Meet the Starchitects With luxury homes valued at $75 million, there's a new type of namedropping in Hollywood. Written by Aaron Peasley Hollywood folk have always had their obsessions. From fast cars to expensive art collections, couture fashion, and rock & roll; it's a town with a never-ending hunger for finding the latest thing. Over the past few years an unlikely passion has beset...

How To Buy A Masterpiece From Prairie School to International Style, important 20th-century homes are being snapped up by collectors. By Mark Van de Walle "I really didn't need another one," says David Zander, recalling his recent decision to buy the Schaffer Residence, a redwood-and-glass house in Glendale, California. Designed in 1949 by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé John Lautner. "I mean, it's not...

Vanity photography hits home By Alexandria Abramian-Mott Special to The Times. Photo Credits: Ken Hively(LAT), Art Gray, Gary Friedman(LAT). In the two years since Diane and David Glean purchased their 1960s post-and-beam in Brentwood, practically the only visitors have been a steady stream of restoration specialists. But now that every tile and midcentury sofa is in place, the last specialist has...

Thom Mayne, who founded his firm Morphosis to surpass the bounds of traditional forms and materials, while also working to carve out a territory beyond the limits of modernism and postmodernism, has been chosen as the 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker Prize caps a three-decade career in which Mayne has received 54 AIA Awards, some 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, as well as...

Prefab, Proven by Allison Arieff - Dwell devoted an issue to prefab homes. Featured projects included a black and white post and beam house in Fox Island, Washington, a high-end penthouse manufactured in Sweden, shipped by boat, and then craned onto London rooftops; and a page on R. Buckminster Fuller's prefab bathrooms. It was fascinating topic, but - magazine deadlines being what they are - we barely...

LA Residential by John Arlidge of The Sunday Times.Whoopi Goldberg has one. So do Courteney Cox and Tom Ford, former creative director of Gucci. Leonardo DiCaprio was going to buy one but the Hollywood screenwriter Mitch Glazer outbid him. Orlando Bloom is searching for one. Rene Zellweger has just agreed to sell hers. For the bold and the beautiful of Los Angeles, architectural collections now rival...

Looking for Modern? Wait in Line. by Kimberly Stevens IF you're interested in buying a Neutra, Lautner or Schindler in Southern California - or any house designed by a high-profile architect, for that matter - be prepared to stand in line and to pay top dollar. "It seems like there have been record-breaking sales every couple of weeks," said Crosby Doe, an agent at Crosby Doe Associates in Beverly...

HOME OF THE WEEK An indoor-outdoor Neutra, Windows of Opportunity: This Bel-Air home designed by Richard Neutra uses expanses of seamless glass to blend into the outdoors.By Ruth Ryon, Times Staff Writer The indoor-outdoor look so popular in Southern California has its roots in such houses as this one in Bel-Air designed by Modernist architect Richard Neutra. When this house was built in 1959 for...

By Shashank Bengali The real-estate listing was more rapt than usual: "Exceptional classic Paul Williams traditional poised on an amazing 3/4-acre lot in prime Brentwood Park.... Absolutely gorgeous grounds, romantic patios.... True perfection." Classics don't age, and Paul Williams-designed homes - with an easy luxury that surpasses trends and time - remain in demand today, at prices the architect...

This is where I drove my go-cart, Crosby Doe says, turning his champagne-colored Jag down Pasadena's Hillcrest Avenue on a rolling tour of the posh Oak Knoll district where he grew up. A civilized gent in a stylish blend of creams and browns, Doe points to a series of houses, fondly recalling memories of each. There's the wood-shingled Blacker House, an Arts & Crafts masterpiece designed by Greene...