PALMBEACH continuedfrom page 139
Artwork includes Picasso's 1968 Buste d'Homme. The library-traditional, elegant and ultra-English-is done in knotty pine with pegged floors of plank oak. The paneling is ornate, a melange of fes toons, ribbons, wreaths, keys and rams' heads. The fireplace is also pine, with fluted Corinthian columns and a rib boned wreath. Irwin Kramer had asked for a gen tlemen's club room, and Smith and Boardman obliged. The space has knot ty pine woodwork; it's arrayed in green and-red fabrics, with a pale, moss-green sponge finish on the walls. There is an immense pine-and-marble bar extend ing across one side of the room and a massive fireplace opposite it. Clay fig ures in a niche are part of an Amlash col lection from the last royal family ofiran. The four guest suites overlooking the courtyard are each a different color yellow, mauve, blue and green-and laid out to correspond with the colors of Terry Allen Kramer's linens. Boardman designed not only the bamboo bed in
"No matter how grand the place, I wanted it to have humor. It had to be young and fun." the yellow room but another of the dec orative beds and much of the furniture in the other three. Terry Allen Kramer had wanted "a fantasy look" in these suites, and that is what she got. No one can visit La Follia without being enchanted by the sunshine-flood ed morning room, a prime conversa tion piece and a perfect place for lunch. Fashioned after an old English oran gerie, it is a bower of white treillage over apple-green-painted walls; the ceil ing is tented with a striped fabric. Terry Allen Kramer especially loves the deli cate upholstered English wheel-back chairs. And she's crazy about the carpet, a tunning menagerie starring frolicking monkeys and preening parrots. Just the ticket for a palazzo that doesn't take itself seriously. □ 220
CAROL BURNETT continuedfrom page 154
described pack rat-"I don't throw things away; I just frame them"-Bur nett has amassed a kind of personal Smithsonian of photographs, memora bilia and art. Pictures of friends and rel atives and Bob Mackie's watercolors of Burnett's television characters consume a wall of the media room. Heirlooms such as a quilt sewn by Burnett's great great-grandmother mingle with younger artifacts, like a pair of Japanese paint ings from her house in Hawaii. And then there are the gifts. Silver pieces from Julie Andrews and Lucille Ball. Rocking chairs from Jim Nabors. A cor rugated cardboard chair and ottoman from Frank Gehry. A clock from Harry Connick, Jr. A painting from Tony Ben nett-a portrait of Burnett-signed "Benedetto." A year ago Burnett settled into the house, which a Native American sha man had blessed. She lives alone, but a guesthouse and gatehouse lend them selves to visits from friends, her sister and her three daughters. She likes hav ing a few neighbors like Marsha Mason and Gene Hackman-"a little bit of Hollywood without being overwhelm ing." Her social life is not taxing: "I love to go out for dinner, even though I have that great kitchen. Sometimes you'll be at a restaurant and there's someone from L.A. who you don't know that well but get to know because they're not going to an appointment or work. It's very kick-back." While unwinding from Moon and awaiting the birth of her first grand child, she's been studying some movie of-the-week and feature film scripts. "But movies tend to bore me," says Bur nett. "You sit around and sit around and finally they're ready for you and you have to shave again. What I do like is being in front of an audience." Which is why she appeared last month as Helen Hunt's mother on the NBC series Mad About You-a favorite show and an en gagement she wouldn't mind repeating. It's also why she recently completed a seven-city speaking tour-a question and-answer gig that struck a familiar chord with fans. "I loved it. I had no act, no preparation, no orchestra," she says. "I just put on a dress, walked out and told the audience we were bumping up the lights." □
FRANK ISRAEL continuedfrom page 163
Israel's nod to another Frank who pre ceded him in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright. Rarely has any architect, in cluding Wright, produced a room that possessed such monumentality on a small scale-monumentality condensed and focused, like a laser. There are allu sions to Wright's Taliesin West and to such later Wright works as his exquisite Seth Peterson Cottage in Wisconsin (see Architectural Digest, February 1993 ), but the interpretation is Israel's own. If no single detail is literally Wrightian, the whole is a brilliantly inventive hom age in which the master architect's forms have been blown apart and then pulled back together. The composition of this soaring little wing evokes not only Wright's architecture but the broader tradition of California modernism of the 1940s and 1950s. Away from the main section, on the side, a stucco wall encloses the stair to the second-floor study. The wall has been turned into a warped plane that tilts out and reaches toward the sky, looking less like a wall than sculpture. That same wall at its lower end pushes back under the stairway, revealing a ghostly hint of a staircase in relief. For all the richness of ideas in this house, nothi!)-g violates the fundamen� tal premise of the design, which is to make living space. Frank Israel, per haps alone among contemporary ar chitects of serious theoretical bent, nev er tried to deny the critical role his clients played in shaping his designs. Indeed, not long before he died he de livered a lecture in which he presented his architecture as a synthesis between his own ideas and the wishes of his clients, distancing himself from those architects for whom accommodation to function is taken as an indication of some kind of weakness. Far from dis paraging the demands of clients, Israel found inspiration, even joy, in them. "The thing about Michael and Ce cilia is that they asked me all the right questions," he said last spring, sitting in the just-finished Dan living room, in what would turn out to be his final visit to the house. "Great clients make great buildings-I wouldn't want to de sign a house in a vacuum. Interacting with the people who will live their lives there is where the challenge is." □