JEFF GOLDBLUM'S POOL HOUSE GETS AN AD100 REDO

The pool house behind Jeff Goldblum's West Hollywood home was built in the 1980s, and for four decades it did nothing except sit there. Architect Barbara Bestor and design firm Zeb and Crunk spent the past year giving it a jazz room, a mostly pink gym, a Murano glass chandelier, and a painting of Goldblum confronting a giant Venus flytrap. The renovation argues that a guesthouse should not be a smaller, quieter copy of the main house. It should be where the owners get to be louder.

The Pink Gym Faces Downtown Los Angeles

Emilie Goldblum, a retired Canadian rhythmic gymnast who competed for Canada at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, takes the pink wing of the guesthouse as her gym. She has performed aerial acts at the Grammys and the Oscars since retiring from competition, and Bestor built the room's ceiling clearance around that equipment instead of a standard workout layout. Large sliding glass doors open the space to a view of downtown Los Angeles. Finally Offline has tracked the same instinct toward adaptive reuse elsewhere this month, including a Kansas City couple who rented an untouched 1880 warehouse floor instead of gutting it for something generic. The Goldblum gym runs the same logic at a smaller scale, keeping the shell and changing only what it does.

Barbara Bestor Already Restored a Lautner House

Bestor founded her Los Angeles studio, Bestor Architecture, in 1995, and Architectural Digest put her on the AD100 list of the field's most influential names in 2018. Her best known project may be Silvertop, the John Lautner house above Silver Lake Reservoir that sat unfinished for decades after Lautner started it in 1956. Bestor led the restoration from 2014 to 2017, working from Getty archive drawings to finish Lautner's original plan, and the project won a 2018 Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award. For Goldblum's guesthouse she worked inside the existing footprint but lifted the ceilings, reconfigured the room layout, and added arched doorways that pull the 1980s pool house back toward the 1930s Spanish Revival lines of the main residence. Nothing in the plan added square footage. Everything in it changed how tall the rooms felt.

A Murano Chandelier Hangs Over a Giant Venus Flytrap

A Murano glass chandelier lights the hallway outside Goldblum's office, hanging near a painting of him confronting an oversized Venus flytrap, the kind of detail that would read as a mistake in a more restrained house and reads as intentional in this one. Goldblum's creative office itself sits under a pyramidal ceiling and doubles as a piano room, which tracks for a man who has led his own jazz act, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, for thirty years. He named the band after a woman who knew him when he was 12 and later introduced him, at 19, to her brother in law, a talent agent who helped get him into the business. Zeb and Crunk supplied the furniture throughout, Terremoto handled the landscape design outside, and Rowe Los Angeles styled the finished interiors for the shoot. Douglas Friedman photographed the guesthouse for Architectural Digest, with the feature written by Mayer Rus and fashion styling by AT Vottero.

This Was Never Going to Match the Main House

The main residence keeps its 1930s Spanish Revival register, with tile roofs, arched windows, and restraint. The guesthouse does not try to match it. It borrows the arch shapes and the ceiling height, then spends the rest of its budget on color and jokes. That is the harder version of a period renovation. Matching an old house is a drafting exercise. Building a companion structure that argues with the original, room by room, and still reads as one property, is design. Finally Offline has made a similar case about restraint elsewhere in the category, most recently with the 1.3 pound Bang and Olufsen Beosound A1 travel speaker, where the constraint was weight instead of a zoning line.

The gym and the chandelier get the attention, but Bestor's real move is the ceiling height. Raising it let a 1980s pool house borrow scale from a 1930s main house without borrowing its formality, and that trade, not the pink paint, is why the renovation holds up as more than a punchline.