The story
- Pool
MAISON DE LA REINE: Timelessness is not a style. It is a quality. Commissioned in 1928 by Alphonzo E. Bell, founder of Bel-Air, from Mark Daniels, the architect who drew Bel-Air's streets and gave the neighborhood its form, having already designed Pebble Beach, the 17-Mile Drive, and the Bel-Air Bay Club. Later the home of Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, and later still of producer Steven Reuther, of Dirty Dancing and Face/Off, who added the cinema and editing suite to make movies in the home. Five years of restoration by Studio Berosso have not preserved this house. They have continued it, in the spirit of Hollywood Regency, the glamour, the entertaining, the indoor-outdoor ease that defined Los Angeles at its most confident. The arrival sets the vocabulary: a 1928 fountain, a front door refinished in Heritage Red beneath its original hardware, and a checkerboard terrazzo foyer restored to its original glory. Nero Marquina thresholds, waterjet Bianco Dolomite floors, backlit Cristallo, hand-bullnosed Rosso Levanto, every stone hand-selected and fabricated by artisans chosen for a level of execution appropriate to a house of this significance. The formal living room, the designers' ballroom, centers on a monumental Calacatta Viola fireplace with antique mirror trim beneath lacquered, hand-aligned paneled walls and ceiling, it's doors fully recessing to the terraces and doubling the garden light in its antique mirror, pure Hollywood Regency in scale and polish. A hand-painted Gracie wallpaper, the atelier behind wallpaper installed at the White House, lines the breakfast room ceiling. Gucci wallpaper appears twice: Lillies in the private office, Heron in the theater powder room, beneath a hammered bronze Michael Smith mirror, a Cristallo vanity, and a mosaic Rosso Levanto floor inlaid with brass. The theater level moves from Missoni chevron and amaretto ultrasuede into a lacquer and smoked-mirror bar with a fluted island that rolls onto the terrace, the same lacquer, mirror, and glamour that define the style throughout. Above, the primary suite sits beneath a coved lacquered ceiling with a Calacatta Monet vanity, Waterworks fixtures in polished nickel, and a dressing room built for gowns and tuxedos. Below, a gym that was the estate's original indoor pool, and a wine cellar backed in Cristallo with a hand-laid mosaic floor, and custom oak racks inspired by the oak barrels traditionally used in winemaking. Lighting and plumbing fixtures throughout are Waterworks, Urban Electric, and Visual Comfort, original where they survived, refurbished or newly cast to match where they did not. Terraces step through mature redwood and cypress that have held the house in privacy for a century, opening in glimpses toward Century City and Downtown. Bel-Air has hundreds of houses. This is one of the estates that made it Bel-Air.
