PRIVATE RESIDENCE

A Florentine Illusion in Holmby Hills

Antiques dealer Richard Shapiro transformed a 1926 Los Angeles manor into an imagined Italian villa shaped by aged surfaces, collected histories and the exacting proportions of Palladio

Richard Shapiro’s house begins at the gate. Beyond it, Los Angeles recedes behind dense planting, weathered walls and stone that appears to have endured centuries of rain. The deception is deliberate. When the antiques dealer and founder of Richard Shapiro Studiolo acquired the Holmby Hills property in the mid-1980s, his ambition was to create the atmosphere of a 17th-century Florentine villa with enough conviction that even he might forget it was built in California

The existing house, a two-storey Hispano-Moorish manor completed in 1926, provided approximately 720 square metres of generous rooms and what Shapiro considered strong underlying proportions. Its transformation depended less upon reconstruction than the manipulation of time. Walls were stained and mottled instead of uniformly painted. Stone was manually eroded, architectural details were softened and the gardens were allowed to become dense in some areas while remaining rigorously controlled in others

This cultivated irregularity gives the house its authority. Nothing is arranged to suggest a single historical moment. Ancient objects, Renaissance sculpture, classical fragments, contemporary art and 20th-century design occupy the same rooms, joined by Shapiro’s confidence in their individual quality. A medieval Italian bishop might appear beside an abstract modern sculpture; museum-level furniture shares space with objects recovered from markets, garages and unremarkable shops. Even a collection of purported dinosaur eggs enters the composition with the same curiosity as a carved antique chest

For Shapiro, who has spent more than two decades dealing in furniture and art from antiquity through the 20th century, collecting is inseparable from the suspense of discovery. The house consequently behaves as neither showroom nor period interior. Objects move between rooms, new acquisitions displace old arrangements and unsold pieces from the gallery occasionally find a permanent position at home. Their difference in origin is what gives the interior its depth

The garden carries the illusion further. Sculpted box hedges form an immaculate green structure beneath towering bamboo and the exposed, web-like branches of a Ficus retusa. Shapiro shapes the topiary himself, clipping it only once each year. Its disciplined geometry provides the setting for the estate’s most ambitious architectural intervention: a Greco-Roman pavilion erected in 2001

Shapiro based the structure on Andrea Palladio’s 16th-century Villa Chiericati at Vancimuglio in the Veneto, reproducing the proportions of its temple-front portico at full scale. Working from Palladio’s drawings, he prepared the design for his engineer and contractors, following the mathematical relationship between the diameter and height of each column, the pediment and the building’s complete width. Redwood columns were finished and distressed to resemble eroded stone, giving the pavilion the appearance of an excavated ruin

At its centre is a 19th-century fireplace modelled on a Renaissance original, discovered by Shapiro in a garage in Antwerp. The pavilion was constructed around it, with sofas positioned on either side for winter evenings overlooking the garden

The achievement of the Holmby Hills house lies in the completeness of its imagined history. Architecture, garden and collection have been assembled with the knowledge of a dealer and the instinct of an artist, creating a Florentine world that may be invented, but never feels insincere