Celebrities and Their Starchitects

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

When it comes to the places celebrities call home, we’re a nosy society. Before celeb YouTube home tours, we had shows like MTV’s Cribs, and glossy magazine spreads showcasing A-listers’ mansions date back to Hollywood’s golden era. We’ve long loved to see where the rich and famous lay their heads and to meet the architects who have designed extraordinary homes for them. Here, Dwell looks back at a century or so of remarkable talent whose California homes for the stars shaped the everyday taste of their times.

Julia Morgan

It’s hard to imagine a more intimidating celebrity client than William Randolph Hearst, the 20th-century media magnate and Citizen Kane inspirer. Julia Morgan, the first licensed female architect in California, however, learned to speak Hearst fluently.

Starting in 1919, Morgan spent nearly 30 years working on his ostentatious San Simeon, California, estate, Hearst Castle, which included a private zoo to house camels and zebras, a pool evoking the baths of ancient Rome, and Greek-columned terraces.

Hearst liked Morgan’s work so much that he asked her to design a Santa Monica mansion for his longtime mistress, Marion Davies, with more than 100 rooms plus several guesthouses and a colossal swimming pool lined in Italian marble. Both projects were glamorous, showy, and designed to position their inhabitants as 20th-century royalty.

Paul R. Williams

Hollywood glam as we know it wouldn’t exist without Paul R. Williams. In addition to the Tudor and Georgian Revival homes across Los Angeles that bear his signature style, with grand staircases and oversize patios, Williams was responsible for the pink-and-green palette at the celeb-favorite Beverly Hills Hotel, where he designed the 1949 Crescent Wing and reimagined the see-and-be-seen-at Polo Lounge.

The first Black architect admitted to the AIA lived up to his "Architect to the Stars" moniker. In the mid-1950s, he designed a swingin’ Beverly Hills bachelor pad for a newly single Frank Sinatra, adding special cabinets for Sinatra’s state-of-the-art entertainment system and gravel-filled walls to perfect the living room’s acoustics. In recent years, stars like Denzel Washington and Ellen DeGeneres have snagged Williams-designed homes.

John Lautner

What’s an overworked midcentury celebrity with a busy schedule of USO tours and variety show appearances to do? If you were Bob Hope, Elvis, or Frank Sinatra (he really got around, architecturally speaking), the answer was to flee L.A. for long weekends in Palm Springs, the go-to getaway for Hollywood’s elite dating back to the ’20s.

Hope, for one, spent his days off perched above the desert in a 24,000-square-foot John Lautner–designed house with a spaceship-esque roofline and a central terrace set beneath a dramatic swooping arch. Lautner wasn’t the only "starchitect" to work in Southern California’s desert: Richard Neutra’s sleek Kaufmann House has become synonymous with Palm Springs thanks to an iconic 1970 Slim Aarons photograph, and Albert Frey’s flying V-shaped gas station now serves as the Palm Springs Visitors Center.

Axel Vervoordt

Long, high-ceilinged hallways clad in off-white plaster and a stone coffee table bigger than some NYC apartment bathrooms don’t exactly scream "relatable," but Kim Kardashian swears her Hidden Hills mansion, with interiors by Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, is a family-friendly home.

Vervoordt’s work on the meticulously monochromatic house Kardashian shared with her former husband Kanye West (who called it a futuristic Belgian monastery) drew more than its fair share of scoffs when first spotted in the pages of Architectural Digest.

But Vervoordt’s brand of natural minimalism left its mark on the reality TV star/businesswoman: Her lifestyle empire includes a select home accessories line with concrete-poured pieces that evoke her home’s neutral aesthetic. Vervoordt even appeared on a recent episode of The Kardashians in a design meeting for the star’s in-progress Malibu home renovation.

Tadao Ando

Hollywood’s latest starchitect darling has his own movie-worthy story. Self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando worked as a professional boxer before he started dreaming up minimalist, concrete buildings for high-profile clients around the world.

The 81-year-old Pritzker Prize–winner has designed only a handful of Southern California homes, but most of them are owned by very famous people, including Kanye West, whose Ando-designed Malibu mansion has reportedly fallen into disrepair, and Kardashian, who’s working with Ando on a La Quinta mansion. (She posted about her visit to his Japan office on Instagram this spring.) Beyoncé and Jay-Z recently bought a $200 million Malibu compound designed by Ando—reportedly the most expensive home in California history. The superstar duo are said to have paid cash, naturally.

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Top Image by Florian Holzherr