“It’s odd to have an unfinished painting greet you when you come in the door,” admits Mel Elias, the entrepreneur and film score composer who owns this 6,000-square-foot Modernist residence in West Hollywood. “But it kind of represents the story of the house.”
Said painting is by the late Milton Katselas, a prominent theater producer and acting coach whose clients included George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. At the end of the 1990s, Katselas bought two late-1930s or early-1940s bungalows on this land and promptly demolished one, replacing it with a steel-frame structure swathed in board-formed concrete, and then exposed the skeleton of the other. After his death in 2008, the property fell into neglect, much of it, like the painting, still unfinished, arrested midconstruction as concrete floors and drywall with no enclosure.
Elias – former CEO of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf chain and now cofounder with Sung Oh of Bruvi, a purveyor of single-serve coffee machines – asked designer Carter Bradley for help in reconceiving and completing what Katselas had started. “Milton had bought dozens of potted trees and vines that had rooted and covered everything, so you couldn’t even see it from the street,” recalls Bradley. “He also wanted rusted steel, but he wasn’t very patient and doused everything with muriatic acid, which caused a lot of problems. There were leaks everywhere.”
Elias describes the plan as “collaborating with Katselas’ original vision, preserving as much as we could and adding this Japanese aesthetic.” The success of the project is that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish new from original segments of the home. Bradley united the structures, reconfigured spaces and used materials – glass, steel and board-formed concrete – that were in harmony with Katselas’ intentions. “We celebrated the rawness of things,” adds Elias. “Pipes can stick out of walls, and beams are still exposed.”
One such hybrid space is the living room, which is located in an old glass-domed atrium with an arched fireplace designed by Katselas’ using rusted metal to simulate grasses on one side and diagonal wood inserts on the other. The space was completely rebuilt but preserves original details and opens to the dining room, which is completely new. Another is Elias’ office, which doubles as accommodations (it has a sleeping loft). It had been a courtyard and retains its footprint, walls and concrete floor. But now it connects to the newly built kitchen, a boxy structure designed by Bradley and featuring a roofline that echoes Katselas’ steel-frame redo of one of the bungalows.
Bradley and Elias, along with Elias’ partner, Sarah Butler, an actress and landscape designer, also added various elements to the house that riffed on those designed by Katselas. At the foot of the fireplace, for instance, was a single red tile, a motif that appeared nowhere else in the residence. “It would have been easy enough to clean up and get rid of,” explains Elias. Instead, Bradley repeated the detail throughout various rooms.
Katselas also had a huge book collection (which Elias purchased), arrayed on built-in shelving. Bradley repeated that idea in the dining room and a family room off a state-of-the-art recording studio. The dining room’s shelves slide aside to reveal a hidden walk-in closet for the primary suite.
The décor mixes classic vintage pieces – Bellini Cab chairs in the kitchen and dining room, an Eames lounge chair in the family room and industrial, bendable-arm wall lamps Elias found in Paris – with modern furnishings, such as a Cassina sectional in the family room. Katselas, an amateur artist, is responsible for the unfinished entry painting, but also for a stunning metal panel, likely cobbled together from rusted building materials, which hangs on a wall behind a pair of Kai Kristiansen #42 rosewood dining chairs. Throughout, Elias added contemporary artworks, most spectacularly an enormous, abstract Eddie Martinez canvas in a room off the living room.
In the end, the house also turned out to be incredibly versatile. “One day, that room will be a dining room,” states Elias of the aforementioned space, “and the next, a performance space. There are so many flexibilities. We’ve had 300 people here for events and sit-down dinners for 50. Rather than needing to move every few years, it allows me to rearrange spaces. The house has to keep up with us.”
Photography by Manolo Langis.
For more like this West Hollywood home, be sure to check out this idyllic Montecito residence.
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