When architect Michael Maltzan talks about the 28,000-square-foot house he designed for former talent agent Michael Ovitz, he draws an instructive distinction between two related architectural forms: “the house” and “the villa.” The former is where people live, a place of domestic intimacy and private sanctuary. The latter simultaneously satisfies the owner’s personal needs—bedroom, bathroom, kitchen—while also accommodating larger, public groups. The villa communicates wealth, prestige, and power. It’s a boast; at its best, a memorable one. The ideal today is still defined by Palladio’s 16th-century Italian country houses, structures that both Maltzan and Ovitz know literally inside and out.
Of the two architectural forms, there is no question that the Ovitz residence in Beverly Hills is a villa. It is Ovitz’s private sanctuary as well as his new public platform, a quasi-museum for his significant art collection. “I average 10 or 12 tours a week,” he tells me one evening at his dinner table, which is flanked on one side by dark-hued canvases by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Franz Kline and, on the other, by a mural-size black assemblage by Louise Nevelson. “It’s open to anybody. There are staff here who bring visitors through.”
Maltzan is sitting across from his client at the large round table, one of two in the dining room, which is less a discrete room than the wide end of a passageway that broadens as it runs the length of the house from the main gallery to the family wing. Along the way hang three Picassos, a Dubuffet, and a stunning trio of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning. The house is chockablock with art, and the effect is nearly overwhelming, like Christmas morning with all the presents open.
Although this is the first joint interview Ovitz and Maltzan have given, client and architect already have a chummy routine. “I told him right up front that he probably shouldn’t take the job,” says Ovitz.
“That was completely true,” Maltzan chimes in. “He said something to the effect of ‘This will either be the biggest thing for your career or it will completely destroy you.’ I kind of liked that. If he thought in those extremes, then he was willing to go to incredible lengths to make this thing amazing.”
At 51, Maltzan is entering the midpoint of his career in a field notorious for deferring important commissions, even for its most talented practitioners. (Frank Gehry, for instance, was 62 when he won the competition for the Guggenheim Bilbao.) More than a decade ago, he was considered something of a wunderkind when curator Terence Riley included him in the Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1999 exhibition “The Un-Private House.” “Michael has done extraordinarily well since,” says Riley. “He’s done public projects and private houses, he’s taught, and he’s had significant publications. Is he a household name? No. But he hasn’t had a misstep.”
