Lautners trade for tens of millions of dollars: Ghesquière bought his from publishing heiress Amanda Hearst for $11 million, whereas Cox and Arquette sold theirs for $33.5 million in 2007 to then Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and his wife. Which is why in 2014, it made headlines when a family listed a Lautner that no one had heard of before for the gobsmackingly low price of $999,000. “Scholars of the architect had long classified this as a project that was never built,” Robert Winter wrote of the house in An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles.
How did it remain under the radar? In the 1930s, before Lautner was the Lautner, he was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright’s at the Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin. There he met Salkin, who gave the young protégé a shot at building him a home in LA. And while the later works were indisputably Lautner, done by a man sure in his own talents, the Salkin House bore signs of a man still coming into them: While the exterior featured exposed concrete, redwood, and glass—all Lautner signature materials—the inside has a Cherokee red floor, a hallmark of Wright’s.
‘‘It’s a gift of God, that little place,” Mage says on a swampy August afternoon. Seemingly unbothered, he drinks his third espresso of the day. He has his first when he wakes up at 5:30 a.m., his second after finishing his 10- to 15-mile run in Elysian Park. Mage is a fan of warm liquids—but not of warm foods. His diet consists of raw vegetables, fruits, and various cheeses. “Anything that is not cooked that I can put salt and olive oil on just works for me,” he says. The Tappan stove in the kitchen is the original from the 1940s—and looks like it hasn’t been turned on since then: It’s stuck on a setting for “ham slices, thick.”
