Tour a Swanky Hollywood Regency–Style Home in LA Reimagined for a Modern Lifestyle
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A beautiful thing about an architect designing their own home is that nobody else needs to translate how the client lives. In the case of AD PRO Directory firm Rios founder and creative director Mark Rios’s Los Angeles residence—shared with his husband, reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Guy Ringler—the vision was especially clear. Rios wanted an environment for the couple to flourish within the framework of a bold 75-year-old house made for someone else entirely. Built in 1949 in service of a bygone lifestyle—separate primary suites, an elevator ascending from the kitchen to a dressing room for mid-party wardrobe changes, staff quarters—the historic property had to be artfully reconsidered for today.
The couple were living nearby in “an edited minimalist shell that housed our collections,” Rios says of his previous home, when an intriguing terra-cotta mansard–roofed house with a nearly windowless façade along Ringler’s running route went on the market. When Rios saw the listing, he realized it was not only designed by John “Jack” Elgin Woolf, the glamorous midcentury-era architect to the Hollywood glitterati, but was Woolf’s personal home—twice. Rios and Ringler knew instantly they wanted it.
“Jack Woolf was a major leader in the gay rights movement,” says Rios of the architect, who helped advance the inclusion of gay people in high society. “For Guy and me to live in a house that has that kind of role model in its lineage is really important.” It wasn’t without challenges, however. “How do you not hurt the original architecture but change the way you live in it, make it casual but still glamorous?” Rios asks. “This is a swanky house, so how do you keep it swanky but make it feel like you can wear shorts in it?”
The overarching theme for the restoration and reimagining of the 9,546-square-foot Hollywood Regency–style pad was living graciously without stuffiness. That, the architect says, “is about appreciation and trying to surround yourself with things that are really beautiful.” It meant adding verdant touches to the landscape, as with a hedge of Dombeya—which blooms with pink flowers the size of dinner plates—outside the picture window of the all-black kitchen. It meant using intense colors liberally. And replacing the narrow, “scary” picket stair with a sculptural set that is the modernist version of a leaping fawn.
In reconfiguring and updating the house, which hadn’t been touched in half a century, the couple embraced experimentation. This thrilled Rios since he could push himself further than a traditional client. Take the plump lacquered fiberglass bar in the former bridge room. “We don’t play bridge, but I drink, so it became the bar!” laughs Rios. The shapely volume is a frequent dinner spot for the pair as well as the first stop when entertaining. It’s the centerpiece of the would-be living room they fashioned into a spacious cocktail lounge, complete with a baby-grand piano, fireplace, and swivel chairs—Rios’s liberal use of lattermost element is “crazy and quirky,” he admits, “but it makes for better living and better community.”
The couple was delighted to showcase their collections in a joyful, bold way as opposed to how a museum might approach it. To wit, their blue and green Blenko glassware occupies the red library, the palette of which was entirely inspired by a beloved Mary Fennen painting over the mantle. A 1960s Roche Bobois sofa covered in Missoni fabric that Rios had his eye on for some time was the impetus for transforming an octagonal pavilion into the Moroccan-esque lounge they jokingly call the “drug room.”
“I think this house wanted to have different experiences per room,” Rios says. “It’s much more emotional than our last.” And each space does offer a distinctive point of view. Aside from the sorbet-colored palate cleanser of the primary suite, they pushed themselves throughout. There’s the pair of octagonal powder rooms they made complete opposites, with one festooned in Sherle Wagner hardware featuring tiger’s eye gems. And the glass-sided formal dining room, which retains its original mirror-topped table designed by Woolf, creating illusions with an air of trippy splendor alongside a mirrored ceiling, candlelight, and lush flora outside. The walls are a Rios favorite, Farrow & Ball’s Studio Green, to make it feel like dining in a garden while enhancing their lighter paintings.
Between Rios’s dedication to beauty and Ringler’s commitment to comfort, the two dreamed up a home that pushes them to live boldly and with ease, thanks to a design that follows “the sequence of how we want to live,” the architect says, reflecting on the project. Plus, he adds, “Jack Woolf would love coming to dinner in this house.”
1/17“It’s really like living in a glass pavilion,” says Rios of his home. The front door was fabricated by Renaissance Design Studio, with hardware by Frank Allart.
2/17With plenty of wood to ground it, Rios says their all-black kitchen is actually very cozy. “People gravitate toward it because black [can be] a wonderful, warm color,” he says, “but you have to experience it to believe it.” The cabinetry is by Bulthaup, the pendants are by Leucos, wall sconces by Apparatus Studio, and the range and hood is by Lacanche. Added warmth comes from the dombeya hedging outside, which has “huge leaves and gigantic pink flowers the size of a dinner plate,” says Rios.
Art: © Annabel Gault/The Redfern Gallery Ltd, London3/17When Woolf reacquired the house, he enclosed one courtyard to create the dining room, mirroring the ceiling and the tabletop. “Guy and I eat in there by ourselves—you don’t have to have a party to eat in your dining room,” Rios says of the room painted in Farrow & Ball’s Studio Green. The dark hue allows the lighter-colored artwork collection, including an Annabel Gault ink on paper, to pop.
Sam Frost4/17Rios is of the mind that every house, “no matter how big or small, should have more than one place to eat.” He and Ringler have four that they move between, one being this breakfast room with Minotti Los Angeles chairs, a Paul Ferrante pendant, and some of the couple’s pottery collection. “At the end of the day, I think houses are better if they have that collection of your life in them,” says Rios, “they’re richer.”
Art: Mary Fedden/Portland Gallery, London5/17In the library, Farrow & Ball’s Incarnadine Red felt like the perfect shade to showcase the couple’s blue and green Blenko glass collection. An Allied Maker light fixture and Ralph Pucci wall sconce plus a chair covered in a bouclé fabric—a current favorite of Rios’s—round out the space that taught the designer not to “be afraid of saturation [and] deep colors.”
6/17Rios says their collection of “eccentric kooky” hardware and pulls by the late creative Pepe Mendoza—working at the same time as Woolf—was an important addition to the house. In a vibrant bathroom, the Phillip Jeffries hemp wall covering in pomegranate contrasts with the mustard-hued Clé tile.
Art: © Annabel Gault/The Redfern Gallery Ltd, London7/17“The house doesn’t have a living room in my mind,” says Rios. “Who wants to sit in the living room? We want to hang out around the bar. We were really trying to make the house function for our contemporary lifestyles.” In the cocktail lounge, guests find a Yamaha player piano, swivel chairs, and, flanking the bar, a pair of Annabel Gault oil-stick paintings.
8/17“This is not a living room, this is a cocktail lounge,” insists Rios. “This is where you get a drink and sit down by the fire,” with its split double-flue system, an innovation engineered especially for the homes that Jack Elgin Woolf designed to allow for natural light to flood in through glass above. The sconces are original to the house, while the Atelier Février rug is new.
Art: Esther Tielemans. Chris Di Vincente.9/17At one end of the grand cocktail lounge, friends gravitate to the bed-like saffron Baxter Piaf sofa. Esther Tielemans’s Berlin Black and Chris Di Vincente’s The Sabine hang above it. Garde Margas swivel chairs invite conversation too. In fact, very few chairs in the house don’t swivel. Rios calls the swivel chair “one of the best inventions, as they allow you to engage and talk in different ways.”
10/17“I’m obsessed with bars; they’re just fascinating,” says Rios, who drew inspiration from one of his all-time favorites, the Connaught Bar in London, for this custom piece fabricated by Miller Woodworking, which handled all of the home’s new millwork, with Gordon Guillaumier for Minotti stools. “The idea was to make the bar feel light, like it was floating in this space; I wanted the illusion that you could push it over and it would roll or move.” All the couple’s gatherings start here with cocktails before their guests grab their own food from the kitchen and decamp to the dining room before congregating in the “drug room.”
11/17“For every party you need something to do after dinner,” says Rios, “so the ‘drug room’ is all about after dinner.” He’d always loved the Roche Bobois Mah Jong modular sofa, and the Missoni version felt destined to lead this psychedelic room, an octagonal pavilion off a rear corner of the house. Rios used Dunn Edwards’s black paint to make the vivid colors pop, embedded light fixtures in the vertical boards, and added a Missoni rug, hexagonal yellow table, a Paul Ferrante pendant, and Pepe Mendoza accessories embedded with turquoise.
12/17Rios designed a sculptural staircase to appear as if it’s flying between two walls of glass, separating the dining room and exterior. With its leather-wrapped handrail by Spinneybeck, it replaced an existing narrow picket stair that made Ringler nervous.
Art: Lyndie Benson13/17The bathroom for Rios and Ringler’s office was originally part of the man of the house’s own primary suite. The clean, textured room now features Apparatus Studio wall sconces, a Phillip Jeffries corduroy wall covering, and Kallista plumbing fixtures. “It’s taking something from another time and saying, ‘How do you make that lifestyle work for today?’” says Rios.
14/17The primary bedroom suite is where Rios and Ringler toned things down a bit, paring back the color and simplifying to create a room that acts as an antidote to the rest of the house. A Minotti desk and chair, vintage 1950s ceramic lamp, Pat McGann throw, and Stark rug are featured.
15/17The primary bathroom was also an exercise in restraint and absence of color. In it, a Porro vanity and custom stone tub designed by Rios with Kallista fixtures are simple and accented with Apparatus Studio wall sconces and an amber-hued Yiannis Ghikas glass stool.
16/17Woolf originally designed two courtyards, but later converted one into the dining room. This courtyard, with Bevolo gas wall lanterns, Tropics Inc. planters, and London plane trees, faces the new interior staircase.
17/17Woolf’s original home included the pavilion on the right, beside the large coral tree. But when Woolf later purchased the house back from a client he added the left pavilion. “They’re meant to feel like tented structures sitting in the garden,” says Rios.
