In 1952, Paul R. Williams—the first African American architect licensed west of the Mississippi River—built a beautifully proportioned International Style home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Lafayette Square for a client who would not have been legally permitted to live there just four years earlier: himself. Designed for him and his wife after their children were grown, Williams lived there until his death in 1980, and it remained in the family until 2018. That’s when its present owner, a woman whose career in the arts often affords her the chance to work with artists’ estates, recognized this place as a “primary text” and heeded an “impulse to protect and shepherd” this important piece of Williams’s legacy.
She assembled a design team to update the house for contemporary living with reverence for its singular place in architectural history. Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, of Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles, led a thoughtful conservation. And AD100 designers Billy Cotton and Leyden Lewis teamed up to give the elegant, idiosyncratic interior a crisp refresh incorporating both original features and new pieces that reflect the array of styles represented in the home’s design. Landscape designer Scott Shrader helped revive the outdoor spaces. The overall result is warm and scholarly, much like Williams himself.
In 1923, Williams was the first African American to join the American Institute of Architects, and later the first to be elected to its College of Fellows, in 1957. For decades, he maintained a thriving practice that included projects like the Beverly Hills Hotel, homes for Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, the Googie-style La Concha Motel in Las Vegas, and the Spanish Revival 28th Street YMCA in LA, each fluently realized in its particular architectural idiom. He designed more than 2,000 buildings—all largely before desegregation—and had an uncanny ability to provide newly successful clients homes with the sense of history and gravitas they craved. Less known, he also built thousands of units of affordable housing.
No matter the style or scale, however, his sixth sense for the provision of creature comforts is evident throughout his work. “He just knew how to design a house for cultured living,” notes Escher. It’s telling that Williams opted for modernism in his own residence, yet the functionalist disposition of the rooms is balanced with richly personal details. “On one hand, it’s still sort of a traditional layout in how the kitchen and back-of-house facilities are organized,” says GuneWardena. “But the plan is very modern in how you enter: There’s this stair hall that’s kind of like the center of the pinwheel, and then the three main spaces angle off there.”
When it came to understanding the complex mix of styles in the house, Williams’s library offered an important clue. GuneWardena found a 1950s press photograph of the architect in his office in which he could read the spines of books on his shelves. These included several volumes on interiors by French designers including Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, so it’s no surprise that Williams, whose buildings spanned the architectural spectrum from Beaux Arts to Space Age, wove Art Deco details inside his own International Style house.
One particularly evocative flourish is the wrought-iron staircase railing embellished with galloping cast-brass gazelles. Another striking feature—a request from Mrs. Williams after the couple visited a similar space at a country club in Jamaica—is the so-called Lanai room with its coffered ceiling and stone floor that opens to the back garden. Escher and GuneWardena also carefully uncovered the dreamy original sorbet-like color palette under layers of white paint: The rooms had originally been swathed in pale pistachio and rose.
To give the interior a contemporary aesthetic that picks up the thread of the history without feeling like a museum, Cotton and Lewis studied the extant elements and surviving furniture. Cotton says they carefully considered “what it meant to restore the existing pieces, what it meant to add additional pieces, what it meant to have the architecture, which is so strong and so interesting—and really, in many ways, the star of the show—be at the forefront. And then, how does someone actually live in this and bring their own life to it?”
Noting that Williams was a keen observer of European design throughout his career helped bring focus. “We landed on this idea of the Italians,” says Cotton, referring to pieces by Gio Ponti in particular, such as the walnut side tables in the primary bedroom, which they paired with a bespoke velvet-upholstered bed and a pair of midcentury green Murano glass sconces. “They were working around the same time, and there was this shared blend of whimsy and austerity in modernism.”
In the living room, a pair of 1930s Italian Rationalist club chairs in a cream Pierre Frey velvet join a sofa original to the house now reupholstered in a bone-colored Warris Vianni linen. A Steinway Model ‘M’ Piano was refinished in an instantly recognizable pale shade of green as a tip of the hat to what Lewis characterizes as Williams’s “commitment to pistachio.”
Small details, like a record cabinet set into curved millwork along a wall in the living room, retain an aura of midcentury glamour without feeling dated. And Cotton and Lewis found elegant companions for some of the more quirky elements. For example, a flamboyantly rococo-framed cabinet at the built-in dressing table in the primary closet contrasts with a recently acquired vintage streamlined makeup mirror and a drum-shape stool upholstered in green velvet.
“Williams checks all these ‘first’ boxes,” says Lewis. “But I think he is truly speaking in terms of architecture. That is the universal language his entire career is based on,” he adds. “My sense is that Williams committed to experiment in his own home and it is truly a laboratory for his designs: past, present, and future.”
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
