Oscar-Winning Style
An Academy Award-winning cinematographer enlisted Marmol Radziner to breathe life back into a 1952 Los Angeles house by the legendary midcentury architect Cliff May.
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Robert Richardson, the director of photography on two of 2009's hottest films—Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island—has very clear ideas about how things ought to look. As a cinematographer, he says, he strives to create two things: "precision of line" and "the right balance of light and dark."
Which explains a lot about his house, set in a wooded canyon on the West Side of Los Angeles. Designed in 1952 by Cliff May, the so-called father of the California ranch, it was originally a radical experiment in open-plan living: Inside, the only real walls enclosed the bathrooms, and even they ended below the ceiling. Other rooms were defined, as needed, by long white drapes and rolling mahogany cabinets. A 288-square-foot skylight made the main room luminous even on overcast days.
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