Real Estate / Mansions

Inside NBA Super Fan Jimmy Goldstein’s Stunningly Famous Los Angeles House: Eccentric Millionaire Proudly Safeguards the Lautner Legacy Amid Unforgettable Celebrity Parties

BY
photography Enmi Yang

If these walls could talk they would spin stories of Snoop Dogg and Charlie’s Angels, 1960s Hollywood glamour, and epic star-studded parties that still happen regularly, high above the hills of Hollywood. This is the unparalleled Sheats-Goldstein Residence, a 1963 John Lautner-designed masterpiece that pushes the limits of sci-fi surrealism, sleek minimalism, and innovative technology.

Today, the estate’s larger-than-life owner and caretaker —  real estate mogul, fashion devotee and NBA super-fan, James Goldstein — has built the home’s grandiose reputation from an icon of pivotal mid-century design to an unparalleled symbol of hedonistic, Southern California culture.

Welcome home, angels.

The dramatic Sheats-Goldstein house has prevailed for more than 50 years as a cultural touchstone, its space-age architecture as timeless today as it was when architect John Lautner conceived it in 1963. The Big Lebowski, Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle, and Bandits were all filmed under its cantilevered roof. Snoop Dogg made it the location for his music video, “Let’s Get Blown,” and Mark Ronson and Jamie XX partied here before the 2016 Grammy Awards.

In 2015, Rihanna chose the house for her 27th birthday bash, with Leonardo DiCaprio in attendance. James Goldstein, the house’s colorful owner since 1972, recalls a notorious party when a huge traffic jam developed blocks away as people tried to get to the house — Jack Nicholson, drink in hand, got out of his car and directed traffic.

Hollywood Houses

Hollywood has always embraced Lautner’s striking, futuristic creations. The 1971 James Bond spy film, Diamonds Are Forever, was filmed inside the Lautner–designed Elrod Residence, a conical, concrete wonder invisibly tucked into the rocky hillside above Palm Springs.

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Body Double took place at Lautner’s awe-inspiring Malin Chemosphere Residence, a panoramic glass octagon rising above the Hollywood Hills landscape via steel pedestal, like a Martian spaceship. Lethal Weapon and Less Than Zero were filmed at other Lautner houses — and the list goes on.

“Fifty years have gone by and it feels like five or 10 — and I don’t know what the hell happened because I was involved,” Lautner once said about his prolific career.

During the mid-20th century, Lautner built almost 200 houses and commercial buildings throughout Southern California. He was a major contributor to the commercial architecture genre known as Googie, the ultramodern roadside buildings of the ’50s and ’60s named for Lautner’s design for the Googie coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard.

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John Lautner’s houses are known for integrating water elements with architecture.

Still, despite the hundreds of designs and Tinseltown attention, Lautner didn’t achieve prominence with his peers or the architectural press until after his death in 1994. Googie architecture, once derided by critics as vulgar and superficial, is now considered a part of the American cultural zeitgeist. Several of Lautner’s houses in Los Angeles have been designated as historic cultural monuments.

Born in Michigan in 1911, Lautner was an apprentice for architect Frank Lloyd Wright at his legendary Arizona home and school, Taliesin West. During Lautner’s six-year tenure there, he helped Wright carry out a number of projects. Like Wright, Lautner was interested in the relationship between humans, space, and nature, and his buildings often integrated water and natural landscapes into the design.

But Lautner’s work evolved in ways that Wright’s did not. Lautner’s houses were a combination of fantasy and minimalism, with sweeping rooflines, glass-paneled walls, and steel beams. He often emphasized geometric shapes such as circles and triangles, and incorporated the latest technological innovations. His use of modern materials, such as concrete, allowed him to blend his structures into the California landscape, perching his sci-fi creations on rocky hillsides, beaches, and deserts.

Architect Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, who wrote a definitive book on Lautner, describes him this way: “John Lautner was a tall man with a generous smile, who looked good in red. His desk was always full of the things he was thinking about that day: a patterned shell, an image of an arching Egyptian goddess, a piece of text about the essence of beauty. Cherished by all that knew him, Lautner has left a legacy of barely known work that speaks of the infinite potential of architecture.”

The Sheats-Goldstein House

The Sheats-Goldstein house, located a short distance from Beverly Hills, was originally built in 1963 for Paul Sheats, a university professor, and his wife Helen Sheats, an artist.

Carved into the sandstone ledge of a hillside, its most striking feature was the expansive living room, which was completely open to the terrace outside, and protected from the cold only by a curtain of forced heated air. There is no air conditioning; the house is entirely cooled by cross-ventilated windows. Retractable skylights in the kitchen, an open dining area for meals under the stars, and a glass terrace were all unusual features for the time and helped reinforce the house’s indoor-outdoor feel.

When California real estate baron Jimmy Goldstein purchased the house in 1972, it had already changed hands twice and was in disrepair. The heated curtain of air had never worked very well, and a previous owner had enclosed the living room with glass, which had a crisscross of steel mullions interfering with the views.

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Lautner contributed greatly to the “Googie” commercial architecture genre.

Early on, Goldstein hired Lautner to replace it with frameless glass. Its almost invisible seams open and shut at the push of a button.

“From that project on, I never stopped,” Goldstein says of working on the house with Lautner. The duo continued to collaborate until the architect’s death 22 years later.

“He and I were on the same wavelength on every subject,” Goldstein says. “No matter what my suggestion was, he could immediately come up with several different solutions without even leaving his office.”

Minimalism was a key Lautner concept. “Everything is concealed, everything is simple — and at the same time beautiful,” Goldstein says.

A wood ceiling opens to let down a huge TV in the den. In the master bathroom, there’s a glass sink with no faucet. Water flows from a hidden spout with the wave of a hand, and drains outside the window.

Working around the existing architecture was often more difficult than building something from scratch, Goldstein adds — renovations for the master bedroom alone took four years to complete.

Jimmy Goldstein, No Ordinary Eccentric

Jimmy Goldstein cuts an eccentric figure. The 70-something has shoulder-length white hair and a penchant for wearing black-leather pants and a snakeskin hat. He has his own men’s fashion collection — and is perhaps most well known for being a devoted basketball fan, attending more than 100 NBA games each year. He watches basketball games every night from his Lautner-designed den on a 135-inch screen TV.

Having always been a modern-architecture buff, Goldstein spent two years searching for the perfect house before discovering this one. It’s the only house he has lived in since. While Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid are another two of his favorite architects, Goldstein will forever be remembered as the patron who put John Lautner on the map.

Over two decades, Goldstein involved the architect in every aspect of the house’s remastering, including designing all the furniture, rugs, and lighting. No other Lautner project includes such extensive involvement by the architect, Goldstein assures. Early on, the house’s four acres were covered in a tropical jungle, which now requires four gardeners to maintain.

The house’s astonishing James Turrell Skyspace installation came about after Goldstein admired other Turrell works he saw in museums and private homes. Through Ace Gallery in L.A., Goldstein arranged for Lautner and Turrell to collaborate; and when the architect died mid-way through the process, Goldstein stepped in.

Called Above Horizon, the installation is built from the same materials as the house, and is located on a steep slope below the residence. It features two portals made by an aerospace engineer and thousands of hidden LEDs that flood the area every evening for a light show.

With so many requests to use the house, Goldstein had an alternative party space, Club James, built across the driveway. Designed by Lautner protégé Duncan Nicholson, it includes offices, meeting rooms, and a private nightclub. Dressing rooms for film and photo shoots were added to the entranceway of the house, and Goldstein had an infinity tennis court built atop the roof, which he uses regularly.

“The house is a constant joy,” he says.

In 2016, Goldstein pledged his landmark house, its contents, and the four-acre estate surrounding it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition to the Lautner-designed house and furniture, the gift includes the Turrell Skyspace and works by artists Ed Ruscha, DeWain Valentine, Bernar Venet, and Kenny Scharf.

While changes to the house itself are finished, Goldstein is working on a slew of future projects elsewhere on the property, including a large terrace, secondary swimming pool, guest house, and screening room.

“Who knows what else I’ll come up with,” says Goldstein, whose estimated $40 million bequest features a $17 million endowment for maintenance and programming for visitors and scholars. Tours of the house will be available by appointment on a limited basis for as long as Goldstein lives there.

He still gives tours himself on occasion.

“I believe it’s my responsibility to show the amazing architecture of John Lautner to anyone who is interested in seeing it,” he says.

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