Inside the Big Lebowski house – a masterpiece donated to Lacma

The Sheats-Goldstein house will be left to the Los Angeles museum by the businessmen who bought and restored it with the original architect John Lautner

To get to architect John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein house in Los Angeles, you drive upward to where the Hills of Beverly become mere mounds compared with the vertical winding lanes of Beverly Crest. On a sharp turnout, there’s an empty lot with a dramatic view of Miracle Mile to the east and Century City to the west. An opening in the lush vegetation leads to a narrow and steep descent at the end of one of the most photographed houses in the city, which seems hidden amid greenery.

“There are almost no 90-degree angles in the house. John was very much opposed to a box-like approach to design,” explains owner James Goldstein, the septuagenarian businessman who just donated the house and its contents to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With a purchase price of $185,000 in 1972, the current bottom line comes to north of $40m, including the site-specific skyspace installation by light-and-space sculptor James Turrell, as well as artwork by the likes of Ed Ruscha and Kenny Scharf.

Goldstein hopes to inspire future architects by opening the house to the public through the museum (on limited occasions only while he still lives there), and help foster a greater appreciation for contemporary architecture. “I don’t understand why people give their art, worth many millions of dollars, and don’t think about giving their houses when their houses are a work of art.”

“Some houses,” Lacma’s chief executive, Michael Govan, corrects him. And the Sheats-Goldstein house is definitely one of them. Lautner built it in 1963 for Paul and Helen Sheats, respectively a professor and an artist. Thirty years earlier, the young architect was a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright, overseeing the construction of the Sturges house, a 1939 Brentwood residence that goes to auction on Sunday for an estimated starting price of $2m.

Although he partnered with Samuel Reisbord and Whitney R Smith in the 1940s on commercial projects such as Coffee Dan’s restaurants, residences were Lautner’s main focus throughout his career. Keeping with the mid-century tradition exercised by fellow Wright disciples, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, Lautner’s designs incorporate the terrain while striving to eliminate the distinction between outdoor and indoor.

Like Wright’s Ennis House (also overseen by Lautner), the Sheats-Goldstein house cascades down a canyon wall, offering stunning views while overcoming complex engineering challenges. His hillside Chemosphere house, built around the same time as Sheats-Goldstein, employs one simple column buried deep in the hillside to prop up a circular, pie-shaped structure.

In 1972, when Sheats put the house on the market, a dispute occurred with the buyer and Goldstein, a real estate investor, offered the asking price even though it was already in escrow. At the time, ratty shag carpet covered the living room floor, the master bedroom had turquoise-painted walls, and the view from the living room was crisscrossed with steel mullions.

Seven years later, Goldstein decided to replace the formica-and-plywood cabinets that adjoin the glass wall in the living room, so he called Lautner. “I could see the expression on his face. He was in deep shock,” Goldstein remembers. “John was happy to work on my specific project, and before it was even complete I saw what a change it was making in the house. And so I wanted to move on to more projects. It sort of happened step by step without a complete plan of what we were going to do. Interestingly enough, John Lautner never made a suggestion to me. I never knew what he was thinking. As soon as I came up with an idea, he jumped on it and gave me several alternative ways of doing it and always left it up to me to pick the ones I liked.”

From their first encounter onward, the house has been a work in progress. And when Lautner died in 1994 at the age of 83, his protege Duncan Nicholson took up the mantle, designing a tennis court, a nightclub (the scene of recent Grammy parties, as well as Rihanna’s birthday), and an entertainment complex, including a planned screening room as well as a lap pool, currently under construction.

Through the years, the house has become famous for star-studded Hollywood parties, and has seen a steady stream of photo and film shoots, notably The Big Lebowski, in which it stood in for a pornographer’s pad (the master bedroom includes glass walls that part with the push of a button).

Museums don’t often acquire buildings due to what can amount to astronomical maintenance costs. Luckily, Sheats-Goldstein comes with a $17m endowment. “One of the reasons I was so excited when we began talking about this house, is that this is an expression not just of design but also of an architect, John Lautner, who is one of the greatest architects of our time,” Govan said of Goldstein’s generous gift. “And as I’m fond of saying, no patron, no project. Without the patron, artists cannot work.”

Goldstein kept Lautner working continuously until the end of his life, his house ever-morphing around him. “I’ve never had any regrets,” he sighs. “I’m very happy with the way it’s turned out.”

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