In jam-packed Los Angeles, it’s rare to find a plot of land that doesn’t have some history. But one half-acre parcel overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir is particularly redolent of the past. It once belonged to Julian Eltinge, a vaudeville performer who usually played women—so convincingly that audiences were often shocked when he revealed himself to be a man. Starring in musical comedies like The Fascinating Widow, The Crinoline Girl, and Cousin Lucy (all title roles written for him), Eltinge went on to become one of the highest paid movie stars of the 1920s. One prominent critic cleverly dubbed him “ambisexstrous.” Whatever his sexuality, his story has been folded into the LGBTQ history of the Silver Lake neighborhood, where the early gay rights group the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950 and where queers protested against police brutality at the Black Cat Tavern in 1967, two years before Stonewall.
In 1918 Eltinge built a castle-like, Spanish Revival house atop a steep hill. Below it, he installed a formal “Andalusian garden.” Water flowed from an octagonal fountain into a long, rectangular pool that ended near a pergola of classical columns.
Eltinge’s career faltered during the Depression and he died in 1941. The property was eventually sold to Charles Knill, who cherished its history and collected Eltinge memorabilia. In 2015, Scott Boxenbaum, a real estate investor, interior architect, and former stand-up comedian, was hunting for a water-view lot in the neighborhood and approached Knill about the land below his house. Knill, according to Boxenbaum, insisted, as a condition of sale, that Boxenbaum restore the formal garden and that Knill be given access to it. Unfortunately, parts of it had fallen down the hill over the decades, Boxenbaum says. It took more than two years for the men to come to an agreement.
While still negotiating, Boxenbaum consulted Takashi Yanai, a Tokyo-born, California-raised, and Harvard-educated partner in Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects, who, more than a decade earlier had designed a house for Boxenbaum’s parents in Beverly Hills. Boxenbaum admired Yanai’s architecture, but he envisioned something very different from his parents’ assemblage of crisp white and gray cubes. Indeed, he wanted his house to be black, in part so it would blend in with the scenery. He also wanted some of what he calls “the combination of gravitas and tranquility” he associates with Japanese architecture. And perhaps most of all he wanted his dogs to be able to run around inside and out. “It’s basically a very large doghouse,” jokes Ruth Pierich, Boxenbaum’s spouse.
The architect packed a lot into 4,500 square feet. The second-floor windows angle out about 12 degrees to face the picturesque reservoir directly. The custom-made cinder blocks that cover several exterior and one interior wall aren’t quite black, but they are dark gray and surprisingly luminous. Some blocks protrude just enough to turn walls into geometric bas relief sculptures. And he used both natural and charred wood, the latter given the coating (and corrosion protection) known in Japan as shou sugi ban. Now, “it feels a bit like a supervillain’s lair,” he says with a laugh.
Yanai made sure that when the first floor’s huge sliding glass wall is open, the border between inside and outside disappears. It’s a modern version of the way that shoji screens were used in traditional Japanese architecture, he says. Upstairs, the terraces resemble an engawa, an external space that joins a series of interior rooms, another staple of Japanese design.
To improve the setting, Boxenbaum called on Jenny Jones, a principal at Terremoto, the Los Angeles-and Berkeley-based AD100 landscape architecture firm that has worked on historic houses by the likes of Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Rudolf Schindler, but rarely re-creates the gardens exactly so as to incorporate more contemporary ideas of ecology. “We look to the original design for inspiration, but not for instruction,” says Jones, who worked with senior designer Diego Lopez. Which is lucky since Eltinge’s vision really couldn’t be restored. “The symmetry over the main axis was totally destroyed by the fact that the hillside had given way,” Jones says.
Besides, with concrete columns strewn around, “there was a ruin vibe that everybody liked,” she adds. Certain essential features, including the fountain, were brought back to life. But filling the decorative pool wasn’t an option—it would have cost a fortune and wasted water, Boxenbaum say —so Jones turned it into a planter overflowing with California poppies, a native perennial. Her team removed invasive grasses and mustard but brought back lavender, rosemary, roses, and several kinds of cypress, alongside native plants like sage, buckwheat, yarrow, and oaks. Below the house itself is a wild-ish garden with paths that echo the lines of Yanai’s architecture. That part of the site is “more of a true wild Silver Lake hillside, full of native plants, to which we added some fruit trees for production,” Jones says. Soon after the new flora arrived, fauna followed, Boxenbaum notes. “You get lizards, bees, butterflies, coyotes, owls, hawks, and hummingbirds. It’s become an impromptu nature preserve.” He concedes: ”We’re not reversing climate change here, but there’s at least a place a bird can go to have a drink of water.”
The cross-dressing Eltinge called himself an illusionist. Architects and landscape architects are illusionists too. Together, Yanai and Jones gave Boxenbaum a Japanese-inflected house beneath an Andalusian garden on a site assembled by a man famous for playing women. What could be more Hollywood than that?
This story appears in the March issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
