DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
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120 DIGS.NET | 12.16.2016 Of all the architecture in L.A., what compelled you to write a book about Trousdale Estates and how long did it take? Honestly, it took me 40 years. But I thought, Trousdale started coming back around the year 2000 and I grew up studying its architecture; so in 2008, when nobody had written a book about it, I said to myself, I'll do it as a hobby! Then it kind took over my life. Given Trousdale's history, did the fact that so little was written about it surprise you? It did and it didn't. Trousdale was becoming fashionable and pricey again; that's usually enough for people to get interested in looking at the architecture, but I'm actually very proud to have put together the pieces to show just how many great L.A. architects were called on to build there in the '50s and '60s—and it was almost all of them, just a great concentration of big names in midcentury A R C H I T E C T | D E S I G N | B U I L D Ridgeline Residence, 2014. Paul McClean, Designer. Photo by Nick Springett. architecture. One of the precepts of Trousdale was that its homes be designed by architects. So the wealthy went to the best there were; old lions like Wallace Neff and Paul Revere Williams and James Dolena; new ones like A. Quincy Jones or Hal Levitt and Lloyd Wright. So I kept finding a Wallace Neff, a Cliff May, an A. Quincy Jones in Architectural Digest or other places, and began to put it together casually. When it became kind of a collection, I thought, I need to run with this, so I did. The book also looks at social architecture of a city. Describe the social construct of Beverly Hills during the time that Trousdale Estates was conceived. The backdrop is Southern Californian in the postwar era, full of growth and promise, a lot of optimism. It was a time of the Case Study House program, which showed the world how California lived. Those lessons were taken and expanded on by a lot of well- off Californians and developers. But if the California life was good in L.A., it was even bigger and better in Beverly Hills. Everything had to be bigger. I think a lot of people followed the Groucho Marx model. He had lived in the flats of Beverly Hills, which is a somewhat conservative—architecturally, anyway— area. His brother Harpo lived there very comfortably all his life, but Groucho wanted to be free of it, so as this brand-new shiny development is going up above Beverly Hills, he decides to go there. He's indicative of others who felt uncomfortable in traditional homes in the flats; they wanted to go to Trousdale to show their wealth, their power, their achievements—and they did. Self-made people who had made fortunes in their lifetimes wanted to reward themselves. You write in the book that Trousdale was "long dismissed and derided as being all flash and no substance," a notion that top L.A. architects helped dispel. Will you elaborate? Architects followed clients, and clients followed