The museum’s director and fashion’s favorite art whisperer have rescued a midcentury house in Baldwin Hills
Words by ALESSANDRA CODINHA
Photography by FRANÇOIS DISCHINGER
It might surprise you, standing in Michael Govan and Katherine Ross’s sleek, modernist icon-designed perch in Baldwin Hills, to hear that they were not actually looking for a midcentury house. In fact, “I was firmly no,” says Govan, the director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which houses a world-beating collection of Calders and Pollocks, Manets and Magrittes. These homes often come with a litany of problems, including storage shortages, energy inefficiencies, heating and cooling issues, and little privacy — everything you could imagine not enjoying about living in a 70-year-old minimalist glass box. “There’s an idea that I’m a historian, in a way,” Govan says of his position at the museum, “so there would be an obligation to restore.”
The irony is not lost on him that he and Ross ended up in one of the city’s best examples of its era: the Waymire house, one of Ray Kappe’s earliest creations. Not that it looked so appealing when they found it.
Five years ago, Govan was cruising Zillow on a flight back to L.A. when he came across a three-bedroom boomerang of a house. It was smaller than their New York apartment, but it had jaw-dropping views and was a mere 20-minute drive from LACMA. Ross, an adviser on art and culture for Prada and Miu Miu, knows a good thing when she sees it: She sent the listing to their agent, and they went straight to a viewing from the airport. What they found was wall-to-wall carpeting, worn interiors (not by Kappe), a petite kitchen, strangely proportioned bathrooms, and a whole lot of wood paneling in need of TLC. The house had been flipped three times and required some imagination to return its glory. Thankfully, with this pair, imagination is never an issue.
“The cool thing about the house was that it had no interior,” Govan says. There was no hand wringing over wrecking a Ray Kappe original with their desire for comfortable bathrooms or a functional kitchen. More worrying was the fact that the hillside had eroded to the point where the house was in danger of sliding away before they could start. It was “like a disaster,” Ross says. “I talked to the engineer,” Govan adds, “and he said, and I quote, ‘Run, don’t walk. You’ll spend more than the house or land is worth trying to save it.’ ” Good thing they ignored him.
“The engineer said, ‘Run. You’ll spend more than the house is worth trying to save it.’ ”
First they spent two years shoring up the hillside with the help of an engineer Govan had met through the museum — which in April opens its David Geffen galleries designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor at a cost of more than $700 million. They moved out of a house owned by LACMA in Hancock Park, initially planning to stay at their weekend trailer in Malibu during construction, but when the fires hit and traffic became impassable, they took an apartment by the museum with a view of the tar pits. “Incredibly meditative,” Ross tells me of watching the ancient methane and hydrogen sulfide bubble up to the surface. “Like an enormous lava lamp.” Plus, the close quarters were “kind of romantic,” she says. “I felt like I was in my 20s.” They had a card table, a view, and each other. When they got the green light that the new house was firmly on solid ground, everything started to fall into place. (Apart from an errant branch that crashed through the roof overhang.)
Barbara Bestor, a midcentury house expert who had worked on John Lautner’s sublime Silvertop in Silverlake (recently seen in an episode of the Apple TV series The Studio), was brought on to manage the restoration. The primary bathroom became a serene, spa-like retreat, including a soaking tub adjoining a glass wall (with careful plantings outside to ensure privacy). A shaded courtyard holding a breakfast table was added off the dining room to maximize the available space. Plus, as Ross says, when you live in what is mostly one big room, it’s nice to have an area where you can close a door — even a glass one. The kitchen was widened and the closets made more up to the task of two people who go out as much as these two. LACMA is now the locus of two pivotal fixtures on L.A.’s social calendar: the annual Art+Film Gala with Gucci in October, cochaired by Leonardo DiCaprio and Eva Chow; and, in March, the Geffen Galleries hosting the storied Vanity Fair Oscars after-party.
For the floors, the couple commissioned Cuban artist Jorge Pardo, a friend since Govan was director at Dia Art Foundation on the East Coast, who handcrafted an abstract dreamscape of nearly 250,000 ceramic tiles in aquatic shades ranging from pale aqua to marigold. The tiles flow through the entire 1,900-foot-house and gradually deepen in tone as you progress through the property. Their production took eight months. “People would ask, ‘How’s the house coming?’ ” Ross says. “I’d say, ‘Oh, we’re still waiting for our tiles.’ And they’d be like, ‘How long does it take for a tile?’ And I was like, ‘They’re not your average tile.’ ” Indeed, each individual tile had to be hand-painted, then placed on mats that were painstakingly fitted like a puzzle. The result looks both mystic and microbial. “We didn’t even know if it would be comfortable,” Govan says of the floors. “It was so crazy when we looked at it, like how are we going to live with that?” But as he told Ross, “What are we going to do, put down gray carpeting?” Absolutely not, Ross says. “We are not the gray carpeting people.” (Local fashion designer turned textile wiz Gregory Parkinson was enlisted for gloriously comfy — and colorful — nubby rugs in the living room and bedrooms.)
“We are not the gray carpeting people.”
The two smaller bedrooms became an office for Ross, who fields calls from Europe in the morning and Asia in the afternoon (she sits next to a work by John Baldessari), and a media room where they project movies onto the blank white wall and pull Twizzlers and Bit-O-Honeys out of a big glass candy jar. It doubles as a place for their twentysomething daughter to crash on a daybed when she is in town. (Their older, in her 30s, has her own apartment.) A digital player piano in the entry is an homage to the Waymires, who had a baby grand in the exact same place. They may learn to play in their later years, Ross says. In the meantime, it’s just for parties.
Works by mostly California artists like Ed Ruscha, Alex Prager, Jonas Wood, Ed Moses, and Calida Rawles line the walls — but don’t call it a collection. “We don’t collect art, really,” Govan says. He sees that as a conflict of interest. Instead, they have amassed prints from friends or fundraising benefits they’ve worked on or attended. One exception: the piece by their neighbor Todd Gray that hangs over their dining room table, lit by spiky black pendant lamps by Pardo. They borrowed it for a Vogue shoot of the house in July, after a planned-on Warhol didn’t look right, and realized it made perfect sense. “We don’t have any rules” when it comes to hanging art, Ross told me. “You just know.”
Ana Saavedra from Planted L.A. took on the landscape design. The result is a serene and lushly planted garden that feels bigger than it is, creating little outdoor “rooms” for a grill, a pillow-filled conversation pit-style lounger, or the well-planted carport. Native greenery tucks the house away from the street on one side and doesn’t compete with the view on the other, which glows or sparkles, depending on the hour. “When I come in, even after traveling at two in the morning, the light is just incredible,” Ross says. “It’s so uplifting.” It’s the kind of house (and view) that doesn’t need much, a point that was underlined by the recent delivery of boxes they’d had in storage since the Hancock Park days. “I kept pulling out more and more glassware and dishes, and Michael’s like, ‘You have the kitchen for Downton Abbey, and we live in a pied-à-terre.’ ” She laughs. Ninety percent went back to storage. It is not a tureen-type house.
Flowers by JOSEPH FREE.
Makeup by AKINA SHIMIZU.
Skincare by POIRET.
Feature image: Michael Govan and Katherine Ross in their 1958 Ray Kappe home in Baldwin Hills. Govan wears a David August suit. Ross wears a Libertine dress and Prada sandals.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of C Magazine.
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