On November 15, 2004, The New York Times ran an obituary headlined robert koch woolf, 81, decorator for the stars. David Colman, a style columnist for the paper, wrote, “Robert Koch Woolf, the Los Angeles decorator who with his partner, the architect John Elgin Woolf, created a new style of luxury in Hollywood in the 1950’s and 1960’s, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Montecito, Calif.… The cause was complications of surgery, according to Gene Woolf, his adopted brother, and William Woolf, his companion, who are his only survivors.” According to the obituary, Robert and John Woolf “established a new vocabulary for glamorous movie-star living; they synthesized 19th-century French, Greek Revival and Modernist touches into a heady mixture that has since been christened Hollywood Regency, which foreshadowed aspects of postmodernism. They designed houses for, among others, George Cukor, John Wayne, David O. Selznick and Barbara Hutton.”
I was familiar with the work of John and Robert Woolf. In fact, I had had an interview with Robert Woolf just weeks before he died, when he completed telling me his life story, an up-from-nothing tale that brought him from rural Texas to the heart of bygone glitter in Hollywood, where, as the partner, lover, and adopted son of the architect John Woolf, he circulated at the highest levels for decades. John Elgin Woolf, or Jack, as he was known, had died in 1980. Along with Wallace Neff, who designed Pickfair for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and Paul R. Williams, who did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s house and an addition to the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was a top architect to L.A.’s carriage trade. Though less well known today than Neff and Williams, Woolf had more big names on his client list than the other two combined, and he was a frequent subject of articles in House and Garden and Architectural Digest.
In 2002, I had received the catalogue for an upcoming exhibition at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s art museum called “The Art of Luxury: 9 Hollywood Homes by John Elgin Woolf.” At the back of the catalogue was a four-page list of Woolf’s clients and the houses he had designed for them. The list included:
• Cary Grant, 9966 Beverly Grove Drive, Los Angeles.
• Errol Flynn, 7740 Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles.
• Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland, 8850 Evanview Drive, Los Angeles.
• Barbara Stanwyck, 273 South Glen Boulevard, Los Angeles.
• Ira and Leonore Gershwin, 1021 North Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills.
• Fanny Brice, 312 North Faring Road, Los Angeles.
• Bob Hope, 10346 Moorpark Street, North Hollywood.
• Agnes Moorehead, 1023 North Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills.
• Ronald Colman, 1003 Summit Drive, Beverly Hills.
• Charles Feldman and Jean Howard, 2000 Coldwater Canyon, Los Angeles.
• Lillian Gish, Trancas Beach, Malibu.
• Mervyn LeRoy, 332 St. Cloud Road, Bel Air.
• Paul Lynde, 103 Robin Drive, Los Angeles.
• Ray Milland, 10664 Bellagio Road, Los Angeles.
• Ricardo and Georgiana Montalban, 9256 Robin Drive, Los Angeles.
• Loretta Young, 8313 Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles.
• Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, 9191 St. Ives Drive, Beverly Hills.Near the bottom of the list was a Beverly Hills real-estate agent I knew, Bruce Nelson. I called him and asked what he could tell me about John Woolf. He said that, bizarre as it might sound, Jack had adopted his young partner, Robert Koch, and later brought two other young men, Gene Oney and William Capp, into their household. “I just got off the phone with Robert, the oldest of his adopted sons, five minutes ago,” he said. “They all live together in Montecito.” I asked if he would introduce me. “I’ll call Bob back right now,” he said. Five minutes later, Nelson phoned to say, “Bob is waiting for your call.”
A staircase in the Ira Gershwin house. From the Architecture and Design Collection/University Art Museum/University of California, Santa Barbara.
When I punched in the number, a man with a rather weak voice answered. “Is this Bob Woolf?,” I asked. “This is Robert Woolf,” he said with cool emphasis. By the end of our conversation, however, he seemed pleased that someone was interested in writing about his late father, whom he referred to throughout our talk as Papa. I asked if I could drive up to Montecito to visit him and his brothers, and we set a date for later that week.
My introduction to John Woolf’s work had come much earlier, in 1994, when I went to his most famous house, the Pendleton house, on North Beverly Drive, in Beverly Hills, to interview its owner, the producer Robert Evans, for a Vanity Fair profile timed to the publication of his autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture.
I had studied a bit of the history of the house and learned that on a rainy day in 1942, the year it was completed, the young architect had had a chance encounter in the gravel entry court. The place was so unusual that two women had stopped to admire the gray-painted stucco façade with a mansard roof, tall black lacquered double front doors, and a rounded portico supported by slender Greek Revival columns. It seemed unique: a mix of delicate design features that evoked the Petit Trianon of Marie Antoinette, the French and English Regency periods, and the stylized look of a Hollywood stage set. The hodgepodge of design idioms should have been unsettling to the eye, but somehow it all came together to form a pleasing whole.
The house was also a major departure from the white stucco haciendas, half-timber Tudor-style homes, and Churrigueresque villas that were standard on the big lots north of Sunset Boulevard, where movie stars and studio chiefs built in the days before the income tax and the Depression dictated more sober dwellings. It was a perfect example of what would come to be called Hollywood Regency.
Woolf’s clients, the prominent art dealer and interior decorator James Pendleton and his wife, Mary Frances, had plucked the handsome architect from near obscurity and given him the break of a lifetime. They told him to design a house for entertaining, with a pool and pool house, set among a grove of eucalyptus and gardens of lilacs and roses. Because Mary Frances had a deformed hip and couldn’t climb stairs, the house had to be on one level. Woolf was given only 10 days to produce finished plans, and a year to get the place built. The Pendletons, whose home base was in Manhattan, were eager to move into their new retreat, set on four acres of land they had bought for $10,000 (the equivalent of $140,000 today) from the writer Dorothy Parker.
What awaited the architect, then 34, in the Pendletons’ driveway that day could only be construed as a good omen. The two women he encountered were Greta Garbo and her friend Gladys Belzer, one of the most prominent interior decorators in Los Angeles and the mother of the movie star Loretta Young. The ladies were attempting to get an early peek at their wealthy friends’ new house, and they were happy to meet the bright new architect in town and introduce him around.
Vogue featured the house in its November 1942 issue. Later, Slim Aarons photographed it. One of his pictures, taken from the back patio, looking toward the folly-like pool pavilion, shows a white-jacketed butler serving the Pendletons and their guests tea in front of an oval pool. It would become one of the iconic images of Hollywood luxury.
The house today appears little changed. It is low-slung and darkly handsome, and is now covered with vines. Two urns stand in niches on either side of the portico, and French windows beside the niches are concealed by shutters. The lack of visible windows makes the façade somewhat blank and mysterious. At the time the house was built, this kind of façade was rare in Los Angeles, where the grander homes—the big mansions fronting Sunset Boulevard, for example—tried hard to impress from the outside.
“People had simply never seen a house like the Pendletons’ before,” I was told by Kurt White, a decorator and longtime friend of Woolf’s who had worked with him in the 1940s and 1950s. “After the couple were in that house, Jack was a made man, because people didn’t know that a house could look like that—be so top-to-bottom glamorous. After they saw it, they simply had to have one themselves. Remember, these were people who were in the theatrical and movie business, who wanted to live their daily lives in settings like those in their movies.
Glamour Begins at Home the famed Hollywood Regency Architect John Elgin Woolf - Los Angeles-Platinum Triangle-Beverly Hills Real Estate-90210-Bel Air-Holmby Hills-Sunset Strip-Hollywood Hills-Luxury Estates-Mansions-Celebrity Homes-Homes For Sale-Listings-Realtor-Real Estate – http://www.ChristopheChoo.com
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