<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nLorna Auerbach grew up in Santa Monica Canyon during the 1950s and '60s, back when the area existed at a charmingly bucolic remove from the rest of bustling Los Angeles. With her childhood playmates, she \"rode horses in the canyon, climbed into the caves and played in the creeks,\" she recalls. \"The streets were cobbled. There were peacocks roaming around.\"\n\nOn these enchanted expeditions, the young Auerbach would inevitably pass any number of grand residences with white stucco walls, red-tile roofs, fountain-filled courtyards and other architectural elements borrowed from the Spanish colonial vernacular.\n\nWhen the opportunity arose to build the house of her dreams on a corner lot in Pacific Palisades\u2014as the seagull flies, just a few miles from the site of her childhood idylls\u2014Auerbach knew that she wanted to recreate, as closely as possible, the feeling that she'd experienced upon discovering those houses as a child. But she also had some very grown-up ideas about incorporating feng shui principles, minimizing energy usage and employing recyclable and reclaimed building materials. What she needed was an architect who combined her love of architectural history, including her obsession with vernacular details, with a healthy degree of philosophical flexibility.\n\n\"While I was interviewing architects, I attended a party in Santa Monica in a magnificent Tuscan-style villa,\" Auerbach says. \"It was their first big party in their new house, and so I said: I love your house\u2014who's your architect?' They said it was Richard Landry.\" Later, while attending a function at a house that resembled a Nantucket getaway, she asked the owners the same question. The answer: Richard Landry. Auerbach realized that she had found her man. \"I thought: OK. This guy's versatile.\"\n\nFrom the minute they began walking the property and discussing the house to be built there, it became clear that Spain would serve as the project's lodestar. Auerbach speaks Spanish fluently and has traveled extensively throughout Spain and its former colonies with her husband, Larry Wheat, developing along the way a deep appreciation for Spanish and Spanish colonial art and architecture. In Landry she found not only an architect with 20 years of experience building homes for clients with divergent tastes but also someone who shared her obsession with finding and recontextualizing even the smallest details\u2014and in so doing, honoring the artistic spirit of a cherished culture.\n\n\"Lorna grew up in this area and had a lot of good childhood memories of the old ranches,\" says Landry. \"Those memories would ultimately serve as the foundation for this house.\" Then they traveled to Spain, specifically to the Andalusian region, to hunt for sources and inspirations. Armed with Auerbach's digital camera, the blueprints for the house and a desire to instill as much Iberia as they could into the project, they spent days and nights scouring villages and the countryside, chasing down leads and acting on hunches.\n\nNo detail escaped their attention. \"We were browsing through an arts-and-crafts fair in a little town,\" says Auerbach, \"and we saw a plaque, a family's coat of arms, on a wall. I liked the shape, so I photographed it. Later Richard was able to translate the outline of the plaque into the shape of the swimming pool. Or I'd be walking on stairs, snapping pictures of the risers. You can get inspired by anything.\" At remote rural warehouses, they found treasures, such as the enormous 18th-century walnut gate (\"It took eight men to lift it up,\" says Auerbach) that became the house's entrance. Its imposing majesty is tempered by the warmth of a brightly colored tile door surround, a reproduction of one from the 16th century, which Auerbach commissioned from a Spanish source.\n\nWalking through that massive gate, one enters a tranquil courtyard that consciously evokes the kind found in Andalusia during the 15th century. It leads in turn to the spectacular patio de recibo, one of Landry's great architectural triumphs: a soaring interior courtyard, more than two stories high, whose skylight of glass and steel I-beams floods the space with sunshine.\n\nWith the exception of the media room and kitchen, every section of the 10,000-square-foot house is connected to this courtyard in some way. On the ground level, it links a guest suite, the main stairwell, the great room and the dining room; on the second level, the main bedrooms open onto it. Between Landry's architectural plan (which has most rooms opening not only to the courtyard but also to a private balcony or patio) and his clever placement of windows (every room has them on at least two sides), a near-perfect system of cross ventilation obviates the need for air-conditioning. Indeed, only one room, the media room, has it; the rest of the house is cooled simply by opening a door or a window and turning on a ceiling fan.\n\nThroughout the house, Landry has carved intimate spaces out of large ones by breaking up volumes, such as in the great room, where three individual seating areas have been created beneath a trio of groin vaults; or in the master suite, which has similarly been broken into smaller components, including an office, two baths and two seating areas in addition to the bedroom. A daughter with an interest in Indian and Southeast Asian culture gets her own meditation tower: a windowed turret filled with Asian antiques and textiles, entered by passing beneath a magnificently rippled archway of Landry's design.\n\n\"There isn't a room in this house that isn't used every day,\" says Lorna Auerbach. The dining room is also the library; the covered loggia is the site of many impromptu outdoor meals; the pedestal table in the patio de recibo is where Auerbach reads her morning paper. Richard Landry's plan, which emphasizes the unifying power of large central spaces, means that no room is off by itself, lonely and unused. Modern architecture, like modern life, is sometimes criticized as alienating. But by looking back and borrowing the good ideas of other cultures and other times, he has created a house that brings spaces, and the people inside them, together."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/landry-article-012008>