In this Brentwood home in California, keeping up with the Joneses takes on a slightly different meaning when one of the neighbours is the Getty Center, Richard Meier’s hilltop complex and one of Los Angeles’s great repositories of art and architecture. For the art-loving owners of this family home, however, the aim was never to compete with the museum up the road. Their collection required something more personal: a house with the volume to hold serious works, and the warmth to make them part of daily life. It is exactly the kind of commission that explains why interior design studio Citizen Artist has become a go-to for art-led homes. Joshua Rose and Rafael Kalichstein have built a reputation for understanding how to give architecture an atmosphere, while making a client’s collection feel alive in a domestic setting – no easy feat.
A substantial four-storey, 10,000-square-foot house that already had its architectural envelope in place meant the task from the client was clear: “The brief was to create a home that could support a serious art collection and large-scale entertaining,” says the Citizen Artist team, “while still feeling warm, comfortable and human in scale.” The family’s private collection is quite extraordinary, built over time and across generations, with works by Picasso, Calder, Mapplethorpe, Sterling Ruby, Friedrich Kunath, Jonas Wood, Noah Davis, Robert Graham, Chiho Aoshima and others. Several pieces needed generous wall space and real architectural volume, which gave the design brief its scale.
The team brought it all together by developing a calm framework for the interiors, then adding detail through surface texture and the movement of light. Hand-brushed white mineral paint adds texture to the walls and ceilings, while rift white oak and selected stone surfaces bring warmth without crowding the works. Furniture also plays an important role in adjusting the feeling of the architecture: curved forms, tailored silhouettes and bespoke pieces soften the larger volumes. “Even on white walls, that hand-brushed finish creates depth and texture,” notes the duo. “It catches the light and softens the feeling of the volume.”
Large-scale works are given room to breathe, while smaller moments create intimate spots throughout the house: A Friedrich Kunath painting brings colour and charge to the living room; a Christoph Ruckhäberle work holds its own between the bar and dining area; a Jonas Wood painting of Pau Gasol gives the husband’s office a very particular Los Angeles character. In the entry, a Cybele Rowe sculpture sits beneath Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert’s gleaming glass light installation for a wow moment.
.jpg)
For all its serious art credentials, the house has a lively family pulse. In the husband’s office, more than a thousand sports bobbleheads, collected by the owners’ older son, are displayed with enough care in bespoke bookcases to make them feel like their own vignette. Downstairs, the game room has a va-va-voom energy, with its custom ping-pong table and paintings by one of the children. Outside, the four-sided infinity-edge pool rises from the earth beside a low-slung cabana: an ambitious architectural gesture, although clearly the kind of place where children, guests and dogs actually gather.
This may be the real difference between this house and its famous neighbour up the hill. At the Getty Center, one can admire the art, the architecture and the travertine in appropriately reverent silence. Here, Picasso and Calder have to coexist with ping-pong, bobbleheads, wet footprints from the pool and the daily movement of family life. No one is going to tell you off for standing too close, laughing too loudly or bringing a dog into the room. For Citizen Artist, that is precisely the point: a house where important art is given its due, without ever forgetting the people who live with it.
@citizen.artist
.png)
.jpg)