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"View Slideshow\n\nHow do you like my art?\" inquires Jane Nathanson by way of a greeting. It's a bit like Elizabeth Taylor asking what you think ofher jewelry or the Earl of Elgin soliciting your opinion of his marbles. Nathanson, who serves on the boards of both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, and her husband, Marc, a communications ex-ecutive, have personally amassed a museum-magnitude collection of 20th-century paintings and sculpture. And the setting for this treasure trove\u2014a late-1920s Art D\u00E9co/Mediterranean villa recently polished to a fine luster by designer Richard Hallberg\u2014is a prize in its own right.\n\nWon over by the house's drama and scale, its bold plaster reliefs and intricate tile work, the Nathansons acquired the property, in Los Angeles's Holmby Hills area, some two decades ago. \"Someone we knew came over and said, Oh, those tiles are so fabulous, because they're made with radium dye\u2014they're radioactive,' \" recalls Jane Nathanson, a psychotherapist with the sharp candor of a native New Yorker and the long blond tresses of an Angeleno. \"We had to rip it all out\u2014the thing that sold us on the house.\" Nuclear disaster averted, the couple hired the late designer Kalef Alaton to create a light, elegant backdrop for their art. They lived in the house comfortably for the next 20 years, raising their three children and nurturing their ever-evolving collection. A couple of years ago they ran out of wall space for the art and decided to tear down a somewhat moldy add-on from the 1940s and install a gallery. \"For some reason, we were going to build a gallery underground instead of above,\" says Nathanson. \"Richard right away got that it should be a two-story addition that would mirror the house.\"\n\n\"The easy thing would've been to do D\u00E9co interiors. We wanted something that's less expected.\"\n\n\"The house really has such great integrity,\" affirms Hallberg, who knew Nathanson as a regular patron of his Melrose Avenue shop. \"We wanted to do something that was clean and contemporary but still related to the house.\" Inspired by the oval entrance hall in the main house, he designed an oval entrance to the new wing\u2014an airy anteroom whose elliptical skylight now illuminates a large-scale mobile by Alexander Calder. Hallberg used 16th-century charcoal limestone floors to anchor the light-filled entrance hall and family room beyond (if a family room can feature works by Barbara Kruger and Gilbert and George). The art gallery below has polished-concrete floors and plain white walls that set off changing installations by the likes of Frank Stella, Dan Flavin and Julian Schnabel.\n\n\"We weren't really going to do anything but the addition,\" Nathanson muses. \"The pool and the yard and the rest of the house just unfolded.\" While working on the new wing, Hallberg concluded that the swimming pool in back needed to move three feet in order to align properly with both the addition and the main house. \"My husband almost had a heart attack,\" claims Nathanson\u2014but she and Hallberg were just getting started. The designer revamped the entire yard, creating sleek white backdrops for sculptures by Calder and Richard Serra and enhancing the views from the house. \"Once the house came into play,\" Hallberg explains, \"we thought, We've got to keep going, make it all work.''\n\nThe designer brought the addition's chiaroscuro-like interplay of light walls and dark floors into the house, painting the elaborate plasterwork a pure white and swapping honey-colored parquetry tiles for ebonized walnut set on a bias that echoes the lines in the plaster. He resurfaced the oval entrance hall, deploying the same charcoal stone he used in the addition and staining the avocado-green terrazzo staircase a dark gray. Hallberg also opened up the sunroom with French doors and created a sophisticated library with paneling and 24 coats of black lacquer. \"The easy thing would've been to do D\u00E9co interiors for a D\u00E9co house,\" he says. \"We wanted something that's less expected.\" With that in mind, he replaced all of the furniture except the stone table in the dining room with \"a mixture of contemporary and classical things that you don't normally put into the same room, from these rattan chairs to beautiful old consoles.\"\n\n\"Richard always won on the furniture,\" Nathanson maintains, \"and I always won on the art.\" She took the opportunity to shuffle her collection, using the house's dramatic scale changes and stepped openings to showcase pieces like Andy Warhol's Double Elvis (in the living room) and Roy Lichtenstein's Interior with Three Hanging Lamps (above the stairs). The art may be blue chip, but the Nathansons don't treat their house like a museum (the only officer on duty is Duane Hanson's Security Guard). They entertain often\u2014the new gallery seats 90\u2014and their grown children live nearby and are frequent visitors. In fact, Hallberg's doing \"a simplified version of this\" for their son Adam, himself a collector of contemporary artists. He's also about to start work on Jane Nathanson's sitting room upstairs. \"This time I just said, Do it,' \" she says. \"Now I trust him with my life.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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