S5, E10: An Architect’s California: From L.A.'s Secret Garden to the Magic of Joshua Tree

This is a very special episode of Unpacked by Afar. This week, we hosted Unpacked Live—a live version of the podcast—in partnership with Visit California in Dallas, Texas. The event celebrated California’s extraordinary creative landscape, and today’s guest has been shaping the way Californians live, work, and gather for three decades.

Barbara Bestor is the founder of Bestor Architecture, a Los Angeles studio she’s led since 1995—at a time when very few women were doing so. Her work spans coffee shops and corporate headquarters, wineries and community music centers, private homes and historic restorations. She’s on the AD 100 list of top architects and designers and has been called one of the most influential architects working in LA today.

In this episode, she shares her process, her influences, and the places in California that never stop inspiring her, from a former cult compound in Joshua Tree to a secret rooftop garden at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is a very special episode of Unpacked by Afar. This week, we hosted Unpacked Live, a live version of the podcast in partnership with Visit California. I was in Dallas to celebrate California’s creative landscape, and the voice you just heard belongs to Barbara Bestor.

Barbara is the founder of Bestor Architecture, a Los Angeles studio. She has been building since 1995, at a time when very few women were doing so. Her work spans coffee shops and corporate headquarters, wineries and community music centers, private homes, and historic restorations. She’s on the AD 100 list of top architects and designers and has been called one of the most influential architects working in L.A. today. Barbara joined me on stage in Dallas to talk about California’s unique design spirit and what it means to create spaces that feel genuinely alive. In this episode, we go even deeper into her process, her influences, and the places in California that never stop inspiring her.

Barbara, welcome to Unpacked. It’s so nice to have you here.

Barbara Bestor: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. And I love the magazine.

Aislyn: Well, we’ve been fans of yours over the years. Our editor in chief, Julia Cosgrove, wanted me to pass along a hello. Speaking of beginnings, I’d love to talk about yours. You were born and raised in New England, so what drew you west?

Barbara: I got very interested in architecture pretty early on. In the seventies, I was babysitting for a lot of architects in Cambridge, because many people went to school there and stayed. But even before that, I just loved making things. I’d visit my grandmother in Germany and make boats out of whatever I could find and float them in the big fountain near her house.

Aislyn: What was it specifically about California’s landscape, style, or creative energy that appealed to you?

Barbara: California was the only place in America actually doing interesting architecture in the late eighties. I had gone to school in England for a year at an experimental school where Rem Koolhaas taught, and everyone there only talked about California and about SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, which is where I went to grad school. I came out to scout it one summer after England and worked at Morphosis. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I moved out after I graduated and never looked back.

Aislyn: How did you evolve from there? For people who aren’t as familiar with your work, how would you describe what you do and what you’re interested in?

Barbara: I would say informal formalism is what I’m after. A long time ago I used to describe it as bohemian modernism, which I see as part of a longer chain that includes Rudolf Schindler and the experimental musicians who shaped American culture, many of whom came to California from somewhere else. It isn’t about monumentality or expensive materials. It’s about ideas of space and how we might live now. That’s the site of experiment. I want to make spaces that are both beautiful and natural, but also responsive to how people actually live. That keeps changing, and there’s a lot that’s very different about the 21st century. I’m not interested in recreating the 20th century. I’m interested in that continuity of experimental ideas about how we use space and what things could be made of.

Aislyn: Fast forward to now. How would you say Californians live today, and what are you designing for?

Barbara: California has always been a bit ahead of the curve on non-traditional family structures. I’m seeing a real return to multi-generational living. A lot of adult children are living with their families because residential buildings are so expensive. We have new tools for densification: ADUs, extensions, additions that add square footage without necessarily changing the internal relationships of a household. A lot of people want compounds, and I don’t mean that in a militaristic way. Just multiple structures. People will literally buy houses next to each other so they can have that kind of flexibility. And of course there’s the whole post-COVID transformation around working from home. What kind of space do you actually need to work from home so you’re not sitting on your bed for ten hours a day? Those are the questions that really affect architecture right now. What I’m most interested in is the actual day-to-day quality of life.

Aislyn: That’s such a good way to put it. And interesting, because we’ve talked about the rise in multi-generational travel too. Are there other shifts? I live in Northern California, and the fire issue looms large. Has climate changed your work?

Barbara: Absolutely. Building houses that don’t burn is a big one. We all learned our lessons. I’ve built several houses using materials I’ve long been drawn to for other reasons: fiber cement boards, TPO roofing, which is a vinyl industrial material that’s fireproof and highly reflective, which is also great for solar gain. Energy codes are radically different than they were in the era of high modernism. You wouldn’t do a glass house today without triple-pane glass or significant shading strategies. You want openness and indoor-outdoor connection, but you have to plant for shade and design for it.

The bigger emerging issue is adaptive reuse. In Europe, it’s been standard practice for decades, for environmental and sustainability reasons. You don’t just knock things down and build new. Some California architecture was built so cheaply it’s hard to preserve, but I’m very interested in keeping the city fabric intact and finding the places that haven’t been built out to add density thoughtfully. How do we keep the city urban? How do we reduce commutes and the infrastructure that supports car-dependent sprawl? These are some of the big conversations right now.

Aislyn: Going back to the iconic eras that have defined California architecturally, what are the movements or periods that have influenced you most?

Barbara:

The integration with nature through organic architecture is the big one. It’s a subset of modernism, but a distinct one. A glass and steel house perched on the land is not organic modernism. A Lautner house with a concrete shell roof that continues the shape of the hill is organic architecture. Using nature as the formal cue for what to build, as opposed to the factory. There are a lot of lesser-known architects who experimented in this realm and looked at geometries that you don’t find in a typical formalist architecture education. I really enjoy watching the world rediscover people like John Lautner. I’ve also been working with the legacy of Foster Rhodes Jackson, which is slowly getting the recognition it deserves.

Aislyn: Can you share some specific buildings?

Barbara: They just restored Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Art Park in Los Feliz. It’s a beautiful project that uses a textile block pattern Wright developed after being influenced by Mayan ruins in Mexico. Schindler also worked on it. These architects were all orbiting each other in that era.

And then more recently, there’s Ray Kappe, who has this famous wooden-and-glass house in the Palisades that feels almost like a tree house among a hundred trees. He was the founder of SCI-Arc, where I went to school. On any floor of that house, you feel like you’re outdoors. It’s in a canyon below the Palisades, and it survived the fire. It’s a very beautiful project. There’s a lot of work like that here that you just wouldn’t think of if your frame of reference is the Philip Johnson Glass House or the Seagram Building.

Aislyn: You’ve also worked in very public-facing ways. There was the Beats by Dre headquarters. What are some of the most interesting or challenging projects you’ve worked on that people could actually experience?

Barbara: Commercial real estate is a fast-paced world, so things don’t always last. The Beats space is now Apple Music, and I imagine it’s all white. But what interested me about commercial work is the scale of it. When you’re working for a company of 500 or 600 people, you’re doing interior urbanism. You have a factory building, and you have to figure out how to create spaces to work and also places to go, so that moving through the office feels a little like wandering a Jane Jacobs neighborhood. Different atmospheres. Different destinations. You walk down to the cafe. You want to go to that place because it looks different from everything else.

I’ve also done a lot of exhibit design lately, which has similar instincts. You’re trying to make someone slow down, become more sensitive to their environment, get off their phone, and actually notice what’s around them. That worked at Intelligentsia Coffee, and also for a show on Scandinavian modernism in America that we did at LACMA. We’ve done quite a lot for Nike as well. You end up using bigger, brighter colors, inexpensive materials, but deploying them to tell a story.

Aislyn: What is it about California’s ethos that produces this particular kind of creativity?

Barbara: It probably goes back to Walt Disney starting CalArts, which became the primary art school through the seventies and eighties. That created this huge legacy of modern and postmodern art. But there’s also something about the informality of how a city like Los Angeles is organized. When I go to Berlin, I feel a kinship, because there’s so much horizontal expansion. Berlin is probably twelve cities. LA is similar. Districts and neighborhoods that really change. When I was in grad school, Venice was a completely different place socioeconomically. Silver Lake, where I live now, was where below-the-line film workers lived because it was near all the studios. Production designers, Foley artists. That’s a creative clientele who make their own things. There are Moorish houses near me where I’m sure production designers added mosque-inspired elements to their bungalow rooftops.

The entrepreneurial nature of creative jobs here produces interesting clients. You build your career by doing good work and getting hired again. That kind of individualism motivates in different ways than climbing a corporate ladder, and it leads to clients who want to put their real interests into what they build. That’s why there’s so much weirdo stuff here. Even gardening is a form of self-expression.

Aislyn: After the break, Barbara shares the architectural trend she’s seen take hold and offers a treasure trove of California travel recommendations.

We’re back. What neighborhoods in L.A. do you love right now, especially ones with a creative flair?

Barbara: Anyone who’s read a magazine lately knows about Melrose Hill, which is a neighborhood right next to Melrose that was forever dusty and seemingly full of vacant furniture stores. Then someone started renting those spaces, Zara came, and now it’s a whole thing. The more organic transformations interest me more, though.

I love that Paul Thomas Anderson movie Magnolia, and there are parts of the Valley that are well-preserved capsules of California history, precisely because they haven’t been expensive or sought after. Poverty is always the best form of preservation. If your buildings are in a poorer city, you probably have a lot of good buildings. Rich cities tear them down. So I love driving down Magnolia or Victory Boulevard, where there are Western wear stores that must have been there since 1940, a gun store, a nail salon. That kind of Repo Man-era L.A. That was my image of the city before I arrived, and it wasn’t too far off.

Downtown has gotten interesting. It’s a strange mix of development, art stuff, SCI-Arc, and the ICA LA, which is really the experimental art museum of L.A., right on Seventh Street. Big trucks going to the flower market, art spaces, USC students living in towers. A weirdo combo. The library is amazing. There’s a decent restaurant culture. And Altadena was wonderful, and the parts that didn’t burn still are. I think it will come back with a real vibrancy as it rebuilds.

Aislyn: How do you think the character of those neighborhoods will change?

Barbara: I have a feeling it’ll look a bit like Nashville or Austin, where a mid-century area gets popular and people start building. Each block or two has something cool, then some developer-y stuff, then some in-betweens. A sort of democratic lack of coherence at the block level. I’d love to see more medium-density work in those areas. I did a project in Echo Park called Blackbirds, which is 18 houses that look like eight. They sit on land originally zoned for four houses, which were multifamily by designation but built as singles. So we turned it into 18 units on land that looks almost gerrymandered, where you own a house and its sliver of land but your neighbor’s front wall is four inches away. You get the feeling of your own home, your own castle, but in much closer proximity to others than Southern California typically allows. It all comes down to zoning. Someone drafted it, and that’s what we got.

Aislyn: Do you think people are more open to density now? In Sausalito, there’s been enormous pushback, even as the need is obvious.

Barbara: It’s not an architecture problem, it’s a planning problem. In places with a non-politicized planning department, you can have progressive planning and it works out. Portland has always led on this. L.A. has been trying to follow but keeps getting sued by residents. If planning is politicized, nothing gets done, because every homeowner wants to preserve whatever moment their house is from. You have to show people what it could look like before they’ll accept it. The middle-density question is tricky because of our collective unconscious image of what a California house should be.

Aislyn: That rugged individualism works against us sometimes. I need my space, my land, my house. What would an architecture tour of California look like?

Barbara: In Northern California, there’s Sea Ranch, obviously, and now you can stay at the lodge. But I’d actually recommend Airbnb-ing a unit in Condominium One, which is the original Charles Moore-designed building. I did that for my second honeymoon. It’s a classic, hugely important building from around 1966. A kind of barn-influenced abstract sculpture on a cliff. It’s also probably the most New England-feeling place in California, based on how the community is structured.

Around San Francisco, I love the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. And the San Francisco Art Institute has this classic brutalist building with bright colors that’s quite underknown as an architecture school building.

If I don’t need to be fancy, I’d stay at the Julia Morgan-designed Faculty Club in Berkeley, which is technically a women’s club and runs maybe $150 a night. It has an incredible pool that looks like a castle, and it’s totally intact. You could have checked in in 1948 and it would be the same. It’s right in the middle of the Berkeley campus.

The Oakland Museum of California is remarkable. They restored it well, and the building becomes part of the landscape and garden right on Lake Merritt. And the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland is this classic historic theater where Ryan Coogler premieres his movies. Really amazing.

Aislyn: If you were going fancy in San Francisco, where would you stay?

Barbara: I used to stay at the hotel now called the Vitale, right across from the Ferry Building. It has a rooftop situation where you can take an outdoor bath with rose petals overlooking the water. Not super fancy, but the location is exceptional.

I also love Foreign Cinema in the Mission. It screens outdoor movies in the courtyard. It’s been going strong for a long time and feels very much like the European side of San Francisco that I worry is fading a little, but is still very much there.

Aislyn: What about further south?

Barbara: I love Carpinteria as a beach town. It has a Little Dom’s outpost, and the beach itself is lovely in a way that feels more like Rhode Island or Cape Cod. It’s also not entirely gated off, which matters. From there, you’re about two minutes from Ojai, up a road that climbs right into that extraordinary valley that played Shangri-La in the movies in the fifties. That’s literally where it was shot.

Ojai is very hyped right now. I’ve done four projects up there for people who’ve discovered it. It can feel a bit impenetrable at first. There’s an outdoor bookstore, you can rent a bicycle, you can be in nature. But the hidden gems require some local intelligence. And El Roblar, the hotel designed by Pam Cheri, just opened on the main drag. It’s gorgeous from what I’ve seen.

Aislyn: Big Sur has that same impenetrability.

Barbara: Exactly. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do in Big Sur because you can’t find the beach. But if someone tells you where to go, it’s extraordinary. I love Nepenthe, that old restaurant with the giant beautiful patio. It’s a kind of fifties fantasy, almost a Wrightian sculpture on a cliff. As a tourist, you’re standing there in Big Sur at Nepenthe thinking: people definitely did all kinds of things here in the sixties. It’s a lovely architectural experience. Post Ranch Inn and Deetjen’s are wonderful hotels there too. And if you can find a class at Esalen that you’d actually want to take, that’s a very California move.

The key to both Big Sur and Ojai is to find a vegan restaurant and ask the waiter where to go. The new-age mapping is not on any website. They’ll tell you: park by the fire hydrant, walk over here, there’s a natural hot spring and you can be naked. That information will not surface otherwise. You do have to look cool enough that they’ll actually tell you, but that’s the whole game.

Aislyn: That is the best travel advice I’ve ever received. What about Los Angeles specifically?

Barbara: There’s so much. The mercados, for one. There’s a big Mexican mercado in Boyle Heights where you could easily be in Oaxaca or Mexico City on any given day.

But the thing I always want to show people is the garden at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. If you go up the big stairs, there’s an insane garden 50 feet above the street that almost nobody visits. It winds around the building, and you walk through all those titanium folds. It’s a great weird way to experience a building. Not as an object but as a landscape.

From there, you can walk down Grand Avenue to the Los Angeles Central Library. Susan Orlean wrote an incredible book about that library, The Library Book, documenting what happened when it burned in 1986. You can see all of its history etched in the older part of the building. The gardens in front are spectacular.

Then walk down to the Bradbury Building. Walk into the lobby, it’s free. It’s from Blade Runner and a dozen other films. It’s probably the most important building in Los Angeles typologically, the way Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building is important in Chicago. It was built as an office building, maybe five stories, with a glass atrium and a very light cast-iron structure of balconies, exposed elevators, and staircases. All the offices face into this atrium. You can see everyone moving around. It’s transparent and romantic at the same time. It dates to around 1890, so L.A. does have some history that’s a bit older than we tend to think.

From there, cross the street to Grand Central Market, eat something, and take Angels Flight, this Lisbon-style funicular that goes back up to Grand Avenue and deposits you at MOCA.

Aislyn: What makes Joshua Tree so magnetic?

Barbara: It’s become the most important alternative experience in Southern California because it has such a good mixture of things. Joshua Tree National Park itself is both a high desert and a low desert. If you drive in from the top and exit at the far end, you move through entirely different biomes. The lower desert feels like you’re underwater, like you’re in SpongeBob. You exit near a ghost town. It’s a whole thing.

What I find most interesting is the built-in informality. In Pioneertown, there are great bars, including Pappy and Harriet’s, where bands of enormous stature come through. It looks like a cowboy town and operates like a surprisingly vibrant music venue.

Our whole office did a retreat at the Institute of Mental Physics, which is exactly what its name implies: a former cult situation built with Frank Lloyd Wright’s son. The rooms are little triangles with triangle showers at the innermost point. I call it dusty modernism. It is not fancy, not luxury travel at all, but it’s extraordinary to stay in. Around 80 bucks a room, in the middle of the place everyone insists they have to visit.

There’s also a whole layer of art going on out there. A collector commissioned sculptures from people like Arata Isozaki and Robert Therrien on a big piece of land in the desert. And High Desert Test Sites, which was started by the artist and architect Andrea Zittel, is a sort of artist residency with some really interesting buildings on the land. It’s a site of genuine experimentation.

I always take my New York friends from Joshua Tree down to Palm Springs, where there’s extraordinary midcentury architecture to see. And Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage is a really amazing tour. If you want to understand how Ronald Reagan and Nixon lived and consolidated power, take the tour of Walter Annenberg’s home base. Peak high-sixties modernist golf living. It’s a nice counterpart to Joshua Tree.

Aislyn: When you need to get away for a moment of inspiration, where do you go?

Barbara: I have a daughter on the East Coast, so summers take me to Block Island. But around here, my go-to is Terranea, the resort in Palos Verdes. I know it seems off-brand for me, but it’s a 45-minute drive where you can walk a coastal cliff for two hours looking at Catalina Island. It’s basically Hawaii-adjacent without the airfare. For an overnight, Carpinteria or Santa Barbara, where the botanical garden is wonderful. And if I have four days, I fly direct from LAX to Oaxaca. It’s the most wonderful small city for craft, art, and architecture, new and old. I just stayed at two hotels from the Grupo Habita collection there: the Escondido, designed by Alberto Kalach, and Oro, which has an underground cenote pool with a skylight. Almost like a hammam filled with water. Remarkable.

Aislyn: Speaking of design institutions, the Eames Institute just purchased the former Birkenstock building in Marin and is turning it into some kind of community-facing museum.

Barbara: I didn’t know that! What a great building for it.

Aislyn: I bike by it all the time. That reminds me, I wanted to ask about Ashes and Diamonds Winery in Napa, which you designed.

Barbara: I was doing a lot of work in Palm Springs around Albert Frey’s legacy. Designing exhibits, working with those buildings. And when I got the winery commission, I thought: when wine production began in California in earnest, it was a midcentury moment. So let’s celebrate midcentury California as the theme. Wineries always have to have a theme, and that one felt true. So it’s kind of architecturally and thematically rooted in that era. I like that building.

Aislyn: That’s a perfect note to close on. Barbara, thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of your recommendations.

Barbara: Thank you so much.

Aislyn: Thank you to Barbara Bestor and to our event partner Visit California. In the show notes, we’ve included more about Barbara, her work, and her travel suggestions, plus a YouTube link to watch the full live conversation. Check out our other Unpacked Live episodes featuring landscape designer Roderick Wyllie and writer and naturalist Obi Kaufmann.