KELLY LYNCH + MITCH GLAZER

Words Anna Godbersen Photography Chris Mottalini

Published in No 17

WE FOUND LOVE IN A LONELY PLACE

Thirty years ago Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer drove out to the Mojave desert in search of something special. What they discovered has lasted a lifetime.

In the movies, the modernist house is where the bad guys hole up. Think of the steel frame and gunite Lovell House, home to the creepy pimp in LA Confidential (Richard Neutra, 1929). Or pornographer Jackie Treehorn’s concrete and glass aerie in The Big Lebowski (John Lautner, 1963). Or the stone spaceship where Bond finds reclusive billionaire Willard Whyte, held by scantily clad bodyguards named Bambi and Thumper, in Diamonds Are Forever (Lautner again, 1969). The current owners of another Neutra creation, a post-and-beam style house in Lone Pine, California (commissioned by Richard Oyler, a Navy veteran and government employee), are quick to point this out, and they would know. They are movie people.

The owners are the couple Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer, whose influence on American cinema spans decades. They’ve had a hand in Drugstore Cowboy, Scrooged, Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations, Roadhouse, The L Word and the Starz series Magic City. Lynch sees the cultural association between criminal deviance and innovative architecture as a kind of backward-looking conformism, a fear response to architects who were ahead of their time. “It’s like saying that jazz music is scary, complicated music only for evil, smart people.”

The couple first saw the Lone Pine property over thirty years ago, before they were married. They had been searching for a modernist house on Los Angeles’ west side, trying the patience of their realtor (noted modernist connoisseur Crosby Doe), and visited the Lone Pine place on a whim. “We went, just thinking of it as an adventure,” Glazer recalls. “Driving through the Mojave, it was like driving through parts of Arabia. We had a huge Sparkletts jug safety-belted into the back seat, in case we ran out of water midway. We were insane. But the second we walked in, it was home.”

This tale of real estate love at first sight makes sense given that Lynch and Glazer are also, on an almost primal level, architecture people. It’s a shared passion that for both partners goes way back. “I wanted to build houses. That’s all I did as a child,” Lynch says. “I didn’t play with dolls. I built forts, I took boxes and made modernist Barbie houses with my girlfriends.” Glazer, born in Miami in the 1950s during the era when modernist hotels such as the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc were erected, says, “I was born to it. My dad was an electrical engineer, a frustrated architect. As a kid, we’d drive up and down Collins Avenue, my dad pointing to these hotels, saying ‘I did that, and I did that.’”

The couple did eventually acquire a modernist home in Los Angeles, the John Lautner-designed Harvey House in the Hollywood Hills. But it is their desert retreat, known as the Oyler house, that really gives the lie to that movieland trope about villains living in avant-garde glass houses. “You don’t feel like a bond villain here,” Glazer says. “You don’t have that world domination feeling.” The structure doesn’t dominate its surroundings, for one thing. As Lynch describes it: “When you walk onto the property and look back at the house, you see it’s long and low to the ground. You see the mountains, the environment. The house doesn’t overwhelm.”

“`Houses retain the spirit and the energy of the people that lived there. This house is elegant and complicated, yet simple and humble. I could say the same about Richard Oyler.” Kelly Lynch

And then there is the story of the man who commissioned the house, so wholesome and visionary as to relegate any associations between evil deeds and the International Style to another planet. Lynch describes him as modest, “just a simple guy with PTSD from World War II who went to the library and fell in love with architecture.” In a documentary about the house, Oyler tells the story of calling the world-famous architect as something of a moonshot. At the time he was working for Inyo County, stealing away to the courthouse roof to read about architecture during his lunchbreaks. He was struck by the notion he’d like a Richard Neutra-designed house. Oyler visited Neutra’s office in Los Angeles, sensed Neutra’s stature — he’d already been on the cover of Time — and doubted the commission would be accepted. Yet many of the original owners of modernist homes were regular people. In the documentary, Neutra’s son Raymond says, “He had that commitment to build for people of modest means.”

Neutra was famous for integrating the personal habits of his clients with his design sensibility, Lynch explains. The goal was to improve their lives. “He spoke to the people who were commissioning him. Many, many questions. What do you like to do? What times of the day are you doing these things? What are your hobbies? Do you like to be alone? Do you like to be with people? So, even though it’s this jewel box of modernist beauty and simplicity, he designed the house for a family to eat together, play together, be together.” In the case of the Lone Pine house, this process led to an enduring friendship between architect and client, centered on a three-bedroom family home in the desert.

“When you walk onto the property and look back at the house, you see it’s long and low to the ground. You see the mountains, the environment. The house doesn’t overwhelm.” Mitch Glazer

Some points of orientation, geographical and emotional: The town of Lone Pine, in Inyo County, is a little more than three hours northeast of Los Angeles, on the eastern side of the Sierras, a few hours south of Yosemite and Mammoth. It is a landscape of extremes. The Owens Valley, in which Lone Pine is situated, is rimmed by the highest point in the continental United States (Mount Whitney) and also the lowest (Death Valley). The nearby Inyo National Forest is home to the Bristlecone Pine, among the world’s oldest living organisms. Lone Pine is also not far from Manzanar, the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. “One of the most profoundly moving places I've ever been in my life,” Lynch says. The people who were imprisoned there, “took that horrible reality and made something at least beautiful for themselves.”

The region’s lunar landscape has a forbidding, far, far away quality. Perhaps that made it a logical place for the U.S. Government to enact one of its more shameful and fascistic policies. That remote ruggedness has also made the region attractive to moviemakers since the early days of Hollywood. Images of the place are integrated into our collective cinematic unconscious. The Alabama Hills — striking rocky formations east of the Sierra Nevada — were used as a stand in for the Khyber Pass in Gunga Din and have appeared in Iron Man and Django Unchained. When Glazer first saw the area, it was like the experience of a recovered dream. “It got me a little bit disoriented. Then I realized it was because I’d seen these rocks on Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger as a kid. This topography is part of my childhood.” Nowadays, one of Lone Pine’s attractions is The Museum of Western Film History and the old west vibes that the town celebrates with an annual parade of cowboy film stars.

That wild landscape was what sparked Richard Oyler to contact the celebrated architect he’d been reading about during his lunchbreaks and commission an unconventional sort of home. In the 1950s, Oyler agreed to help a real estate developer who was having trouble selling a subdivided piece of land and fell in love with parcel twenty-seven — as the site was then known — and its distinctive rock formations. At the end of his life, Oyler told an interviewer, “I am still overwhelmed by it. You see things clearly here, how they really are.” He believed the spectacular nature of the site was the reason Neutra took on the relatively minor job; “He said, ‘There’s nothing anyplace like it.’”

Neutra’s design philosophy was to site the building to maximize a sense of the outdoors within the living space. Those two obelisk-like rocks, framed by the house’s large east-facing windows, are a breathtaking feature and the inspiration for various metaphors. To the Oyler children, they were two big toes; to Lynch and Glazer they are the skyward pointing feet of a fallen giant. Those rocks are where Glazer scattered his parents’ ashes, and Neutra’s wife Dione characterized them as, “Two hands blessing your home.”

In Lynch’s view, the house is both a reflection of Neutra’s genius and the personality of the man who commissioned it. “As beautifully designed as it is, I feel like houses retain the spirit and the energy of the people that lived there. This house is elegant and complicated, yet simple and humble. I could say the same about Richard Oyler. He is this house, and the house is him.”

This is true down to a material sense. Oyler processed lumber for the roof beams himself, and the family collected rocks from the property and from the Inyo Mountains to form the house’s stone walls. Rather than build the pool that Neutra had originally designed, and that Oyler feared would be dangerous for his children, they blasted out a large rock with an existing, water-collecting divot, which the family filled with a garden hose, and which Glazer and Lynch still swim in today.

The affinity between client, architect, and house was mutual. For many years, during the winter holidays, the Neutras would close their office in Los Angeles and visit Lone Pine. The motivation was partially checking-in, making sure everything worked as designed, and partially for the gratification of seeing a family happily living in his creation. The connection proved enduring, and the magical combination of design, family warmth and spiritual site continues to inspire the people who pass through to carry themselves with an earthy authenticity. “So much of our history and our story is in this house,” Lynch says. “There’ve been very few bad memories here. We’ve had sweet times here. The house, either it protected us, or we brought that.”

By contrast, the Lautner house inspires a more urbane energy. “Mitch and I are casual,” Lynch says. “We don’t ask people to get dressed up to come to dinner there, but people come in cocktail attire, anyway. Here, they come in their jeans. They come to play. I get back to who I authentically am here. I feel like this is me, this is who I am. In L.A., in the Lautner house, I feel like, ‘Oh, maybe I am a movie star in some small way.’ That house makes me feel like somebody. And here I just feel like me.”

Characterizing the experience of living in the Lone Pine house, Glazer recalls his mother’s first reaction: “She used the Yiddish word haimish, which is hard to translate, but it means basically friendly, and family.” That aura seems to emanate from the unique collaboration between architect and client. As Neutra wrote in one of his many letters to Oyler, “There is a great calm spiritual quietness about your family in that landscape. You are wonderful people, and you live in a lovely house somebody must have built who loved you.”

Chris Mottalini shoots for AD France, Elle Decor, August Journal and Casa Vogue, among others. Mottalini.com

Anna Godbersen is the author of The Blonde among other novels. annagodbersen.com