ICONIC HOMES

Among many writers, there’s a commonly held belief that a desk must be organised, an office must be tidy, an entire home must be cleaned, before one can finally sit down and fill the empty pages before them. One can’t help but think of such habits — the physical manifestation of routine and discipline — when visiting the completely preserved home of the midcentury French American eroticist Anaïs Nin, who died at 73 in 1977 in Los Angeles. Here, hidden among pines overlooking the Silver Lake neighbourhood’s reservoir, Nin envisioned a low, single-storey aerie, which she called her “one large studio, no separate, small partitions.” This description appeared in the first edition of her diary (originally published in 1966), which she began writing at 11 as a child traveling to America from the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and continued until her death. Today, there are 18 volumes — with a final one left unpublished — comprising an oeuvre that also includes frank, feminist, sexually explicit, oft-censored essays about her various lovers; literary criticism (the English writer D.H. Lawrence was a favourite); and beloved works of fiction like “House of Incest” (1936) and “Delta of Venus” (1977), many of which she initially printed herself.

It’s easy to see why this house, completed in 1962, was where she got much of this work done: There are hardly any distractions, visual or otherwise. Approached from the end of a long driveway off a steep, winding road, it resembles a pavilion clad entirely in rich, dark Douglas fir. Inside, the original 120-square-metre interior incorporates lots of wire-brushed plywood in the form of heavily striated boards and built-ins, alongside two other materials: concrete blocks and plate glass. Massive windows front one side of the house, providing views of a rock garden, a small pool, scruffy cliffside brush and the city beyond. Aside from the narrow kitchen, there are few well-defined rooms: The living area connects with a sleeping space that’s separated only by an accordion-style, floor-to-ceiling wooden partition that usually remained open; Nin didn’t have children and preferred not to have any guests staying overnight. Next to the bedroom is her small private study, about nine square metres, in the building’s back corner.

The few furnishings — a built-in floating desk; a long, low sofa; a few squat chairs and an ottoman; the kitchen cabinets — that fill the compact three-metre-tall rooms are made largely from the same wood as the walls, its purplish-brown hue complementing the mauve carpeting and the pinkish-grey concrete bricks to create a distinctive, unlikely palette that makes one feel as if they’re hibernating inside a dusty, cracked-open geode — or better, in the spirit of Nin, a womb. That sensation, of being enveloped, is punctuated only by a few statuettes, artefacts and books picked up during her travels throughout America, Europe and Asia; paintings and letters given to her over the years by lovers and artist friends such as Henry Miller, Jean Varda and Eyvind Earle; and the bold turquoise of the upholstery, as well as the teal rotary telephone and typewriter that still haunt Nin’s writing nook and which allude to her adopted homeland’s bright blue vistas. “It had the sense of space of Japanese houses … all sky, mountains, lake, as if one lived out of doors,” Nin wrote in her diary of her home. “Yet the roof, held by its heavy beams, gave a feeling of protection.”

If Nin’s home was built for a specific artist, it took a few others to execute her vision. When she moved in, the writer was married to Rupert Pole, a musician whose mother’s decades-old weathered ebony wood baby grand piano still claims one corner of the sitting room. Pole’s half brother was Eric Lloyd Wright, a grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright and the son of the landscape architect Lloyd Wright, both of whom young Eric apprenticed for, assisting on projects like New York’s 1959 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Eric, now 92 and living in nearby Malibu, spent his life restoring his grandfather’s buildings and becoming a residential architect in his own right, designing spaces that often shared his elders’ interest in geometric forms, organic materials and natural landscapes. As the lore goes, Nin herself was somewhat in awe of the Wrights — those “giants of the West,” she called them — and was worried her own creativity might be subsumed by theirs. Despite that fear, the couple asked Eric to build the house because he grasped how they wanted to live: In Nin’s study, for instance, the architect built a bank of corner windows above her desk, so that she might stare out at the small back garden’s pittosporum, rather than at the walls, when she was writing.

Pole, who died in 2006, had his own motives for giving Nin this retreat. In those years, she travelled often to her home in New York City where, unbeknown to many of her West Coast intimates, she was keeping another husband, the filmmaker Hugh Parker Guiler, whom she’d previously married and then lied about divorcing. Pole admitted in a 1984 interview that he “really built the house to persuade her to dig some roots, and she was very much against it, saying that she had ‘portable roots.’ Nevertheless, it worked … she always looked forward to coming back here after she had been away.” Nin referred to the place as her “house of mirrors” and was particularly entranced by the way the golden light bounced between the large windows and the pool below, where she’d swim whenever she felt stuck.

She spent most of her later life in Silver Lake. Four years after she died, Pole and his new partner, Kazuko Sugisaki, commissioned Eric to build a 50-square-metre addition — all with the same plywood shelving, lilac carpeting and corner windows as the adjacent study — that now functions as a library displaying first editions of Nin’s books alongside those of Miller and other peers. Since 2007, the Nin-Pole Residence, as it’s come to be known to both literary and architectural fans who want (and mostly fail) to get a peek inside, has been owned and inhabited by Eric’s son Devon and his wife, Tree. Devon, 59, often attended gatherings at the house as a child, and living here in recent years has brought back certain memories: of the building’s resonant acoustics, for instance, and of the fact that Pole and Nin only seemed to use their lavender-tiled iridescent dining table (and kitchen, for that matter) when they were giving parties.

One of the first things the latest generation did upon moving in was to have the house designated a historic-cultural monument, with the idea of preventing any future design interventions. They’ve refused to add a microwave or modernise the dated kitchen appliances; when a section of the carpet needs replacing, the colour is painstakingly matched; and they’ve hunted down LED bulbs that lend the same lanternlike light as the original incandescent overheads. But Devon and Tree have also left a few of their own imprints, installing things like blinds that block the mid-afternoon sun, and a wooden deck reminiscent of a Japanese teahouse’s — both reminders, Devon says, that the dwelling “is still churning out new experiences, new ways to live.”

And now it’s someone else’s turn to experience it. During the pandemic, as these once sedate hills became increasingly crowded with new arrivals, the couple decided to move to Ojai, California, but not before finding stewards who’ll respect the Nin-Pole’s lineage by not refurnishing or otherwise ruining it. They must understand that it’s not just a house but a shrine to an artist’s — well, several artists’ — way of being. As Nin wrote, “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”

Piero Lissoni is nothing if not precise. The 65-year-old Italian architect and designer micromanaged everything in his new Milan apartment, from the severe steel window frames to the irregular jigsaw pattern of the primary bathroom’s Carrara marble floors. He is quick to point out that the walls of the apartment, located on a low floor of a 1950s high rise, are not merely white but something known as 9010, or pure white, according to a design-industry colour chart dating back to Weimar-era Germany. However, he equivocates when asked how he managed to make the two-bedroom, 230-square-metre home — marked by formal tableaus of austere objects and a palette that’s best described as chilly — feel somehow cosy, before deferring, finally, to his wife, the 47-year-old Italian photographer Veronica Gaido.

Really, “she’s the architect,” he says, even though Lissoni works as the creative director of several Italian furniture brands, including B&B Italia and Living Divani, as well as Boffi, the kitchen and bathroom company, and runs his own multidisciplinary design studio with offices in Milan and New York. A tall, restrained native Milanese, he cites Italy’s midcentury modern masters Achille Castiglioni and Vico Magistretti as mentors. But his latest home reveals a passion for the postmodernist work of his friend Ettore Sottsass, the Memphis Group founder whose 20th-century experiments — such as the multicoloured, circa-1986, Christmas tree-like Clesitera vase — look surprisingly discreet when sharing a space with Lissoni’s collection of somber, ageless, centuries-old East Asian pottery. The designer also collects vintage Danish midcentury modern pieces, including the Poul Kjaerholm black leather daybed in the living room and the Hans Wegner Wishbone wooden chairs around the new glass dining table of his own design.

He and Gaido — whose oversize long-exposure photographs of a human torso and Chinese terra-cotta sculptures are the living room’s main sources of colour — got married in December 2020, a few months before moving in. “We fought a lot about the floors,” says Gaido, a lively brunette from Tuscany, where the couple have a summer house near Forte dei Marmi. “He wanted white concrete. But in the end, I won,” she says, gesturing to the long-plank oak. Treated with a traditional combination of oil and wax, the floors have a “sculptural” quality, says Lissoni, who planned their pattern precisely.

But it’s their softening, soothing hue that really distinguishes them. For his previous apartment, located in a 1950s building a kilometre away and finished before he met Gaido, Lissoni chose bright white poured resin floors. Many of the pieces in the new apartment are holdovers from that life, including the living room’s Le Corbusier and Kjaerholm armchairs, pieces that might typically be seen in an office. But the oak floors, offset by a Moroccan area rug, give the sober furnishings a warm residential feel — “and they’re comfortable to walk on without shoes,” Gaido adds.

In a minimalist home marked by subtle combinations of distinct pieces, Lissoni aims above all for eye-catching repetition. “I don’t like having an isolated object,” he says. The living room’s iconic armchairs each come in pairs, along with two nearly identical Donald Judd side chairs. Even the apartment itself is arguably two apartments: the one inside, divided between a bedroom wing and an open-plan common area that includes the living room, dining room and kitchen; and another space, out on the 280-square-metre terrace, which has two areas set off by a perimeter of star jasmine vines and allées lined in potted hornbeam. Modern Milanese apartment buildings, in homage to the city’s historic fortresslike palaces, typically have garden-filled inner courtyards shared among the residents, while the apartments themselves often block the outdoors. A private green space like this, visible from much of the apartment, is a rare luxury.

Both the apartment and the terrace needed gut renovations, says Lissoni, who knows little about the previous owners other than that they seemed to have abandoned it: The last incarnation of the terrace — which now resembles a small park, even on a rainy fall day — was a concrete ledge; the interior was divided into a warren of small rooms. Lissoni knocked down all the walls except the load-bearing ones, then added sliding glass screens between the kitchen and the dining room and a network of doors in the bedroom wing. The couple use the second bedroom as a home office, and the new doors allow them to open up the private areas to create a loftlike effect, or seal them off entirely.

The building itself is an oddity: an 18-storey brick-clad high rise designed in the early 1950s by Alessandro Pasquali, an Italian Modernist architect who flourished during Italy’s fascist period. These days, with its massive masonry frontage and streamlined balconies, it vaguely suggests a Brutalist experiment from one or two decades later, but Orsina Simona Pierini, a professor of architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, Lissoni’s alma mater, says it’s rooted in the pre-World War II era, adding that the building’s placement, set back from the street, creates a kind of island in what is actually the heart of the city. The building’s unusual architecture reminds Lissoni of Le Corbusier’s work from the 1940s and ’50s; indeed, Modernism in all its forms has been a beacon for him since he started collecting high-Modernist design in the 1970s.

In the apartment’s office, pride of place is given to Charles and Ray Eames’s late 1940s La Chaise in white plastic. As elsewhere, surprising combinations abound. Just outside the main door, in the apartment’s private entryway, there’s a rare blue version of Sottsass’s Ultrafragola mirror; beyond the threshold, there’s a 300-year-old grey ceramic Chinese pot perched on a raw-steel stand designed by Lissoni. The primary bedroom’s sitting area has a neo-Modernist 1980s armchair by the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata and a marble-topped 1950s Eero Saarinen table, but the bed itself — for now just a mattress — is placed with precision on a rich blue Chinese rug made around 1900.

Such exactitude belies the fact that Lissoni likes to change his mind. The apartment has two anchor pieces — a monochromatic Japanese screen from the late 19th century, now in the hallway, and an 18th-century Japanese cabinet, currently in the living room — that the architect says he kept moving in his mind from room to room. Now, when asked what he’d change within the apartment, he says, “Everything.”

However, he has unequivocal praise for one recent acquisition: a white ceramic pumo, an apple-esque ornament given to the couple as a housewarming gift. Considered good-luck charms in southern Italy, pumi usually come in pairs to be placed on either side of a home’s front gate. Here there is only one, used as a centrepiece on the dining table. Though Lissoni had to give up on the idea of pure white floors, and even compromised with his wife on their new Living Divani sofa, which is off-white at best, he got his wish with the pumo, which is 9010, if it’s anything.

Who knows how long it will remain on the table, though. One can imagine the homeowners continually re-evaluating and readjusting these artefacts, until the pristine apartment wears in a bit. Milan was hit hard by the pandemic, and that caused delays in finishing the home — which, in turn, gave Lissoni more time to experiment and redesign. “Luckily,” he recalls, “someone said, ‘Piero, basta!’” And so for now, at least, the home and its inhabitants stay still.

It had taken several months of scouring flea markets before Jonathan Pessin finally found the weathered, hollow fibreglass Coke bottle that now stands sentry between the dining and kitchen areas of his loft in Los Angeles’ industrial Frogtown neighbourhood. Reportedly produced by the Coca-Cola Company circa the 1970s or 1980s, the almost-two-metre-tall sculpture was one that Pessin, a collector and dealer of strange objects and furniture, says he had been “thinking about seriously” for quite some time, a kind of white whale in his years-long pursuit of tracking down various quotidian items rendered in Claes Oldenburg-like proportions. He’d recently lost out on a plastic rotary phone fit for a giant (“It still haunts me,” he says), though who knows where it might have gone in a 140-square-metre space already overstuffed with a to-scale sculpture of the Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; a massive leather chair modelled on the glove of the legendary New York Yankees baseball player Joe DiMaggio; a human eye-shaped bowling ball that lolls on Pessin’s couch in place of a throw pillow; and a giant papier-mâché pencil that lines the balcony railing of the bedroom upstairs. There, lying across the duvet, is a pair of jeans so large, it makes the mattress seem as if it’s taken off its own pants.

“I want the best, weirdest version of something, and I want to live my life like I’m in a sculpture garden,” says Pessin. He glances down from the sleeping alcove into a raw open-plan apartment with seven-metre-high, wood-beamed ceilings that’s filled wall to wall with his many aesthetic fixations: before his oversize phase — which he’s now renouncing, having noticed ironically large objects becoming trendy in design circles and online — there was the tangential-but-different papier-mâché one. Prior to that, he collected art with donkey iconography, including a beat-up painting in his stairway punctured with two bullet holes that “supposedly hung in a Mexican bar, where they used to get drunk and shoot at it,” he says. Over the years, he’s accumulated several heavily patinated brass Rubik’s cubes, an assortment of coin-operated kiddie rides and myriad hand-shaped sculptures in plaster or wood. Lately, he’s into perforated metal pieces and bringing outdoor furniture inside, whether the towering cactus-shaped planters that flank his 1970s B&B Italia white leather sofa, or the trio of textured fibreglass boulders that serve as his coffee table — for now, at least, until he once again rearranges the hundreds of wares within his home. (His friend the Los Angeles-based designer Pamela Shamshiri sometimes helps.) “I buy ridiculous things, but I like to think my taste is evolving,” he says. “In a way, this loft is like the inside of my brain.”

Pessin never intended to have this much stuff. Nearly a decade ago, he began building his object library — best viewed, perhaps, as a collection of many sub-collections, worthy of its own cataloguing system, not that he’ll ever be that organised — after falling for the thrill of the chase, that sense of unexpected discovery, at flea markets like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. He now shows up before sunrise, flashlight in hand, ready to race through its hundreds of stalls as the doors open at 5am, hoping to snatch up treasure before the other pirates. This quest led him to estate sales, junk shops, art auctions and prop houses, where he’s always searching for an acquisition that might “somehow fill the hole in my heart,” he jokes, “though it rarely does.” And yet living with clutter may have always been his destiny: as a child in Brookline, Massachusetts, he collected rocks, went antiquing with his mother, rarely missed “The Price Is Right” — even today, he prides himself on knowing how much something should cost, a skill that proves useful when haggling — and slept in a converted closet under the stairs, which he says prepared him for the series of flexible, atypical Los Angeles dwellings that he’s inhabited since he moved to the city in his 20s to work in the film industry. “I gravitate toward heavy things and metal things, and I’m sure that has to do with some sort of permanence,” he says. “Glass makes me nervous. Ceramics make me nervous.”

Not long after Pessin became a staple on the collecting circuit, he had amassed enough inventory to become a dealer himself. At the time, he was mostly focused on the kinds of small objects and quirky knickknacks that now crowd his own tables and bookcases, as well as anonymous art, unsigned works that might — though probably not — have been made by a master, or just someone talented enough to create something visually interesting or at least replicate something well known.

In Pessin’s home office, tucked into a nook under his staircase, there’s a verdigris Jean Prouvé-esque desk beneath a wall-hugging facsimile of a geometric Frank Stella painting. He also owns works reminiscent of those by Ruth Asawa, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn and many others; when he once tried to get a wooden sculpture authenticated by an auction house via representatives of the Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero, the artist himself wrote back in all caps that the piece wasn’t his, only further arousing Pessin’s suspicions.

As his name and collection grew, top interior designers such as Kelly Wearstler and Sally Breer also took notice; he soon began selling them art and furniture for their projects. “His perspective is so refreshing and irreverent,” says Breer. “He’s not precious, and he’s got a sense of humour, but there’s also a refined elegance to how he appreciates quality.” Pessin’s hobby had, in effect, become a full-time enterprise. He named it NFS, after the industry term “not for sale”, referencing his own habit of inquiring about items that other dealers weren’t willing to let go. At first, he sold directly from his own loft, which he moved into in 2014; he’s since taken over both an adjacent showroom and overflow storage space from artists who’ve given up their studios within the complex, a maze of low, grey stucco warehouses that were built around the 1940s. The only problem, Pessin says, is he “sometimes experiences pangs of pain” when a customer tries to purchase a piece he’s not ready to relinquish. And there are certain items that are, indeed, NFS, notably his series of works by the late 20th-century artist and designer Robert Loughlin. Employed by both Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat as a picker at New York’s flea markets and vintage stores, Loughlin repeatedly painted the same strong-jawed, cigarette-smoking beefcake visage on mugs, tables, chairs and other surfaces. As the lore goes, his eye was so discerning, he once found a genuine Salvador Dalí painting for $US40 that later sold at Sotheby’s for $US78,000, which perhaps explains Pessin’s fascination.

“I connect with things more than I connect with people,” Pessin says, pointing out several of his Loughlins. “But I don’t want to have to have so many things.” Still, he can’t seem to help himself — he shops seven days a week — and, really, what’s the harm in that? All this stuff will continue to glut our planet whether he buys it or not. And in an era that fetishises minimalism, upcycling and constant self-optimisation, the collector’s life is a reminder that there is, in fact, no moral imperative to the accrual or disavowal of objects. There are merely those who enjoy things — and those who don’t.

A version of this article appears in print in our fifth edition, Page 46 of T Australia with the headline:
“Too Much Is Never Enough”
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