![\"Leanne](\"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/LaLaLand-Cottage.jpg\")
<\/a>Leanne and our Hollywood cottage retreat.<\/p><\/div>\n
We corrected that oversight, spending a delightful week in a cottage, formerly a stables behind a 1906 house in Hollywood.\u00a0 Los Angeles has the reputation for being a hard city to visit, with its sprawl and vast distances.\u00a0 Around the intersection of Hollywood Blvd. and Highland Ave., a tourist magnet draws the curious to the sidewalk embedded stars, a couple historic theaters, and frequent media events.\u00a0 But, hiding in plain site are streets where people live and where interacting with them brings the same spontaneous delights as talking to an old schoolteacher in Italy or a Black Cab driver in London.<\/p>\n
Our Airbnb, was billed as Idyllic Hollywood Cottage Oasis, and it was as good as its ad.\u00a0 We settled into the cottage, which architect and owner Jeff Smalley had redesigned.\u00a0 The old barn door slides to close off the bathroom.\u00a0 That evening, we walked a few blocks to The Pikey<\/a> on Sunset Blvd., a Brit influenced pub and restaurant with good beer and an interesting menu, including vinegar chicken and a side of thrice cooked fries.\u00a0 A bit like landlubber\u2019s fish and chips.<\/p>\n Part of our plan was to visit bits of L.A. architecture not seen.\u00a0 So, Tuesday, we headed to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Park<\/a>, just off Hollywood Blvd.\u00a0 But, as the friendly security guard told us, the house isn\u2019t open on Tuesday.\u00a0 Still, it was a nice encounter, and when we returned on Friday we were told that the interior tour was entirely self-guided.\u00a0 Not so, we found.\u00a0 Three feet inside the door, we were greeted by a docent who said, \u201cthe first thing you\u2019ll find out about us is that we love to talk.\u201d\u00a0 Twenty minutes of stories followed, about the hollyhock theme\u2014they were Aline Barnsdall\u2019s favorite\u2014built into the structure and the decorations, about Wright\u2019s indoor-outdoor vision, including a stream that flowed through the living room, and in true Wright fashion, leaked.<\/p>\n The house was built in 1919-1921 and it fits L.A. as the prairie-style houses fit Chicago.\u00a0 Every room has an outdoor counterpart space, and there are sweeping views of the L.A. basin and the Hollywood Hills.\u00a0 Barnsdall hardly lived there.\u00a0 She gave the house to the City of Los Angeles in 1927 as an art park, and there is now a theater and municipal art museum on the site as well as the original house.\u00a0 The city has done well by the gift, refurbishing the house several times, the most recent one included bringing back or rebuilding much of the original furniture.<\/p>\n Tuesday evening we headed to the Hollywood Bowl.\u00a0 We had not been to the Bowl in decades, having declared it just not our scene.\u00a0 The big cement arena just didn\u2019t have the summer music ambiance we remembered from Ravinia, north of Chicago, and transit was difficult.\u00a0 But from our cottage, the friendly \u00dcber driver wound us through the Hollywood Hills avoiding the traffic.<\/p>\n Los Angeles Phil tuning up on a memorable summer evening at Hollywood Bowl.<\/p><\/div>\n We may not have appreciated \u201cthe scene\u201d when we were younger, but the Bowl offers great people watching: more diverse than Disney Hall downtown, and more joyous.<\/p>\n The L.A. Phil has become one of the most interesting orchestras in the world, and Beethoven\u2019s Ninth promised to be a treat.\u00a0 Little did we know that it would become political push back.\u00a0 The program began with Aaron Copland\u2019s \u201cFanfare for the Common Man,\u201d and transitioned to his \u201cLincoln Portrait,\u201d with the speaking part masterfully done by Vin Scully, probably the best loved personality in the city who had just retired from 67 years of baseball announcing.\u00a0 He knows a thing or two about creating a dramatic pause, and when he intoned Lincoln\u2019s phrase, \u201cFellow citizens, we cannot escape history,\u201d<\/a> the import was not lost on the 17,000 in the Bowl.\u00a0 There were murmurs of\u00a0 \u201cVin, in \u201917.\u201d\u00a0 And people cried during the \u201cOde to Joy.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, the week is young.\u00a0 On Wednesday, we visited the Schindler House<\/a>, built in 1921-1922, and considered to be the first truly \u201cmodern\u201d house in L.A.\u00a0 One can see the International Style of Schindler\u2019s Austrian youth, but the house blows past that.<\/p>\n Schindler was Wright\u2019s project manager for the Hollyhock house, and there are similarities\u2014clerestory windows and indoor-outdoor connections\u2014but Schindler\u2019s house is more adventuresome.\u00a0 Its structure is cast-in-place, tilt-up concrete.\u00a0 Its design was for a cooperative dwelling for two couples, each of the adults having a separate studio.\u00a0 Instead of bedrooms, there are rooftop porches called \u201csleeping baskets.\u201d<\/p>\n When built, Shindler\u2019s house was at the edge of the city and of modernism.\u00a0 But head west on Sunset Boulevard past famous places\u2014yes Whiskey-a-Go-Go and the Chateau Marmont still exist\u2014past UCLA and toward Richard Meier\u2019s hilltop travertine Getty Center<\/a>.\u00a0 When it opened in 1997, it was thought too impossibly remote, a retreat for the rich mirroring the famously reclusive donor, J. Paul Getty.<\/p>\n The Shindler House built in 1921 in West Hollywood is considered to be the first truly modern house in Los Angeles.<\/p><\/div>\n But foresight of Meier and of Getty Foundation president the late Harold Williams<\/a>, showed in the throng we met while waiting for the tram that takes visitors from the parking garage to the 110-acre hilltop.\u00a0 Williams, whom I had met when he helped lead L.A. school reforms in the 1990s, thought that the campus, its gardens, and the sweeping views toward the Pacific, would attract people who would not come to a traditional art museum.\u00a0 He was right.\u00a0 Leanne\u2019s gotten very good a striking up conversations with strangers, and it was fun meeting a rainbow of humanity: the African-American family having a reunion with relatives they had never met before, the family from Denmark, and the museum guard who allowed that David Hockney had actually been in the museum a couple days before (at an exhibit of his work) and that they had the temerity to tell him that he couldn\u2019t actually smoke his cigar in the building.<\/p>\n Later, a nap was taken in your honor at the cottage before we headed toward another adventure: dinner at R\u00e9publique<\/a>.\u00a0 The La Brea Avenue eatery is #16 on L.A. Times<\/i> food critic Jonathan Gold\u2019s<\/a> top 101 restaurants and fits his description of a \u201cbistro on steroids.\u201d\u00a0 The grilled octopus salad has both the bite of chile and the tartness of lime, and the Spinach Cavatelli is actually spinach infused pasta and the most glorious of porcini.\u00a0 Gold\u2019s list is significant, because he is much more than a ranker of upscale restaurants.\u00a0 As the documentary \u201cCity of Gold\u201d<\/a> shows, he\u2019s a chronicler and a promoter of the city\u2019s diversity.\u00a0 A Gold-reviewed restaurant is just as likely to be in a strip mall or a food truck as bright-light location.<\/p>\n Charles and Ray Eames built this steel and glass house overlooking the Pacific in 1945. It’s stood the test of time well.<\/p><\/div>\n After breakfast the next day, we again headed west on Sunset Boulevard: this time all the way to Pacific Palisades and the home of Charles and Ray Eames<\/a>.\u00a0 You, of course, have one of their chairs; mine is a knockoff from J.C. Penny.\u00a0\u00a0 Officially, it is Case Study No. 8, one of 25 houses built as part of a project begun by Arts and Architecture <\/i>magazine.\u00a0 Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed the house as a cantilevered metal box, but the Eames\u2019 fell in love with what they called the meadow on the site overlooking the Pacific and did not want the house to intrude on it.<\/p>\n The completed house, which was the family home until Ray\u2019s death, is roughly 1,500 square feet with the recognizable exterior fa\u00e7ade of glass and red, blue, and white panels.\u00a0 They look Mondrian, but according to Julie the docent, Ray declared it entirely her design.<\/p>\n Julie and her colleagues shared the same gift for conversation and instruction as others.\u00a0 The Eames Foundation, which owns the house, charges $270 for an interior tour, but never mind, the place is made of glass and the friendly docent will slide open the living room door so you can take a peek, all for the senior discount tour price of $6.<\/p>\n We loved that the place looked well used and cluttered, dramatically different than the stark conception of mid-century modern.\u00a0 The modernists who lived there\u2014maybe the most influential ones\u2014knew that houses were to be lived in, books were to be piled and rooms jumbled with keepsakes.<\/p>\n Ironically, most of the other visitors were from abroad: a Dutch family and a rapt doctoral student from Japan.\u00a0 There were hundreds of tourists looking at the tacky sidewalk stars near Hollywood and Highland, but missing this peaceful corner of Los Angles that represented the design that we both imported from and exported to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n We pointed our car south on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway if you’re not from L.A.) toward Santa Monica and a stop at Bergamot Station, a collection of galleries and workshops on the site of an old rail depot\u2026lots of corrugated metal.\u00a0 We poked around, and most of what we saw was uninteresting until we happened on the Peter Fetterman Gallery, which was showing more than 60 of Sebasti\u0101o Salgado\u2019s<\/a> photographs, which I\u2019ve long admired, both for their artistic quality and his vocational connection with the people who do the hard and dirty work of this world.\u00a0 His prints now sell for $8,500 and up; wish that we\u2019d bought one of his \u201cWorkers\u201d collection when we first saw it in London in 1993.\u00a0 But I forget; we didn\u2019t have the \u00a3250 then.\u00a0 We settled for a lovely signed book of his images that now rests on our coffee table.<\/p>\n For dinner, we headed to the Tower Bar in the Sunset Tower Hotel.\u00a0 Not a bar, but one of the A-list destinations for a bit of old Hollywood, the Tower Bar<\/a> features stunning views of L.A. at dusk and at night for those lucky enough to score a prime table.\u00a0 But that, as we found out, is not all of us.\u00a0 Apparently, not getting a good table is common enough that the New York Times in a tongue-in-cheek article<\/a><\/i> about Los Angeles appropriate competitive events suggested \u201cscoring a prime table at the Tower Bar\u201d should qualify for Olympic status in 2028.<\/p>\n On Friday morning, before we drove home, we met Robin Smalley, the Cottage\u2019s official Airbnb host who had steered us toward some interesting restaurants.\u00a0 She had arrived from South Africa the evening before.\u00a0 Robin is not given to small tasks.\u00a0 She co-founded m2m (mothers to mothers)<\/a>, an organization that is within striking distance of wiping out pediatric AIDS in nine African countries.\u00a0 The goal is audacious but possible, and the technique of enabling African women to work directly with other mothers is both empowering and effective.\u00a0 If you\u2019re looking for a cause to support, this is a good one.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leanne and I have explored Paris on the #69 bus that goes to the Pere Lachaise cemetery and Florence, where the #7 bus goes up the hills for a view of the city.\u00a0 We visited Berlin when we were young, before the Wall went up, and when we were old after it came down.\u00a0 We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[143,184,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a><\/a>