About This Property
MAISON DE LA REINE:
Timelessness is not a
style. It is a quality. Commissioned in 1928 by Alphonzo E. Bell,
founder of Bel-Air, from Mark Daniels, the architect who drew
Bel-Air's streets and gave the neighborhood its form, having
already designed Pebble Beach, the 17-Mile Drive, and the Bel-Air
Bay Club. Later the home of Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, and
later still of producer Steven Reuther, of Dirty Dancing and
Face/Off, who added the cinema and editing suite to make movies in
the home. Five years of restoration by Studio Berosso have not
preserved this house. They have continued it, in the spirit of
Hollywood Regency, the glamour, the entertaining, the
indoor-outdoor ease that defined Los Angeles at its most confident.
The arrival sets the vocabulary: a 1928 fountain, a front door
refinished in Heritage Red beneath its original hardware, and a
checkerboard terrazzo foyer restored to its original glory. Nero
Marquina thresholds, waterjet Bianco Dolomite floors, backlit
Cristallo, hand-bullnosed Rosso Levanto, every stone hand-selected
and fabricated by artisans chosen for a level of execution
appropriate to a house of this significance. The formal living
room, the designers' ballroom, centers on a monumental Calacatta
Viola fireplace with antique mirror trim beneath lacquered,
hand-aligned paneled walls and ceiling, it's doors fully recessing
to the terraces and doubling the garden light in its antique
mirror, pure Hollywood Regency in scale and polish. A hand-painted
Gracie wallpaper, the atelier behind wallpaper installed at the
White House, lines the breakfast room ceiling. Gucci wallpaper
appears twice: Lillies in the private office, Heron in the theater
powder room, beneath a hammered bronze Michael Smith mirror, a
Cristallo vanity, and a mosaic Rosso Levanto floor inlaid with
brass. The theater level moves from Missoni chevron and amaretto
ultrasuede into a lacquer and smoked-mirror bar with a fluted
island that rolls onto the terrace, the same lacquer, mirror, and
glamour that define the style throughout. Above, the primary suite
sits beneath a coved lacquered ceiling with a Calacatta Monet
vanity, Waterworks fixtures in polished nickel, and a dressing room
built for gowns and tuxedos. Below, a gym that was the estate's
original indoor pool, and a wine cellar backed in Cristallo with a
hand-laid mosaic floor, and custom oak racks inspired by the oak
barrels traditionally used in winemaking. Lighting and plumbing
fixtures throughout are Waterworks, Urban Electric, and Visual
Comfort, original where they survived, refurbished or newly cast to
match where they did not. Terraces step through mature redwood and
cypress that have held the house in privacy for a century, opening
in glimpses toward Century City and Downtown. Bel-Air has hundreds
of houses. This is one of the estates that made it Bel-Air.
Phone: 425-283-2930
Address: 335 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017