Los Angeles may be the ultimate tabula rasa when it comes to architecture and design. It’s a place where everything from Hamptons homes in Malibu to Tuscan villas in Beverly Hills coexist, a versatility only heightened by Hollywood. This fall, two new design books exemplify just that diversity. Tim Campbell’s Intentional Beauty (Point Leaf Press) is a sweeping overview of the bicoastal designer’s career, including his work on such iconic homes as Richard Neutra’s Singleton House and Luis Bargain’s landmark Bel-Air home. Born in West Virginia, Campbell came to LA and discovered a “visionary playground for architects and designers.” An early adopter of “less is more” decor, Campbell’s work is architecturally agnostic. Whether a residence is model or traditional, Campbell says that all “homes that feel the warmest feel less ‘designed’ and more ‘found’ and should seem as though they evolved ‘over decades instead of months’.”
Contrasting the effortless elegance is husband-and-wife team M. Brian Tichenor and Raun Thorp’s new book, Outside In (Vendome Press), a tome wholly dedicated to indoor/outdoor living. “For us, the entire project, house and garden together, tends to be a philosophical and physical puzzle, or series of puzzles,” says the couple. Page after page, they reveal how they skillfully lure the outdoors in and vice versa, whether they’re working on a Paul Williams traditional or a Palm Springs contemporary. Stunning outdoor rooms range from formal-looking “Franco-Cali” courtyards to space offering hidden moments, like a plein-air bed that seems to appear from a sea of wind-blown cattails. Pacific Palisades home, a once-ramshackle residence that they refer to as their “lab.” Like so many architects’ homes, it has become “a research and development think tank for tinkering with ideas about residential structures, their interiors and gardens, and the indoor/outdoor relationship that is the very soul of life in Southern California.”