The Tip of The Lautner Iceberg

What do Troy McClure, Jackie Treehorn and Tony Stark have in common? Turns out it’s an architect.

The other day, while watching an episode of my favourite new police procedural, Southland, I noticed the murder scene the police were investigating looked very familiar. It was the honeycombed ceiling and the retro style couch that caught my attention. After flipping through my mental rolodex, I figured out that the reason it rang a bell was because I had seen it before in at least two movies – the artistically vacant Charlie’s Angels 2 and the cult classic bowling whodunnit The Big Lebowski.

I thought to myself, there’s gotta be something special about this place for it to be showing up regularly in Hollywood productions. Maybe it’s a house that sits vacant in the valley and the owner rents it out on the side. What I found out was even bigger than I had imagined – but I should have known that a living room that’d shown up in so many different productions had to have more to it than just good feng shui.

After scanning through IMDB I discovered the name of the house was the Sheats/Goldstein Residence located in the Hollywood Hills (not in Malibu as suggested in The Big Lebowski). “Goldstein” referring to basketball superfan James Goldstein who attends over 100 NBA games a year. The home has appeared as Jackie Treehorn’s house in The Big Lebowski and Alex Munday’s house in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Built into the sandstone ledge of a hillside, it’s supposed to emulate a cave that opens outward to the natural world outside. As an example of “American Organic Architecture” it is considered a “complete structure” as it was wholly conceived by the architect, including not only the edifice, but the interior design and furniture so that everything would fit together.

As it turns out, the house was designed by John Lautner, an apprentice of the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright, and a prolific Los Angeles area architect. That so many of his homes appear in movies and television could be down to his work being centred in Los Angeles, but there is much more to the man than his geographical location. John Lautner is the progenitor of the “googie” style of architecture – pretty much inventing it with the design of Googie’s Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip. It is meant to be a design that communicates and attacts attention and born out of Art Deco, which was meant to be very functional, but Googie was even more utilitarian. Synonymous with Canadian science fiction author William Gibson’s term “Raygun Gothic”, Googie is hard to pin down to one specific look, but the look of “classic” Las Vegas can be attributed directly to it, so essentially Lautner is responsible for the for the look of Frank Sinatra’s Las Vegas.

In 1960, he designed the Chemosphere, once considered “the most modern home built in the world”, you may remember it from such Simpsons episodes as “A Fish Called Selma”. It can also be found in GTA San Andreas, Charlie’s Angels (That’s right, there’s been a Lautner home in each Charlie’s Angels movie. McG, you sly dog.), Body Double and Cars. It is representative of one of Lautner’s approaches to architecture: building in locations that would otherwise be unable to accommodate housing. This is reflected in another home from the movies, the “Stilt House” from Lethal Weapon 2 that Martin Riggs manages to tear down with his pickup truck. He’s also designed the Bob Hope’s Palm Springs home, and his work was even the inspiration for Tony Stark’s mansion in Iron Man (it was actually CG’ed in over a national park).

So what did I learn from my little experience? Over a long enough timeline, everyone’s house is bound to wind up on TV or in the movies, but when you keep seeing the same places over and over again, there’s got to be something special about them. And when you tend to design your homes in the Los Angeles area, you’re bound to get some of your work on screen, but when you’re as talented and creative an architect as John Lautner, the challenge would be to keep his work off the screen.