaches a new level when open to the sublime natural surround, a landscape of meticulous gardens featuring modern interpretations of traditional French topiaries and espalier walls. Uniquely, the pool (plus a pool cabana with pool baths, an outdoor bar and more) is situated off to the side of the house to make way for the grand lawn, which is perfectly poised for parties. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, the home takes an especially dramatic turn in the evening with specialty lighting, fire features, and water walls framed in light among the elements of a majestic transformation.
In these moments, “It’s a whole different level of wow,” Mark Savary says. “Every element adds to the feeling of a special place,” he adds. “Something more than your typical home.”
Something extraordinary.
Landry Design Group | landrydesigngroup.com
Photos Manolo Langis
