Michel Architects Restores Lloyd Wright's De Jonghe Residence and Wraps It in a Flagstone Pool Landscape

Restoring a house by Lloyd Wright carries a particular weight. The eldest son of Frank Lloyd Wright spent most of his career in Los Angeles, and he never quite escaped his father's shadow. His buildings still argue for themselves. The De Jonghe Residence, set into the hills of Laurel Canyon and usually dated to 1959, is one of them: board-formed concrete, deep overhangs and a great deal of exposed wood, arranged low against the slope. For its 2025 restoration and exterior masterplan, Michel Architects, led by Rob Michel, took on the harder half of the problem. The interior had already been restored years earlier by architect John Powell. The landscape around the house had not been resolved in the same way.

What interests us is how much restraint the new work shows. The clients wanted a place to host large parties and then recover from them. That brief could easily have produced a resort-style backyard. Instead, the team catalogued every original and later-added element, recovered Wright's drawings from UCLA Library Special Collections, and built a new pool, elevated spa, firepit and terraces out of the house's own vocabulary. They even sourced flagstone from the same quarry as the original. The result is an addition that tries hard to look as though it was always there, and for the most part it succeeds.

Arrival as a Threshold

The sequence starts at the carport, a timber pergola resting on a rough stone arch, and continues along a dedicated footpath to the garden. Michel Architects describes the path as a threshold between the working world and home. That sounds like marketing copy until you look at how the route actually plays out. The stepped rafters of the porch, the flagstone underfoot and the slow approach do the job of a hallway before you reach a door.

The custom stained-glass panels set into the porch doors were commissioned by the architects and fabricated by James Thomas. Coloured glass is a risky move in a restoration, since it can easily read as a pastiche of Wright family motifs. Here it holds back. It catches afternoon light, adds warmth to a palette dominated by wood and stone, and leaves the original structure as the main event.

Wood That Carries the House

Inside, the timber does most of the architectural work: tongue-and-groove ceilings, wall paneling, exposed beams and original casework. Woodworker Stosh Fila refinished or reconstructed these elements, and the quality of that effort shows most in the kitchen. A curved timber brace and a slatted screen frame a stone-topped island, with copper pans hung above a steel range. It is a working room that still reads as part of a mid-century composition.

The dining area makes the house's central argument in one frame. A rough stone wall meets floor-to-ceiling glazing under exposed beams, so mass and transparency sit side by side. The amber translucent chairs are a smart contemporary note. They pick up the warmth of the wood without competing with it.

Private Rooms with Some Theatre

The private rooms are where the interiors allow themselves some drama. In the bedroom, two suspended brass fireplaces hang beneath a wood-paneled ceiling, and a mirrored wall doubles the room in evening light. The dressing room uses a coloured glass panel wall lit from behind, with a tufted green velvet bench in front of it. Purists may flinch. We think these rooms show a house that is lived in rather than kept as a museum, and the moves stay confined to interior surfaces, where they can be reversed.

A Pool That Belongs to the Stone

The roughly 600 sq ft flagstone pool is the largest intervention, and the one most likely to have gone wrong. A conventional plaster-and-coping pool would have broken the house's spell immediately. Instead, the edge is built from flagstone and boulders, with stone from the original quarry. It reads as an extension of the site's geology rather than an object set down in front of the house.

Seen from across the water, the long timber pavilion stretches low behind the pool under a spreading oak and a leaning palm. That relationship between a horizontal roof, a reflective plane and existing trees is the core of Wright's integrated landscape approach, which the team explicitly followed. The new work sits subordinate to the house, and it should.

Terraces Built for the Party and the Morning After

The brief of hosting and recovering explains the layout of the outdoor rooms. The pool, the elevated spa, the cast-in-place concrete firepit and terrace, and several garden spaces are distributed around the house rather than piled into a single entertainment zone. Large gatherings can spread out, and a quieter corner is always available the next day.

The new concrete details took their cue from the texture of the house's board-formed walls. Matching an existing concrete finish is notoriously difficult, so drawing inspiration from it rather than attempting a forensic copy is a sensible call. Furniture and umbrellas bring colour and some playfulness to the flagstone, while the hard landscape stays disciplined.

Views over the Canyon

On a hillside site, every flat surface has to be earned, and the geotechnical input from Feffer Geological Consulting would have shaped what was possible. Paradise Construction carried out the flatwork and masonry. From above, the kidney-shaped pool settles into the slope among palms and oaks, with hills in the distance. The elevated spa gives guests a view toward the Hollywood Sign, a nod to the location that never tips into spectacle.

At dusk, the pool edge, with agave and boulders reflected in still water, frames the city beyond the canyon rooftops. This is where the collaboration with AJ Canfield Landscape Design pays off: the planting is sparse and drought-tolerant in character, and it lets the stone and the view carry the composition.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan makes the strategy legible. The long, angular roof outline of Wright's house runs alongside the curving pool, and the trees and contour lines around them remain largely undisturbed. The geometric contrast is deliberate. The house stays crisp and faceted, while the new water feature softens into the topography rather than mirroring the building's angles.

Why This Project Matters

Most mid-century restorations in Los Angeles concentrate on the building and treat the yard as an afterthought, or worse, as space for whatever amenity the market demands. The De Jonghe Residence takes the opposite position. Its argument is that the landscape belonged to the original architecture, and that new outdoor program can be added without diluting it, provided the designers do the archival work first. Recovering Wright's drawings and matching the quarry are the kinds of slow, unglamorous decisions that separate a careful restoration from an expensive renovation.

It also shows that subordination does not mean timidity. The stained glass, the brass fireplaces and the polka-dot umbrellas show a house that its owners actually use for parties. Michel Architects drew a clear line: the permanent fabric speaks Wright's language, and the expressive moments stay in what can change. For anyone working on a modernist landmark with a contemporary brief, that line is worth studying.

De Jonghe Residence Restoration by Michel Architects, with landscape design by AJ Canfield Landscape Design. Original architect: Lloyd Wright. Location: Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, United States. Year completed: 2025. Photography by Sean Hazen.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.