Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Once upon a time in Hollywood, the bad guys holed up in anonymous hotel rooms or shabby bedsits.
They were rootless; they took what they could get. If their lairs happened to be in places of former grandeur – castle ruins or sunken hotels – it was just a neat visual reminder of their moral decay. But around the mid-century, things started to shift; the sophisticated baddie took hold.
Today, modernist architecture is movie shorthand for menace. Such houses can be read as cold and stark. But they can also be idiosyncratic, built into rocks, or perched in canyons like strange birds, transcending house-as-shelter.
If the house reflects the self, then it follows that whoever lives in such places might see themselves as inviolate, removed from the hustle and hassle of everyday life. So if we are drawn to the dream houses of movie villains, does this indicate some latent badness within, our shadow self of wealth and taste? Martin Landau and James Mason inside Vandamm’s house in North by Northwest (1959). Credit: Alamy My own love affair with lairs started with the Vandamm house in North by Northwest (1959).
In the movie, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) is a communist spy – softly spoken, elegant and ruthless. He’s gunning for ad-man Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), whom he has mistaken for a CIA operative. It’s all cat-and-mouse and crop-dusting until Thornhill brings him down and wins his lady, the real CIA plant.
We know Vandamm is evil, but his badness is enhanced when we find him in his natural habitat: a modernist glass-and-stone dwelling on top of Mount Rushmore. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater inspired Alfred Hitchcock but the architect wanted too much money to design something similar for North by Northwest. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater (1935), the house has dramatic angles; it is arch and imposing.
It lurches over darkness – symbolically, the villain is never far from the void. Film lore tells how Hitchcock approached Lloyd Wright to design it, but quailed at the architect’s proposed fee (10 per cent of the film’s budget). In the end, he hired production designer Robert Boyle and his team to build a copycat house on the MGM stages in Culver City: beams, balconies, floating stairs, limestone feature fireplace, landing strip and all.
The sophisticated baddie is a complicated beast. He wants to be admired, but also, he will crush you. He says: “We are not so different you and I .
..” but then: “How do you like my island, Mr Bond?” Advertisement Bond villains, of course, get the most lairy lairs, most from the fervid imagination of production designer Ken Adam.
In The Man with the Golden Gun , Scaramanga’s island lair is built into the rocks, right next to the ocean. Inside there is a labyrinth/maze, and the whole is generated by a high-tech solar power plant. In his long, illustrious career, Adam also designed the sets for Dr Strangelove , the car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and an 18th-century frigate in Captain Horatio Hornblower .
He had an affinity for impossible sites and built lairs in space ( Moonraker ), underwater ( Dr No ), and in the heart of a hollow volcano ( You Only Live Twice ). Of the volcano, Adam said: “Once I started designing it, I went on and I went on and I went on. I never talked to a cameraman, I just thought, ‘well, somebody can light it’.
I learned that from Stanley Kubrick, who was also a great photographer; he would never accept from anybody that something couldn’t be done.” The volcano lair designed by Ken Adam for The Man With the Golden Gun. Credit: Getty Images You can visit James Bond Island – it’s part of Ao Phang Nga National Park in Thailand – but you won’t find the lair.
The exterior was a facade, the usual movie trickery, and the interiors were all sets built at Pinewood Studios. Frank Lloyd Wright Jr’s Sowden House in Los Feliz (1926) is a real-life villain’s lair, famous for once being home to George Hodel, a gynaecologist and sadist who hosted sex parties in his gold bedroom, and beat his sons in the basement. Hodel has been linked (by son Steve Hodel) to the Black Dahlia murder, among others.
Advertisement Sowden House features in the TV drama I am the Night (2019), which delves into the case. The home, nicknamed the Jaws House, looks like an ancient Mayan tomb; its front features jagged jaws jutting from the centre. A virtual tour shows black and silver interiors, a stainless steel toilet, an aquarium wall.
Any blood spill could be easily cleaned from those shiny surfaces. The walls are super-thick; the better to muffle your screams. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House, pictured during a fundraising event, became a real-life villain’s lair.
Credit: New York Times Loading It is ironic that in the beginning, the promise of modernist architecture was one of utility and democracy above filthy lucre. Like Australia’s Small Homes Service, California’s Case Study houses (1945-1966) were designed to be cheaply made and easily constructed to service the post-war housing boom. The style was organic, favouring clean lines, open-plan living, and natural materials.
Often their makers were innovative, meeting the challenges of place. John Lautner’s famed Chemosphere (1960). Credit: Los Angeles Times via Getty Images John Lautner’s famed Chemosphere (1960) was built on a hillside that had a 45-degree slope.
Lautner essentially built a pod on a pole, with windows all around and a funicular railway for access. Advertisement The Chemosphere has hosted villains in films ranging from Body Double to Charlie’s Angels – even The Simpsons has paid homage, replicating its spaceship likeness for disgraced movie star/deviant Troy McClure and his sham-wife Selma Bouvier. Inside the Chemosphere.
Credit: Los Angeles Times via Getty Images In his 2007 film-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself , Thom Anderson offers a line-up of lairs from Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs pad as a mob boss’ residence in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), to the mid-century Hollywood Hills hide-out in The Night Holds Terror (1955) (“A straight drop,” says Thug #2. “I wouldn’t try it.”) Anderson is deadpan regarding Hollywood’s poor treatment of modernist houses.
The most heinous case is Lautner’s iconic Garcia House (1962) in Lethal Weapon 2 . The house resembles an eye of glass and wood on stilts so slender that Mel Gibson can sling a cable around one, attach it to his tow-bar and bring the whole crazy-beautiful structure crashing into the canyon. Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs was used as a mob boss’ residence in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950).
Credit: Getty Images Advertisement Since Anderson’s film, there have been several variations on this theme: Curator/creative Benjamin Critton has produced two zine/broadsides: Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films (2010) and Sad People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films (2019). In his opulent compendium, Lair – Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains (2019), Chad Oppenheim asks: “Why do bad people live in good houses?” He concludes that it’s a combination of ready funds and psychological mirroring. A utopian person requires a utopian domicile.
“Villains are ...
complex characters ...
they believe what they’re doing is correct. They’ve drunk their own Kool-Aid.” Victorian polymath John Ruskin said: “All architecture proposes an effect on the human mind, not merely a service on the human frame.
” In The Architecture of Happiness , Alain de Botton agrees. Architecture suggests ways to live, but this is only ever an invitation. John Lautner’s Garcia House on Mulholland Drive in Hollywood Hills.
Credit: Alamy Stock Photo “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or worse, different people in different places – and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” Whether we are good or bad, we mostly want the same things: comfort, peace, a safe haven, a network of underground tunnels, a helipad, a shark pool, a working laboratory plus chimps and, just in case, a button to make the whole thing self-destruct. Los Angeles Plays Itself screens at Cinema Nova from August 29 to September 4.
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