Three-year renovation wraps up on John Lautner’s famed Silvertop

A comprehensive and complex restoration of a masterful John Lautner-designed home in Silver Lake is now complete, reports the Wall Street Journal Magazine.

The owners, Beats by Dre president Luke Wood and his wife, writer Sophia Nardin, purchased the house, known as Silvertop, in the fall of 2014. They spent the last three years working with architect Barbara Bestor to restore and renovate the house using Lautner’s original plans.

Silvertop was commissioned in 1956 by Kenneth Reiner, a businessman and inventor. Over the next eight years, Reiner and Lautner worked together to create an incredible “Atomic Age masterwork” that ultimately bankrupted Reiner.

In 1974, the house sold to a couple who lived nearby, and when it came on the market again in 2014, it was visually stunning but also something of a fixer-upper, with “a leaky roof, a cramped kitchen... and a host of midcentury technological headaches,” the Journal says.

Wood and Nardin paid $8.55 million for Silvertop. “Renovation costs amounted to roughly the equivalent of the purchase price, according to several estimates, including about $1 million” for lighting alone, says the Journal.

The result has the ultimate midcentury look but with improved technology. The home’s glass living room wall “formerly chugged like a locomotive” but now emits no more than a hum as it opens, and speakers are hidden throughout the house behind panels of cork in the ceiling.

For photos of the new custom furniture and the post-renovation interiors, head over to the Wall Street Journal.

• Inside Beats President Luke Wood’s John Lautner-Designed L.A. Home [Wall Street Journal]
• Genius Silvertop House For Sale For First Time Since 1974 [Curbed LA]
• Breaking: Beats By Dre President Luke Wood Won the Battle For Silver Lake’s Spectacular Silvertop House [Curbed LA]