handsom

Photographer Dewey Nicks Santa Barbara Home.

By Mayer Rus

Sometimes it takes a few beats to realize a new day has dawned—and that seemingly radical change may not be so radical after all. When photographer Dewey Nicks and his wife, Stephanie, acquired their heavenly parcel of land on a small oceanfront cul-de-sac in Carpinteria, they intended to build a casual weekend home for surfside sport and repose. As design and construction unfolded, however, certain changed realities in their lives sent the family down a different path to domestic bliss à la plage.

The couple’s twins, Madeleine and George, were starting school. Suddenly, they were on a schedule, and that schedule had to be coordinated with papa’s frequent travels. “There wasn’t going to be a lot of opportunity to use the house. We compared the lifestyle in Santa Barbara with the life we had in Los Angeles, and we decided to make this our full-time home,” Nicks says. “My whole professional life is digital now. I don’t have to be in L.A. to deal with model casting, location scouting and film deliveries from the lab. This move wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago.”

Stephanie also frames the resolution to step away from the bustling metropolis (still easily accessible) as a lifestyle change. “The kids surf and play in the ocean, and they have the freedom to hop on their bikes whenever they want. This is the perfect neighborhood for their growing-up years. It feels like the 1950s.”

At first glance, the couple’s home feels a bit like the ’50s, too, with crisp, modern lines and echoes of classic midcentury California architecture. But on closer inspection, the house reveals itself as decidedly contemporary in both form and sensibility—very much of its own particular time and place and very much in tune with the exuberant, idiosyncratic spirit of the Nicks clan.

“I was interested in the Sarasota scene and the early houses of Paul Rudolph,” says architect Barbara Bestor on the inspiration for the design. “The vibe is what I’d call humanist hippie. We didn’t want to regurgitate expected modernist tropes.”

In the pages of glossy shelter magazines, one low-slung modernist box tends to look a great deal like the next. But of course, all modernist boxes are not created equal. It is through the articulation of building details and subtle manipulations of scale, plan and proportion that architecture distinguishes itself, and on these counts the home appears distinguished indeed.

“Santa Barbara is the land of restrictions,” Bestor laments. “On this project, we were kept to a building height of 13 feet. We made about 20 study models of simple volumes to determine the best way to maximize the space on a tight lot.”

Indentations break up the main volume of the structure and help establish a fluid, intimate connection between inside and out. Along the facade of the house, the living room pushes out into the front yard, while a picnic table and barbecue niche pushes into the kitchen. Large glass doors that open from the same position at the front and back of the house enhance the bond between indoors and alfresco.

“From the exterior, the house presents a finished, comprehensive image—a modern object in the landscape. The color blocks are part of that,” says Bestor. “The interior is not meant to be so perfect. It has a homey quality that is all about comfort and ease.”

The simple exposed-wood construction of rough-cut fir sets up a warm backdrop for the relaxed drama of the decorating. “We wanted the Paul Fortune experience,” Nicks says, referring to the much admired Los Angeles designer, a longtime family friend. Fortune’s home in Laurel Canyon is widely regarded as a masterpiece of subtle, effortless chic—a rogues’ gallery of international tastemakers and bon vivants swears by its charms.

Fortune brought the same sensibility to bear on this project, gathering choice pieces of furniture and art from Nicks’ collection, filling in where necessary and tying together the assemblage in a cohesive, vibrant living space that reflects the unique character of the family. The decorative scheme includes furniture by Roy McMakin and Warren Platner, vintage Moroccan Art Deco carpets, elegant bits of Danish Modern, paintings by John McLaughlin and Monique Prieto and prints by Ellsworth Kelly in the children’s rooms. Altogether, it’s a handsome, modern mix for a handsome, modern family.

“We call this place the ashram,” says Nicks. “We all get to be a little closer and to simplify our lives. This is who we are right now. It feels good.”

whitegoods.

Kobe Bryant for LA Times Style Magazine

It’s almost 4:30 in the afternoon. In the vast Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, everything is in place for Kobe Bryant’s cover shoot: The photographer and his three assistants have been here since 8 a.m. creating a set for the shoot that is swathed in black duvetyn and dominated by three towering light stands. There is even a Kobe stand-in for adjusting the lighting.

There’s a stylist and a seamstress, a groomer and a manicurist, assistants and publicists galore. A woman from Harry Winston is here with a serious pair of diamond-stud earrings Bryant will be slipping on, along with a rack of all-white designer outfits. There’s just one thing missing—the man himself. He’s running late...actually, not running at all. Flying. In his helicopter. From his home in the O.C. He just landed, a publicist assures. He’s 10 minutes away.

“I knew he’d be late,” says the creative director, completely unfazed by the fact that he now has barely two hours to pull off a job that normally takes at least four. And there’s no wiggle room: Bryant has to leave by 6:30. He’s doing the Kimmel show tonight.

Suddenly, there he is—long, lean, in shades and simple gray sweats, a small entourage in tow. Bryant ambles over, smiling and exchanging hugs, handshakes and fist pumps. The stylist shows him the clothes, and they chat easily in Italian before deciding on the first ensemble. The manicurist starts on his nails, while the groomer rubs moisturizer on his face and head. Not the ideal circumstances to conduct an interview, but on this tightly scheduled day, it’s the only option.

Tom Murray: I have to ask, When you’re in that chopper, do you ever look down on the city, pinch yourself and say—

Kobe Bryant: How the hell did this happen? Absolutely—every time. Like I’m sitting here right now. [Nods toward the two ladies primping him.] You know what I mean? This is dream s--t. Wardrobe that’s all white? This just doesn’t happen. Not for me. This is crazy.

You’re very relaxed. Of course, we’re talking as you’re getting a manicure and a facial before you have your makeup put on. Is this a side of your personality you’d like more people to see?

I think people, especially here in Los Angeles, are starting to understand me a lot more in terms of what I’m like personality-wise. I’m relaxed, laid back, pretty funny, smartass. I like having a good time.

But people don’t often see that.

When they turn on the TV or go to a game, that’s not the side of me they want anyway. They want to win a championship, and that ain’t gonna get it done. [Laughs.] Know what I’m saying? Most of the time when they see me, I’m in that golden armor. We all have different personalities. The competition and the nastiness part of it, that’s a part of my personality, too, you know? It just depends on what environment I’m in.

You take heat because of your demeanor in postgame interviews, especially if you lost.

Well, everybody gets upset. But if I’m being short, I’m being short. It’s not like I’m telling people to go F-off. It is what it is. At the end of the day, you play to win. I do whatever it takes to get my team in the best position of winning, and when it’s over, we’re celebrating again with another parade—then everybody is happy.

But wouldn’t it benefit you if the media in L.A. saw this side of your personality more?

It probably wouldn’t be helpful for them, because they have to write and sell stories. And you can’t have everybody saying positive things all the time. It’s just not going to work, even though this is, like, my city when it comes to sports, you know what I mean? You gotta have people on one side of the fence and people on the other. If not, the story’s not compelling. The people who truly know me know what I’m like. There have been people who try to say things that aren’t fair, and I check them. And then they don’t like me because I checked them.

When you say check them, what do you mean?

Call them out. I’m not going to be a pushover. If I’m going to talk to you, I’m going to talk to you respectfully. I’m comfortable in my own skin. If I’m upset, I’m upset—write about it. If I’m happy, I’m happy—write about it. I’m gonna just be me, and let them report what they’re gonna report.

When I first met you years ago, you lived in the Palisades. Now you’re in Orange County.

I love Orange County. I get to enjoy L.A. more. Living in L.A., you don’t get a chance to enjoy it, because there’s so much traffic, and it’s so congested. So, moving outside of it, I get a chance to be close to the water. It’s relaxing, spread out. I can come to L.A. and enjoy it, then go back to the peace and quiet.

How do you like to enjoy L.A.?

We go to restaurants, things like that. I love Koi. Most of the time, after a game, I go across to Katsuya at L.A. Live. And I love Philippe’s.

Yeah! They make a great French dip sandwich!

[Looks confused, then starts laughing.] I don’t know about roast beef. I love the Beijing chicken. That’s my favorite. [Now I’m confused. Bryant, sensing that my inner rube has surfaced, comes to the rescue.] No, man, I’m talking about Philippe Chow—on Melrose.

Ah, of course. So, what else can you tell us about yourself?

I love dogs, I hate bees, I love snakes. And I hate dog s--t. I absolutely hate dog s--t.

So what do you do when dogs poop in front of the house?

Clean it up. [Laughs.]

Wait, you’re out there with a—

Pooper scooper? Yeah, I’ve done it a few times. Every once in a while, you have to.

That helps keeps you grounded, I'm sure, but most would think you’d have someone whose job is to pick up your dog poop.

I do, but they have to have off days. And the dog doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s my walker’s day off, so I’m not gonna s--t today! When they gotta go, they gotta go. And somebody’s gotta pick it up.

You’re playing Guitar Hero at an event with Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis after this. You play a pretty mean air guitar?

Oh, yeah, man—everybody can play a mean air guitar! I’ll be rocking out!

Even against a badass NFL linebacker?

You can’t sack a guitar...but you can’t dunk one either. [Bryant beat Lewis two out of three, despite admitting to never having played the videogame.]

Any songs or bands you like?
“Hells Bells”—a little AC/DC never hurt anybody. Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana...plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

The World Cup is around the corner. Are you rooting for any particular players or teams?
I’ll obviously pull for the USA, but I have sentimental ties to Italy. I have a friend who plays for Argentina. [David] Beckham I was pulling for, and it’s unfortunate what happened [torn Achilles tendon]. But it’s tough to say which team I think is going to win the whole thing.

It’s time for Bryant to head to the set. Music pounds and lights flash every few seconds, and when he’s finished, there’s time for just a final few questions out by the pool.

Do you think about your basketball mortality at all—that one day you won’t be able to do everything you can now?
I feel invincible out there, but it’s a different kind of invincible than when I was younger. Can I jump over two or three guys like I used to? No. Am I as fast as I used to be? No, but I still have the fundamentals and smarts. That’s what enables me to still be a dominant player. As a kid growing up, I never skipped steps. I always worked on fundamentals because I know athleticism is fleeting.

Have you thought about what you’d do after your playing career that would get the juices flowing as much as basketball?
The game...there’s beauty in it. The motivation comes from wanting to do it the best way you can. So whatever endeavor or field I decide to go into after I play, I’m going to approach it with the same discipline.

Do you think it might be in the game?
Hmmm, never say never. But coaching, managing, stuff like that—I seriously, seriously doubt that. Heavily doubt it.

Why so emphatic?
I don’t really have any interest. Me going into that would definitely increase my frustrations. But part of my personality is I’m infinitely curious. And finding something else that could get my juices flowing—that’s a bigger challenge.

Time’s up. Bryant has other commitments, then it’s back to the chopper. “What do you think about while you’re up there?” Kobe is asked, as he winds through a throng of admirers.

“I think about a lot of things,” he says. “I think about driving around the streets of Philadelphia as a kid and looking at all the tall buildings downtown and just wanting to be a great basketball player. And then I fast-forward, and here I am, in a helicopter over a city I’ve been playing in for 14 years. That’s pretty surreal.

“I think about all the fans we have, the houses I’m flying over. Especially when I’m heading to a game, I’m like, How many will watch us play for the next two hours and be pulling for us? That helps motivate me.

“But most of the time...I just sleep.”

TOM MURRAY is upset because he forgot to ask Kobe Bryant for floor seats to a playoff game for him and his two sons. Ha!

Pizza Goes Global in LA

It may boast an Italian heritage, but pizza is now claimed by South Americans and South Asians alike, not to mention Croats, Israelis and Armenians.

Brami's Kosher Pizza in Reseda bakes the impossible. Somehow stuffed inside a thin disc ofmalawach — a Yemeni flatbread as dense and flaky as a hundred layers of phyllo — is a pizza. Mozzarella oozes with each bite from between the crisp sheets of dough, bringing with it tangy crumbles of feta, diced tomatoes and briny green olives. At its edge, the crust is pinched into an almost pastry-like braid, sealed just well enough to contain that cheesy filling.

There are traditional kosher pizzas on the menu — rabbinically approved reproductions of the classics — but at Eli and Shelly Brami's restaurant, themalawach pizza is a creation apart. It's as Israeli as it is American, a unique melding of culinary concepts that reflects the cross-cultural pizza boom spreading across Southern California.

Just as certain city blocks contain the cuisines of a half-dozen different countries, pizza in Los Angeles doesn't conform to one nationality — it practically circumnavigates the globe.

There are South American pizzas shaped by decades of Italian immigration and Croatian pizzas forged along the shores of the Mediterranean. Korean and Japanese corporations have taken to testing their unique interpretations of pizza on L.A.'s international appetite. And some foreign pies defy classification altogether, labeled as pizzas by restaurants and diners searching for a simple descriptor. It's all part of the naturalization process.

A purist's definition of pizza might not apply among such diversity. Take for instance Guelaguetza's clayuda, which some refer to as Oaxacan pizza: a parchment-thin tortilla smeared with asiento (rendered pork fat) and black beans and topped with cheese, lettuce and slabs of meat spread across the tortilla like continents cast off into separate hemispheres.

Others consider the lahmajune from 60-plus-year-old A. Partamian Bakery to be Armenian pizza. The flatbread is completely covered with a ruddy, gamey mix of ground lamb, tomatoes, bell pepper and spices and baked until it borders on blackened. Unlike some more brittle versions made elsewhere, lahmajune from the West Adams shop is as pliant as a New York slice.

These are inexact incarnations — pizzas not by birth but by adoption. Still, there's credence in such classifications. At Pasadena's Old Sasoon Bakery, the Georgian breakfast flatbread khachapuri can't help but recall an oblong, egg-topped pizza. The Geragosian family's Armenian-by-way-of-Syria bakery produces a superior version of the canoe-shaped staple, capped with a blend of Middle Eastern cheeses and a cracked egg. Drag a piece of the khachapuri's billowy, bready crust through the egg to release a tidal flow of yolk that flavors every inch of this morning meal.

Pizza-like mankousheh at Forn Al Hara in Anaheim also blurs boundaries. Fresh out of the oven, its crust is charred and blistered with pockets of air as taut as overinflated balloons. When it's cooked with cheese and sujuk, a peppery, cumin-shocked beef sausage freed here from its casing and transformed into a meaty spread, the Levantine flatbread shares more than a passing resemblance to pizza.

Maybe it's just another unpredictable result of globalization, but previously pizza-less countries have developed their own distinct creations. Waves of Italian immigration brought pizza to Argentina, and Mercado Buenos Aires imports that South American style to Van Nuys. Each slice of its Buenos Aires pizza is crowned with a piece of cured ham, a sliver of roasted bell pepper and a single green olive.

Costa Mesa's months-old Il Dolce Pizzeria highlights another pizza of Argentine invention, the fugazzeta. From owner Roberto Bignes' wood-fired oven comes not the typical focaccia-like fugazzeta, but one with a chewy Neapolitan crust, airy at its edges and thin as a pane of glass at its center. The powerfully simple fugazzetais sauce-free, spotted with milky patches of house-made fior di latte cheese and blanketed with julienned sweet onions and a dusting of oregano.

Sometimes it's all about the sauce. So it is at Dean's Pizza in Long Beach, a true fusion that's part Thai restaurant, part pizzeria. Its parallel menus are mostly kept separate, but there is one notable intersection: the Thai curry pizza.

Dean's uses a red curry sauce redolent of kaffir lime and lemongrass that burns with a subtle, creeping heat. Curry pizza here can be constructed virtually to anyone's liking, with a choice of toppings (think pepperoni and pineapple) or without them altogether (the lactose-averse can order the pizza without cheese). Try reconstructing something close to a traditional red curry with a pizza of chicken or tofu and bell peppers.

L.A. has also become a testing ground for foreign pizza chains informed by the strip-mall standard American franchises that have set up shop abroad. But don't expect pedestrian localizations of Pizza Hut. Instead, inspired overseas entrepreneurs have been taking the basics and building them into peculiar pizzas that go beyond the boundaries of convention.

Seoul-born Mr. Pizza Factory's Koreatown branch is the only one of its kind in the U.S. Consider the bulgogi and seafood pizzas first, but ultimately opt for the Potato Gold: potato wedges, bacon, corn, crushed tortilla chips, cheese and a drizzle of sour cream. It recalls a plate of potato skins you might find at a sports-bar happy hour until you reach the layer of sugary sweet potato paste buried deep within the doughy crust. It's a bracing surprise.

Similarly startling is Strawberry Cones, a Japanese chain that recently opened its first U.S. restaurant in San Gabriel. Its early signature might be the teriyaki mochi chicken pizza: a rice-flour crust covered with cubed chicken, red onions, mozzarella and Romano, teriyaki sauce, a squirt of mayonnaise, shards of dried seaweed and mochi, squares of glutinous rice superheated until they can be stretched like cheese.

There's also a line of "ninja pizzas" whose crusts are colored a pronounced gray by powdered chikutan, Japanese bamboo charcoal regarded for its mineral richness. On the salmon and avocado pizza, the chikutan crust tastes a bit like the sea air that swirls above a beach bonfire.

Until recently, you could even find Filipino pizza, multicultural pies topped with fatty pork sisig, Spanish sardines or chicken adobo. But don't take its disappearance as a sign of waning pizza popularity — there are more global offerings on the horizon.

San Pedro's Pavich's Brick Oven Pizzeria is about to open a second location that owner Zdenko Pavic hopes will start cooking by May. It will have not only dedicated seating but also an expanded menu to complement its mammoth Croatian pizza laced with purplish ribbons of Balkan smoked beef.

Also coming soon is Bella Vista, a Brazilian pizza buffet on track to open this month in Culver City's Brazilian Mall. As owner Marcelo Gomez describes it, the restaurant will operate like an all-you-can-eat churrascaria, with waiters bringing dozens of different pizzas straight to the table until you can take no more. Among the Portuguese-style pies and seafood-intensive slices, it might be the dessert pizzas that prove most distinct, concentrating on fruit-focused pairings like banana and cinnamon and guava paste and cheese.

However you slice them, these international interpretations of pizza, each more unexpected than the last, prove that in Los Angeles, the world truly is flat.

By Miles Clements, Special to the Los Angeles Times

April 15, 2010

Sex and the Cribbie

THE HOUSE SEX AND THE CITY BUILT:

John Melfi, a New York producer of "Sex in the City," "Rome" and the upcoming Showtime series "Nurse Jackie," called on Culver City architect Steven Shortridge of Callas Shortridge Architects to design a new home for him in L.A. Shortridge proposed an unconventional design for a 30-by-80-foot lot in Venice: Rather than small rooms stacked three stories high, the architect wanted seven levels of living space that rose like a zigzag through the house.