Luxury Life & Style - Westside - (Page 27)

rustic retreat representation of a field of cat tails.” On the other side, the railing consists of a steel version of a picket fence, another affectionate wink at Landry’s rural Canadian childhood. He grew up in Berthierville, a small town an hour outside of Montreal. It was a farming community. “Every morning and every night, cows would cross our yard, going to pasture,” he recalls. “When I was a kind, we used to play in barns.” It was the inspiration, decades later, for the architect’s Malibu home. “It is an update of the vernacular of the barn,” Landry explains. “Barns are very simple buildings,” he continues. “Simple lines, simple rooflines, and they’re very open: open beams, and nothing is hidden.” When you descend into the great room, the rural origins of the house and its architect are readily apparent. The ceiling soars to an imposing height of thirty-two feet, yet the room seems more inviting than intimidating. The materials are primal: stone and concrete and alderwood, with all the electrical and mechanical systems exposed. Landry deliberately combined the rustic with the industrial to create a contrast and to establish his contemporary vision of a 19th century structure. “The house is very contemporary,” he insists. “It has enormous windows, exposed concrete and exposed mechanicals. There are huge amounts of glass in the design. The side that faces the ocean is almost entirely glass; it looks as if one side of the barn has been sheared off. It’s a very contemporary gesture.” Its surfaces are simple as well. No paint was used in the house – only beeswax and natural finishes. “I preferred to create texture instead of using color,” Landry explains. “The transparency and depth was appealing to me, as opposed to the opacity of paint.” However, the real character of the house comes from Landry’s use of reclaimed lumber from a very special source. “I was visiting my parents,” he recalls. “I found out that a neighbor’s property had been sold, and the barn was being demolished.” He made arrangements to buy all the salvaged wood from the old barn he had the metal fireplace in the living room resembles a factory boiler. A simple, rectangular structure, flanked on either end by stainless steel “silos”, the Landry house is situated on fifteen acres at the summit of a Malibu hilltop. In that spectacular and unspoiled setting, Richard Landry, AIA, has created a serene and rustic retreat from the city and the pressures of his hectic architectural practice. From his offices in West Los Angeles, Landry oversees a staff of thirty and a daunting multiplicity of projects all around the world. He recently completed a house in Chicago, is working on no fewer than three projects in Las Vegas and is currently putting the finishing touches on contemporary houses in Singapore and Moscow, a French-inspired chateau in Shanghai and a traditional manor house in Dubai. At the end of his day, he gratefully heads up PCH and into Malibu’s wild canyons, to the place he calls home. “You discover the house slowly,” Landry muses. “It’s only revealed to you after you have passed by a lot of other features. When you enter the gates, the first things you see are the stables, the horses and the pool: a corrugated metal tank. You cross a wooden bridge over a small stream; you hear the running water, and the noise from the loose wooden planks as you drive over them.” This multi-sensory introduction was carefully orchestrated to establish a mood and introduce the Landry house. “When you get out of the car, you can hear the silence all around you,” Landry continues. “Our property abuts the parkland; there is nature all around us. You hear nothing but the ocean in the far distance. It’s transforming.” The house defies expectations and presents a playful optical illusion: seen from the porte-cochère, the house appears to be only one story. Upon entering Richard Landry’s house, you discover that you are actually standing on its second floor, and a simple, narrow staircase, unlike the dramatic, sweeping circular stairs framed in ornate wrought iron that typically center the foyers in Richard Landry-designed houses leads into the great room. The wooden steps are flanked by a metal panel Landry designed with a cutout pattern of cat tails. “They grow in the marshlands all around rural Quebec,” Landry explains. “We used to play with them as kids. I drew a field of them, free hand, on a sheet of white paper, and scanned it into the computer and took the disk to the metal shop, where they were able to cut my sketch into a 5/8th-of-an-inch thick steel plate: an artistic Premiere Issue 2008 Luxury Life & Style 27

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