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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen Karen Hudson, granddaughter of the legendary and prolific Southern California architect Paul R. Williams, drove her grandfather through the streets of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and San Marino in the years before his death in 1980, he would often say, as they passed a house he had designed, \"That was a good job. If a 40-year-old house still looks good, it was good design.\"\n\nIn a career that spanned more than 50 years, Williams designed over 2,000 houses, many of them for entertainment royalty such as Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and Tyrone Power. But the breadth of Williams's work\u2014which included hotels, department stores, restaurants, hospitals and churches\u2014was only one of his distinctions. He worked at a time when relatively few African Americans entered the professions, particularly architecture, and he became the first African American fellow of the American Institute of Architects.\n\nFinding a Paul Williams house is equal to finding a treasure, but all too often it's buried treasure. Los Angeles designer Craig Wright had his fourth opportunity to restore a Williams interior when a long-time client and her husband bought a 12,000-square-foot residence in a storied neighborhood of Los Angeles. According to the client, the house had barely survived one readaptation after another. \"This job was a challenge,\" agrees architect Richard Manion, who worked on the project from the beginning and dates the house to the 1930s.\n\n\"Williams's trademark was using a combination of styles,\" Wright explains. \"He excelled at Vogue Regency, characterized by bow windows and white painted brick. But he added Chinese Chippendale railings and some French touches.\" The result, says Manion, was a \"quiet elegance that is unique to Southern California residential architecture.\"\n\nRetrieving that quality, however, entailed a long process. \"Previous occupants had added a theater, a gym and a playroom at awkward angles,\" says Wright. \"They also needed more rooms upstairs than down, so there were rooms on stilts over terraces.\"\n\nWright put a winter garden on one of the terraces, which, he explains, \"made a space for entertaining in an enfilade with the breakfast room and the elliptical dining room.\" \"In its before stage,\" adds Manion, \"the wing off the dining room was completely incoherent. The winter garden anchored the space.\"\n\nThe current music room had been a porch that was enclosed. Wright and Manion redesigned it to mirror the library on the other side of what is now the center hall, and Manion added a bow window to match the one in the library. Outside, he put roofs over the bow windows\u2014a typical Regency touch\u2014and, with three new gables, the rear fa\u00E7ade now has a pleasantly formal air as it looks over the sloping lawn.\n\nThe entrance hall and living room had original details, and the balustrade on the signature curving stair was also original. The fluted columns in the octagonal powder room were the impetus for the mahogany walls of the bar and the elaborate mirrored-glass vanity in the client's bath.\n\nOnce the house was returned to its 1930s serenity, Wright brought it alive with Hollywood touches like striped walls and a tented ceiling in the breakfast room, \u00E0 la Elsie de Wolfe. The mirrored dining table in the winter garden was modeled after a table that French designer Serge Roche made for Ren\u00E9e Saint-Cyr in 1936. Silver leaf echoes the shimmering, opalescent surfaces favored by California designer Frances Elkins. The fringe in the drawing room mimics the style of William Haines, decorator to countless stars.\n\nPerhaps the room that best embodies the restored elegance of the original house is the dining room. Retaining Williams's oval shape, Wright created a slight dome in the ceiling to give the illusion of height. He placed carved wooden pilasters in the shape of palm trees at intervals around the walls. They were suggested, he says, by Robert Adam's late-18th-century design, which influenced the ornate palm room at Spencer House in London and were copied in the 1960s by St\u00E9phane Boudin for the French design firm Jansen.\n\n\"Craig has been a great mentor,\" says the client. \"He wasn't satisfied with nearly correct. This house had to have glamour\u2014and it had to be our home.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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