Let others rhapsodize the new, the soulless, the blank slates. Philippe Naouri covets the old. “I’m into vintage Levi’s, vintage cars, vintage watches, vintage everything,” says the Los Angeles developer and former fashion designer. So it follows that, last year, when he happened upon the last home that the midcentury architect Edward Fickett built in Malibu (a 1973 relic with its best days long past, which others considered to be a teardown), he saw a haven.
“Nobody wanted to touch it,” says Naouri. “Everyone was scared, ‘so much money to spend.’ They had no vision.” Naouri took the four-bedroom, four-bath, 4,200-square-foot estate in the Malibu hills down to its studs. “We kept the beams and started to reimagine the house while restoring it to its original state.”
Decades before the "starchitects" and their mega-mansion projects in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, iconic Mid-Century Modern architects such as Richard Neutra, John Lautner, A. Quincy Jones, Craig Ellwood, and Edward Fickett were designing timeless homes around Southern California.