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"Robert Richardson, the director of photography on two of 2009&amp;#039;s hottest films\u2014Quentin Tarantino&amp;#039;s Inglourious Basterds and Martin Scorsese&amp;#039;s Shutter Island\u2014has very clear ideas about how things ought to look. As a cinematographer, he says, he strives to create two things: &amp;quot;precision of line&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the right balance of light and dark.&amp;quot;  Which explains a lot about his house, set in a wooded canyon on the West Side of Los Angeles. Designed in 1952 by Cliff May, the so-called father of the California ranch, it was originally a radical experiment in open-plan living: Inside, the only real walls enclosed the bathrooms, and even they ended below the ceiling. Other rooms were defined, as needed, by long white drapes and rolling mahogany cabinets. A 288-square-foot skylight made the main room luminous even on overcast days.   But by the time Richardson bought the house, it had been badly altered, with additions that obscured its clear proportions and decorating that competed with the architecture for attention. Richardson knew the lines of the house could be made sharper.  To accomplish that, he brought in Marmol Radziner, a firm with wide experience restoring midcentury jewels. Out came distracting materials: orange-tone terra-cotta floor tile was replaced with a soft, earth-tone terrazzo; a ceiling of Homasote (a board made of compacted newsprint) was covered in dark-stained tongue-and-groove paneling. The goal, says the partnership&amp;#039;s design principal, Ron Radziner, was to soften the house, &amp;quot;to make it sympathetic to the oaks and sycamores around it.&amp;quot; He adds: &amp;quot;My hope would be that we&amp;#039;ve been respectful but not slavish.&amp;quot;  Robert Richardson, who has won two Academy awards (for Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s JFK and Martin Scorsese&amp;#039;s Aviator), often works thousands of miles from home, living out of hotels while &amp;quot;reacting,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;to what other people have in their imaginations.&amp;quot; When he returns to Los Angeles, he says, &amp;quot;I need to have my two feet on the ground.&amp;quot; Cliff May, as if anticipating Richardson, built the house just a couple of inches above grade, achieving what he called &amp;quot;ground contact.&amp;quot;  Rising from the slab foundation, now covered in a natural-tone terrazzo that reads as a continuation of the forest floor, are glass panels that bring nature inside. &amp;quot;The greenery is literally another wall,&amp;quot; Richardson says. The renovating architects&amp;#039; goal\u2014like a cinematographer&amp;#039;s\u2014was to avoid distracting from the drama.  Marmol Radziner did that by focusing attention on the house&amp;#039;s strengths. For instance, by outlining the &amp;quot;gable&amp;quot; above the kitchen counter, the architects reinforced the feeling of domesticity. True, they introduced materials unknown in the 1950s, but they did so in service of May&amp;#039;s architecture (the stainless steel backsplash tiles, for example, multiply the light from the living room). Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;Oscar-Winning Style.&amp;quot;   Marmol Radziner also served as interior designers, choosing classic midcentury furniture\u2014wooden pieces that manage to complement the clean lines of the building and the twists and turns of the trees surrounding it\u2014plus a few new pieces to add shimmer. They also worked to create contrast between the main room, which is luminous, and the much more subdued master bedroom. The house has &amp;quot;just the right balance of dark and light,&amp;quot; says Richardson, a man who knows.  Cliff May, a sixth-generation Californian, was raised on a San Diego ranch and got his start designing Spanish colonial\u2013style houses. Though he became a modernist, May&amp;#039;s buildings weren&amp;#039;t the stark-white boxes of International Style architects like Richard Neutra. Horizontal and low to the ground, May&amp;#039;s houses were made of natural materials that expressed deep connections to the California landscape.  Radziner and his partner, Leo Marmol, have renovated a number of houses by California&amp;#039;s midcentury masters. Some of them, like Neutra&amp;#039;s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, are icons that deserve to be preserved as built. Then there are houses like this one, Radziner says, &amp;quot;that are not so iconic that they can&amp;#039;t be touched.&amp;quot;  Richardson, who lived in an 8,000-square-foot house on Cape Cod before moving back to California, appreciates the building&amp;#039;s simplicity, in part because he travels so much. The house takes care of itself when he&amp;#039;s away, Richardson says. In that sense, it feels like a condo, except that it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;far more serene than it would be in a large building with neighbors.&amp;quot; To create that serenity, Marmol Radziner used just a few materials, and used them well. A design-build firm, it has its own employees supervise construction (with components fabricated, whenever possible, in its own shop). That, says Radziner, &amp;quot;makes us better architects, because we&amp;#039;re responsible for the house practically, not just aesthetically.&amp;quot; The result? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s still a Cliff May house,&amp;quot; says Radziner, &amp;quot;but we made it relevant to 2009.&amp;quot; What The Pros Know When Richardson shoots films in the L.A. area, it&amp;#039;s frequently at night. That means he has to sleep by day, requiring a bedroom that can be darkened at any hour. To accomplish that, the edges of the blackout shades\u2014where there would normally be a halo\u2014had to fit snugly into opaque tracks. Complicating the problem, the two &amp;quot;clerestory&amp;quot; windows (above the sliding doors) are trapezoidal. Given those shapes, &amp;quot;we met with a lot of people who told us we couldn&amp;#039;t get 100 percent blackout,&amp;quot; says project manager Chris McCullough. Eventually, a firm called Architectural Window Shades rose to the challenge. Shades, made of an opaque fabric by Mermet, roll on wires hidden in the thinnest possible frames. The architects covered the frames in strips of roughsawn Douglas fir, which &amp;quot;makes them look like part of the structure of the house,&amp;quot; McCullough says. The result: The shades disappear when they&amp;#039;re open; light disappears when they&amp;#039;re closed. Another plus: One button controls their nearly silent motors. Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;Oscar-Winning Style.&amp;quot; Click here to see the resources. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elledecor.com/home-remodeling-renovating/a3943/oscar-winning-style-a-58721/>