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"View Slideshow\n\nIn 1942, just before World War II halted all nonessential building, Richard Neutra completed a residence in west Los Angeles for NBC radio producer John Nesbitt. The architect, who had made his reputation as a leading proponent of the International Style, temporarily abandoned white stucco cubes with metallic trim to work in brick and redwood. Neutra's biographer, Thomas S. Hines, calls the house a masterwork and cites the praise of an AlA awards jury in 1946: \"Urban sophistication and cultural refinement have been expressed in terms of almost rustic simplicity a juxtaposition of contrasting moods.\"\n\nThose contradictory virtues caught the eye of Pippa Scott, a film producer and human rights activist who divides her time between the East and West coasts. She had dreamed of finding a small horizontal house on a big lot to indulge her passions for architecture and gardening. \"I was able to afford the property because a developer wanted to tear it down and the neighbors asked the city to declare it a historic monument,\" she explains. Scott offered to restore it, telling the authorities, \"I will honor Mr. Neutra if you will let me buy it, but only if you do not declare it a monument and make it impossible to extend.\" As a former architectural commissioner for Beverly Hills, she had demonstrated a commitment to preservation, and her offer was accepted.\n\nThe house had been altered and painted in dark colors over the decades, and the kitchen and bedrooms were cramped. Scott turned to Barbara Barry, who had decorated a house for one of her daughters, to transform the interiors, and brought in architect David Serrurier to add a new master bedroom at one end and two guest bedrooms at the other. For the next two years client, designer and architect collaborated closely to restore and enlarge the house in the spirit of the original.\n\nSerrurier had previously restored Neutra and Craftsman residences, as well as Rudolph Schindler's Tucker house in Hollywood, where he has lived for twenty years, intuitively absorbing the architect's feel for proportion. \"The Nesbitt house has a strong sense of style, so I wanted the additions to be complementary and not an abrupt shift,\" he says. \"You don't want to walk into a room and ask, Where has this come from?'\" Serrurier has woven the new master bedroom into the linear plan of the house so well that it's hard to see where the old building ended. The prospect of adding a second story of guest bedrooms over two small rooms behind the garage, thus breaking the horizontal line of the house, made the architect nervous, but the structure is set back and is partially masked by the abundant foliage.\n\nPippa Scott wished \"to live in a garden and achieve a rigorous, Zen like purity indoors.\" Barry responded by peeling away unsightly layers and striving for a harmony of colors and textures. \"There's a hierarchy here\u2014garden first, house next, decoration far down,\" Barry says, and that determined the choice of what she calls \"humble\" materials. She felt shut in by the exposed brick fireplace walls and covered them with plaster. Redwood ceilings were sandblasted. Plane sliced ash plywood, sea grass rugs and floors of concrete and polished brick bring a feeling of nature inside. Plaster and cabinetry were colored a soft gray green that Barry describes as \"my version of beige,\" which picks up on the hues of the garden and suggests the silvery patina of the exposed wood surfaces.\n\nAfter Barry had scrubbed and strengthened the bones of the house, she then fleshed them out. \"When spaces are as pure as these, everything matters, down to an eighth of an inch,\" she says. \"It's important to have an eye for proportion. Here, the architecture supplied the cues, and every corner became something to study.\" Her attention to detail is seen in the play of angles between a living area cabinet and the study's hearth and in the connecting wall of shelves, where vertical divisions are recessed and tapered to create the illusion of unbroken rows of books. It is evident in the low set panoramic window that draws the eye down to the garden and pool, giving the study a certain intimacy, even though the ceiling is the same height as in the expansive living/dining room. And it shows in the contrast of shapes and textures. The contrasts are particularly engaging in the guesthouse, which is linked to the kitchen by a covered walkway. Two tiny rooms were converted for use as an office and a Japanese bath and exercise room. Scott is an aficionado of Japan and of the understated elegance the Japanese call shibui. Barry expressed that quality in a glass screen that's blocked in silver to contrast with the dark stone of the tub.\n\nThe house is furnished with a mix of 1940s finds and Barry's own understated designs, which include a dining table made from a leftover panel of ash plywood set on a square ash pedestal. \"Pippa considered installing an antique table and a tansu chest,\" notes the designer, \"and I played tough and said we didn't need it. But she imparts elegance with her silver, pressed linens and, of course, her paintings.\"\n\nScott's love of art began early. She remembers childhood trips to New York with her father, Allan, a playwright who also coscripted the best-known Astaire Rogers musicals, and her mother, Laura, \"who was a pal of some remarkable artists,\" Scott says. \"Rufino Tamayo and Yves Tanguy gave her paintings. I absorbed her insights, but my former husband hated contemporary art. When we separated I said, 'Oh, goody!' and started collecting,\" she recalls with a laugh. The walls display a few canvases at a time; after a few months they are replaced with others.\n\nChildhood nurtured another enduring joy. \"My mother was a great dirt gardener and I was her slave,\" she says. \"Later I went back to school to study landscape architecture. I knew all about Mediterranean plant material but turned up my nose at tropical stuff, which I found lurid and vulgar.\"\n\nThat prejudice vanished when Scott acquired the Neutra house. She had read that the architect had wanted a tropical garden but was unable in the 1940s to find suitable plants, so she brought in landscape architect Thomas Batcheller Cox to help her transform what she calls a \"straggly\" garden into an exotic paradise. From the king palms that shade the diagonal path that leads to the entrance, to the grassy dell framed by Australian tree ferns, every step brings a surprise, and every window frames a different composition. A giant bird of paradise, ginger and jasmine flourish.\n\nAt night the mood changes as the garden fades into darkness and the interior glows from within. Pippa Scott appreciates its serenity, especially on her return from an exhausting trip. \"This space is honest in its appropriateness to Los Angeles,\" she says. \"Every time I come here I feel I'm shedding excess baggage. I think it's as elegant as any highly polished, gold leafed, French windowed space you could imagine.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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