Massy Mehdipour is not your typical Silicon Valley mogul. She began her career at Bechtel, the multinational engineering and construction firm where she managed projects around the world, and for all her experience in digital technology—she has founded two companies and is a major venture investor—she has always felt equally comfortable in the realm of real-world architecture and building. She has been a longtime client of the interior designer Paul Vincent Wiseman and has commissioned vacation houses from the architects Ricardo Legorreta and Peter Bohlin. When it came time to plan a new home base for herself in Silicon Valley, she saw no reason to lower her architectural ambitions. She was a longtime admirer of Frank Gehry, whose work she viewed as the benchmark against which others were measured, and beside whom everyone else, she decided, seemed wanting. Mehdipour set out to hire the celebrated architect, even though at the time—a little more than a decade ago—he was taking on few residential projects.
She went to see Gehry in his office in Los Angeles. “When Frank asked me why I wanted him to design my house, I told him that I wanted to bring his creativity to Northern California,” Mehdipour said. “People in this area needed to see it. I told him that I wanted this house to be his work of art.”
It helped that Paul Wiseman’s husband, Richard Snyder, is Gehry’s former brother-in-law, and that Wiseman, who had known and admired Gehry for years, had always hoped to collaborate with the architect. Gehry agreed to go forward and went to see the land Mehdipour had purchased: a deep, flat parcel in suburban Atherton, a town whose population is better known for its tech-derived wealth than for its patronage of new architecture. That troubled Mehdipour not at all—she was delighted at the prospect that her house would not only be Gehry’s first in Northern California, but that it would be one of Silicon Valley’s few ambitious pieces of new residential design.
It would be a complex and occasionally strained, but ultimately fruitful, collaboration. When he began the design, Gehry was looking forward to the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, his museum in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris (AD, October 2014). The house gave him an opportunity to explore at domestic scale some of the design elements that marked the Paris project, which contains ship-like sculptural wings of glass and steel within which Gehry placed exposed heavy wood trusses, an element the architect had used in his own house in Santa Monica (AD, April 2019). The final version of Mehdipour’s house would show the influences of both. Like them, it would be a structure of unmistakable drama. But it was also nothing like anything any contractor in Silicon Valley had ever attempted. Could it even be built?
Mehdipour was certain that it could be, and that she could do it herself. Over Gehry’s objections, she decided that she would serve as the general contractor, and she presented the plans to the local planning commission to request exceptions to local height restrictions and certain other ordinances. She expected a hard time, but the reaction was the opposite. “The head of the planning commission went to Frank’s office in Los Angeles to have him explain the house,” Mehdipour said. “He asked Frank, ‘What can we do to help you?’ This is the most collaborative town.”
Gehry’s design was quickly granted a two-foot exception to Atherton’s residential height restriction, and approval for a deeper than normal roof overhang. That would turn out to be the easy part. The striking shapes and unorthodox geometries of Gehry’s architecture, which can look slapdash to the uninitiated, demand a high level of technical expertise to build, and Mehdipour and the various subcontractors she hired were occasionally stymied by the challenges of the construction process. The house would take 10 years to complete, and while the final appearance is essentially in line with what Gehry had designed, certain details were not completed according to his exact specifications.
“I love Massy—she had big ambition, and she pushed us to do more and more,” Gehry said. But her decision to take charge of building the house “didn’t allow us to do all the details,” Gehry said—or for the architect’s office to oversee the project all the way through the construction process, which is the usual practice.
Still, it is very much a Gehry house. At once powerful and highly intricate, both a sculptural presence and an exploration of the relationships of materials to each other, to space, and to light, it is a symphony of juxtaposing masses, striking views, and varied textures. The composition of glass, wood, metal, and brick includes one of Gehry’s finest spaces, a dining room made of heavy wooden columns, curving wood beams, and glass: part pavilion, part tent, part ancient sailing ship recast as modern art object. The room looks toward a lower-level entertainment space opening out to a courtyard garden, a freestanding pavilion, and a pool. The sprawling house also has brick towers, a glass entry canopy, balcony overlooks, and some roofs of corrugated metal that arose from a conversation Mehdipour had with Gehry about the huts she remembered from her native Iran.
James Hunter and Sadie Darsie of The Wiseman Group worked alongside Paul Wiseman to source furniture for the house and to design new pieces. Mehdipour wanted to be responsive to Gehry’s architecture but not to mimic either the architecture or Gehry’s own furniture designs. “I wanted the furniture and the house to be separate—it shouldn’t imitate Frank too obviously,” Mehdipour said. For the dining room Wiseman designed a long wooden table with rounded ends, in a dark finish that stands out from Gehry’s honey-colored Douglas fir beams, and specified purple leather dining chairs for a pop of color. The Wiseman Group conceived several sofas, chairs, and coffee tables, all of which have a degree of visual weight that makes them strong enough to hold their own within Gehry’s architecture without stealing the spotlight. Throughout the house Wiseman placed other objects that seemed to engage in dialogue with Gehry—sconces by Pierre Yovanovitch, a Pierre Chareau games table, outdoor furniture by Patrick Naggar, a Jens Risom chair and ottoman, some vintage Italian floor lamps.
Wiseman understood the essence of Gehry, which is that while his architecture can seem like a random array of disconnected objects, it is anything but. Gehry’s work is as precisely composed as that of Mies van der Rohe, and every bit as disciplined. It is not minimalist, to be sure; in its complexity it is almost baroque, with an exuberance that emerges out of the same love of exploration, of sensual experience, and of the emotional side of all architecture.
“It took a long time and a lot of editing to get it right, because you can’t compete with Frank Gehry’s architecture, but neither can you imitate it,” Wiseman said. “Doing this house gave me the chance to think outside of a box that I’ve been very comfortable in for 45 years. I think of this as a crowning moment in my career.”
This story appears in the AD100 issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
