POWER PLAY

Architect Frank Gehry conjures an astonishing, sculptural home in Silicon Valley with discreetly deferential interiors by The Wiseman Group

- PAUL GOLDBERGER

AN ELABORATE COMPOSITION OF PETAL-LIKE BRICK STRUCTURES ENFOLDS THE LIVING ROOM.

Massy Mehdipour is not your typical Silicon Valley mogul. She began her career at Bechtel, the multinational engineering and construction firm where she managed projects around the world, and for all her experience in digital technology—she has founded two companies and is a major venture investor—she has always felt equally comfortable in the realm of real-world architecture and building. She has been a longtime client of the interior designer Paul Vincent Wiseman and has commissioned vacation houses from the architects Ricardo Legorreta and Peter Bohlin. When it came time to plan a new home base for herself in Silicon Valley, she saw no reason to lower her architectural ambitions. She was a longtime admirer of Frank Gehry, whose work she viewed as the benchmark against which others were measured, and beside whom everyone else, she decided, seemed wanting. Mehdipour set out to hire the celebrated architect, even though at the time—a little more than a decade ago—he was taking on few residential projects.

IN THE LIVING ROOM, A 1940S ITALIAN FLOOR LAMP FROM ALMOND & CO. ARCS OVER A GAMES TABLE SURROUNDED BY PIERRE CHAREAU "T" STOOLS. YELLOW PAINTED SCULPTURE BY TROY PILLOW.

She went to see Gehry in his office in Los Angeles. “When Frank asked me why I wanted him to design my house, I told him that I wanted to bring his creativity to Northern California,” Mehdipour said. “People in this area needed to see it. I told him that I wanted this house to be his work of art.”