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"View Slideshow\n\nIn the early 1950s teen-aged Barbara Warner, daughter of Jack, the most forceful of the four original Warner brothers and the head of the Warner Bros. studio, was riding around Los Angeles with a couple of schoolmates when they suddenly decided to pay a call on a friend of a friend. \"We turned north on Sunset Boulevard, cut up an incline in tiny Holmby Hills and drove through a wooden gate that truly creaked,\" she recalls. \"And then we hit a dirt road, with walls of overhanging trees on each side, and up we went through this tunnel of untamed landscape. We had the thrilling sensation of not knowing where we were going.\"\n\nThey presently arrived at a clearing. Up ahead, gnarled old olive trees silvered the hillside, and the house could be seen all the way at the top. \"It was like an enchanted cottage\u2014all that wood, very rustic. The whole place had a real forest quality, which was such a rarity for there, even then,\" she says. \"That house just stayed with me.\"\n\nBarbara Warner had also made a note of the owner, producer-writer-director Cy Howard, who beguiled the girls with the story of how he had recently built the house as a bachelor pad, wanting it to look just like the king of Denmark's hunting lodge, which he had actually seen. \"I always remembered Cy as funny and attractive,\" she says. \"He served us champagne in the middle of the afternoon.\"\n\nTwenty-odd years later, having turned the key in the door of her life in Paris, where she had been married to restaurateur Claude Terrail of the legendary Tour d'Argent, Barbara Warner asked someone back in Los Angeles, \"Does Cy Howard still live in that house?\"\n\nIt turned out he did, and, well . . . Reader, she married him. And they lived there happily ever after\u2014or at least for sixteen champagne-filled years, until his death in 1993.\n\nRecently she decided it was high time to make at least some changes; it was a very masculine house, after all\u2014dark, though without, she hastens to add, being gloomy. She invited her friends designer Carey Maloney and architect Hermes Mallea of the Manhattan-based M (Group), who had transformed her New York apartment (see Architectural Digest, February 1996), to renew and update the house for her. Having by now been her guests not only in Holmby Hills but in her 1920s Spanish-style house in Palm Springs (a peaceful retreat rented over the years by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley and Herman Wouk), they knew firsthand exactly how their client lived in all three of her dwellings.\n\nThe linear, ground-hugging 4,000-square-foot house newly entrusted to Mallea and Maloney had been built of wood siding and brick (with mortar oozing out of the joints to give it a more natural, naive feeling) and with a thick wood-shingled roof; it crested a property of some four acres. \"We'd never done anything in California ranch style before; we had to learn a whole new vocabulary,\" says Mallea. \"In the end we decided that what we wanted to do was reinforce the clean architecture. We were responding to what was there\u2014because what could be more appropriate in California than a ranch house? And yet it was almost unique in Barbara's neck of the woods. To us, the great charm of it was that there it was, beset by mega-mansions\u2014 Hollywood palaces, if you will: Georgian, Tudor, Mediterranean\u2014and it had such simplicity.\"\n\nAt first, Howard requested that only the guest wing be redone, so they set about turning a warren of small rooms into a suite consisting of a study, a bedroom and two good-size, windowed baths. One of the demolished small rooms had contained a cabbage-rose-chintz English four-poster\u2014with a canopy and bedding custom-designed by William Haines for young Barbara and then \"produced\" by the Warner Bros. studio, probably over-night. \"It was made for a little girl, but I slept in it till I was a teenager,\" Howard confesses, adding, \"I remember Billy Haines coming into my room and rearranging my dolls.\"\n\nOn the designers' first several visits to the house, the six-foot-two-inch Maloney was constrained to sleep in that bed. \"It was charming but not comfortable,\" he says. \"We fled to the Chateau Marmont.\" Barbara Howard took the point. She even likes to joke that she commissioned him and Mallea to create the new guest suite simply in order to entice them back.\n\n\"From there,\" says Maloney, \"it was a natural progression to the living/dining room. Then we infiltrated the rest of the house, and even wound up collaborating on the landscaping with Barbara's gifted landscape designer, Barry Sattels. We kept it low-key\u2014no terraced gardens and not a greensward in sight.\"\n\nToday the front door, a monumental slab of mahogany, opens into a hall with low ceilings, which Maloney and Mallea painted\u2014along with the walls\u2014dark Chinese red. \"As it's a tiny space, we went with an intense, dramatic color to feed into a room eight feet ahead that's one huge expanse of glass and light,\" Mallea says. \"You don't want to give it away right away\u2014you want to make a sequence of it, to create a sense of progression from the entrance.\"\n\nThe living and dining areas that make up that prismatic space are partially separated one from the other by a wood-and-rough-brick bar, which juts out like a peninsula. The designers hand-plastered the dark ceiling in a subtle off-white finish, while darkening the pale-gold wide-planked oak floors so they would \"continue to draw your eye out to the dark slate of the outdoors.\" The beams were dark brown, and \"brown,\" Maloney insists, \"can bring you down,\" so they painted them light green. They replaced the sisal carpet with a big antique dark-blue-and-pale-brick Sultanabad distinguished by the sheer simplicity of its solid-beige field. Barbara Howard collects tribal and Oceanic art, and they used what she had \"because it worked.\"\n\nThe pair of porcelain \"hand\" lamps by Jansen came from the Warners' house in Cap d'Antibes, the Villa Aujourd'hui, one of the lodestars of the postwar Riviera; they adorn two Paul Frankl side tables. A beautiful long sofa table by Frankl\u2014an angled piece of mahogany below a cork top\u2014holds photographs of Barbara Howard and her parents. There is a profusion of Frankl chairs as well: four, in white and black leather and mahogany, in the living area, and eight more, in black leather and mahogany, in the dining area.\n\n\"Frankl had a showroom in California, and my husband was a friend of his,\" Barbara Howard explains. Also, as it turns out, Cy Howard's decorator back when he was a bachelor\u2014the great comedienne and singer Fanny Brice\u2014was partial to Frankl, too. (Luckily for Howard, because when it came to decorating, Brice, who famously took no fee, did only what she wanted to do: \"I always tell them before I start, You are leaving it all to me. . . . You can't have anything to say.' \")\n\nThrough the glass walls of the living/dining room can be seen\u2014beyond olive trees and patches of lavender, beyond a slate-blue kidney-shaped pool\u2014the skyscraping sprawl of Century City three miles distant. \"Century City was the back lot of Twentieth Century-Fox when I was growing up,\" Barbara Howard muses. Another memory is kindled by the good-looking out- door furniture, with its eagle-print cotton pillows that Haines designed in the 1960s for her parents' Palm Springs house.\n\nThe many-windowed master bedroom is off to the right of the entrance hall, wrapped around a small fern garden. Wheat-colored linen walls, a brick fireplace painted wheat, and white beams are all in keeping with the house's new tonality. Frankl pleasingly reappears in the form of a wood-and-cork head-board that incorporates bookshelves.\n\nThe new guest suite, off to the left of the front hall, features a bay window in the study and a wall of French doors in the bedroom. Both spaces open onto a covered walkway and a rose garden. In the study, the designers raised the low, flat ceiling to twelve feet and peaked it with painted wood beams. Continuing to play to the 1950s-California-ranch-house aesthetic, they paneled the walls in random-size boards, leaving the exceptionally deep tongue-and-groove visible, and also paneled the doors to make them \"disappear\" when closed.\n\nOn the bookshelves in the study are a couple of Best Picture Oscars\u2014one of them looking out from between pots of indoor ivy\u2014won by Jack Warner for Casablanca and My Fair Lady. An Emmy won by Cy Howard, for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, completes the kudos in the room. The two wood-columned parchment-shaded lamps once cast streams of lambent light in Barbara Howard's parents' Beverly Hills house, which stood as a testament to the famous taste of her mother (Ann Warner's sense of quality\u2014of what was good as opposed to glitzy\u2014extended from the interiors, which she worked on with Haines, to the house itself, Spanish rebuilt as Georgian, and the way it was set on nine-and-a-half fountain-studded acres).\n\nIn the adjacent guest bedroom, Mallea and Maloney raised the ceiling, keeping it flat. Among the treasures there: two 1960s Venetian lamps, a pair of swivel chairs designed by Haines and a Dali watercolor of a girl skipping rope, signed to five-year-old Barbara.\n\nSeveral years ago, in the drawer of a sideboard they were discarding, the Howards found a small brass plaque with the inscription \"Designed by Fanny Brice.\" \"They nailed it up on the wall of the bar to commemorate her contribution, and now,\" Maloney laughs, \"we're having a plaque made that says M (Group) 1999' to go beside it.\" Barbara Howard enthusiastically endorses that idea: \"Carey and Hermes honored the spirit of the place, but now it's fresher, the colors are more my colors\u2014light green, pastel earth tones. I feel like I'm eighteen again and seeing the house for the first time.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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