The New View From the Top

Every morning the curtain goes up on this house in the Hollywood Hills when Maurice Tuchman activates a motorized blind in the glass entry hall, revealing a framed view of the house, verdant slopes and a gravity-defying lap pool. “Each part of the house has something to say to the rest, and almost every room opens onto a terrace, which is great when I’m having a party,” he says.

As much as Tuchman loves to entertain, though, he also planned his home as a place to work and display his collection of contemporary art, including sculpture by Robert Graham and paintings by Ed Ruscha and Edward Kienholz. A former assistant curator at the Guggenheim Museum, he was senior curator of 20th century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1964 to 1996. Now senior curator emeritus, he is co-producing and hosting for a major corporation interactive art programs that will appear on the Internet this fall.

Tuchman has lived on this site since 1970, when he bought a conventional ranch house for privacy and the view. When the canyon became part of the California park system in 1989, guaranteeing that his view would never be obstructed, he talked to several architects about building something more adventurous. He picked Brent Saville, who was best known for museum installations, home renovations and several local restaurants. “Brent was trained as a philosopher, not as an architect, and I admired his confidence and ingenuity as a designer,” Tuchman recalls. “I knew he would go for a home run.”

To make the best use of the lot, which looks out toward the ocean and downtown from the height of New York’s World Trade Center, and to open up the house to light and air while protecting fragile artwork, Saville burrowed into the hillside, placing Tuchman’s office below the entry-level living room and the master bedroom suite above that. The two upper levels face south through a curved glass bay that opens to a gully and the pool. On the opposite side of the glass entry hall are two small rooms (a pool changing room and a computer workspace) topped by a belvedere and linked by a brick stair tower. A walkway over the hall features cables strung between painted steel ribs that were inspired by Brancusi’s sculpture “Bird in Flight.”

Saville died of cancer last year, but he lived to see his design take shape in the form of rare woods, stone and imported custom-designed furnishings. The building’s exterior siding of untreated hardwood has begun to turn a handsome silver. Inside, the open living room runs the length of the house and has a curved drop ceiling that sweeps from the library nook, with its Australian lacewood shelves, through the sitting and dining areas to the kitchen. The curve echoes the window bay and is repeated in Dutch leather sofas upholstered in soft blue and green that tie in with the pool and landscape.

The house is becoming layered with forms and memories. Paintings have come out of storage to be displayed with new acquisitions. And friends have left souvenirs--for example, Claes Oldenburg did a chalk drawing for the bathroom whose title, “View From the Canyon,” is written backward as though in a mirror. “As serene and satisfying as the house is,” Tuchman says, “it also represents a dynamic work in progress that’ll soon be enriched by all kinds of site-specific artworks.”