Michelle MacLaren has accepted an offer on her house in Hollywood Hills West. The director and producer took $2.85 million for the property. It was a longtime home for Ms. MacLaren, who purchased it about twenty years ago, and paid $730K for it. It had been on and off the market since late 2014, and was initially listed with an asking price of $3.5 million.
The mid-century home dates to 1955, and is designed in an earthy style prefiguring late 1960’s and 1970’s overtly naturalistic and free-flowing designs. The architect was Robert Byrd, and this example of Byrd’s work contains the turret he sometimes incorporated into his residences.
The interiors contain a lot of raw wood, open-trussed ceilings, and a great deal of brick and Saltillo tile. That’s a lot of warmth, but the house carries it off well. Byrd’s architectural sensibilities allowed 19th century visual elements into the postwar period, giving them an engineered historical embellishment, and his designs are frequently beguiling as a result.
The house measures in at a fairly compact 2,450 square feet, and contains three bedrooms and three baths. There is a pair of suites worked into the design, on upper and lower floors. The lower suite features a sauna, while the upper is ensconced in glass, and offers terrific views from a balcony accessed via a set of glass doors.
Several fireplaces—one outside—hand painted tile floors in the kitchen, and an open-trussed dome ceiling in the glass-walled dining room are all pleasantly surprising features of the home. There is a small lagoon-inspired pool, and a secretive outdoor patio, on the slightly more than half acre lot.
MacLaren’s recent directorial work includes episodes of ‘Westworld’ and ‘Better Call Saul’; she won two Emmy Awards, in 2013, for her work on ‘Breaking Bad,’ and was a guiding spirit for the final seasons of ‘The X-Files.’
