Hollywood Remake

With an assist from designer Jake Arnold, The Expert's Leo Seigal and his husband, Maxwell Anderson, breathe fresh life into a landmark LA house by Raphael Soriano

- PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL P.H. CLIFFORD STYLING BY LISA ROWE

Leo Seigal and Maxwell Anderson weren’t in the market for a new home in the early pandemic days of 2020.

But when the couple came across a Raphael Soriano house for sale in the hills north of West Hollywood, the dominoes fell quickly. “We went to see it the next day, and we put in an offer the following,” recalls Seigal, a cofounder of the online design consultation and e-commerce platform The Expert. “We’re both obsessed with California midcentury design, and this house, with its broad expanses of glass and intimate connection to the landscape, represented all the midcentury ideals.”

Part of the property’s allure was its rarity. The 1940 Polito House, a designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, is one of roughly a dozen extant structures by Soriano, an influential LA modernist known for his pioneering use of steel in residential construction (notably in the landmark home of photographer Julius Shulman). “None of the original fixtures or surfaces were there, so the interior was a blank slate,” Seigal says. “Still, the bones were intact.”