John Elgin Woolf: Architect to the Stars
Slim Aarons’ iconic photo of the Pendleton estate Woolf designed in 1941
Do you remember going to parties? In the pre COVID world of Hollywood in the forties, fifties, and sixties, entertaining was gloriously hedonistic. The backdrop for many of these gatherings were homes designed by the architect to the stars John Elgin Woolf. Woolf originated what we now call Hollywood Regency style. His famous clients included Cary Grant. Errol Flynn, Loretta Young, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Ira and Leonore Gershwin, Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy, among a few. The glamourous estates he built in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Hollywood combined elements of French Beaux-Arts, Greek Revival, and Modernism to create a uniquely Southern California architecture.
Beverly Hills Woolf house built in 1959
Hallmarks of Woolf's beautifully symmetrical and proportioned houses are French mansard roofs, Pullman doors, elliptical leaded windows, round foyers, enfilades, high ceilings, Doric columns, curved patios, and oval swimming pools. The Atlanta native studied surviving classical Revival antebellum residences after graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an architectural degree. Moving to Hollywood in 1936 at the age of 28, he hoped to get a role in Gone With The Wind. He didn't, but he did meet George Cukor, who invited him to his infamous soirees, where he met influential people including Somerset Maugham, Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Fanny Brice.
John Elgin Woolf in front of 8450 Melrose Place
Fortunately for architectural history, Woolf did not become a movie star, and Brice hired the charming Southern gentleman to design a small English Georgian-style guest house. More commissions followed, and interior designer Robert Koch joined the business after the architect took offices at 8450 Melrose Place in 1947. The Texas native, fifteen years his employer's junior, would go on to be lover, partner, and later adopted son known as Robert Koch Woolf. The prolific Woolfs crafted fanciful, theatrical Hollywood Regency homes that suited their entertainment clientele with grand entrances, dramatic living rooms, and whimsical pavilion pool areas. Their designs remain timeless with John Elgin Woolf's houses now prized among today's stars even as they quarantine.
