MIDCENTURY MAISON

For years, Nicolas Ghesquière had one very special West Hollywood house on his mood board. PAUL GOLDBERGER tours the property—newly restored by the designer and his partner, Drew Kuhse—that is now the couple's American home base

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When you talk to Nicolas Ghesquière, who has headed women's design at Louis Vuitton since 2013, you realize his secret weapon—the part of his persona that allows him to withstand the pressure of producing major collections throughout the year under the most intense public scrutiny—is that he feels as much passion for the act of connecting fashion to culture as he does for the draping of fabric. For Ghesquière, fashion has never existed in a vacuum. His designs deftly blend traditional elements of Louis Vuitton like trunk hardware and the quatrefoil shape with references to futurism, pop culture, Japanese anime, science fiction, and modern architecture.

Since 2014, Ghesquière had gazed at an image of a house in West Hollywood by John Lautner, the Frank Lloyd Wright disciple whose designs have now become as celebrated a part of midcentury modern culture in Southern California as those of Richard Neutra or Craig Ellwood. Ghesquière had never been to the Wolff house, which was built in 1961 for Marco Wolff, a concert pianist and interior designer, and at that point barely knew Los Angeles. But the moment he came across the picture, he responded to the intensity of the house, a tightly wound composition of stone, wood, and glass perched on a narrow site high in the Hollywood Hills. Every Lautner house has considerable panache, not to say flamboyance; within the architect's striking shapes, there is a kind of explosion of space, and to move through it is to feel a sense of drama, brilliantly contained and controlled.