Michael Govan and Katherine Ross are sitting at the dining table of their almost-finished house in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. Designed in 1958 by the mid-century California architect Ray Kappe, it’s perched on a hillside, like a bird in flight, and its floor-to-ceiling windows overlook a significant swath of the city, from the Getty to the Hollywood sign to the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. There’s still no running water or kitchen appliances. They stayed up most of the night hanging art, including a work by their neighbor, Todd Gray, that they had asked to borrow the day before. “In most neighborhoods you might borrow a cup of milk if you’re just moving in—but in Los Angeles, you can be sure there’s an artist who might have an artwork to lend,” Govan says. They’ve just arranged their furniture, which arrived that afternoon, including a digital baby grand player piano, which they both plan to learn to play. It’s the first time the two have actually paused to enjoy their spectacular view.
A view is a must wherever Govan and Ross live, whether it’s their place in Amagansett (the dunes) or their mobile home in Malibu’s Point Dume area (the ocean and mountains) or here. “We always have a view,” Govan says, “always—small house, big view.” Ross adds: “When we first saw the house, we came at sunset, straight from the airport, and both of us knew this was it.”
Govan and Ross have become central players in LA’s cultural scene since they arrived in the city two decades ago. He’s the visionary director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), whose dramatic and highly controversial new building, by the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor—his first commission in the United States—opens next April. (Among the first things installed will be a 27-foot-long work by Gray, created for the south entrance.) The museum is a 15-minute drive from their new house, and they’ll be able to see it from their bedroom window.
Ross, who spent 16 years at Sotheby’s, is a communications adviser on art and culture for Prada and Miu Miu; a consultant to the South Korean skin-care line Poiret, which she’s helping to launch in the United States; and a member of the board of governors at Otis College of Art and Design. She has worked closely with Govan on every aspect of the new museum and chairs two of LACMA’s leadership committees, doing events, development, and cultivating high-level memberships.
Govan and Ross, who have been married for 22 years, are always going out, entertaining, or on their way somewhere—he in his two-seater airplane or his itty-bitty Mazda convertible, she in her Audi S5 convertible. (When they slow down, it’s for walks on the beach in Malibu.) He returned a few days ago from a trip to Paris and London, and she got back yesterday from Milan. Amid all this activity, they managed to raise (or help raise) two daughters, Gabrielle, who is 20, and Ariana, 30, Govan’s daughter with his first wife.
When Ross picks me up in her convertible, she’s wearing a Miu Miu skirt and top. It’s a half-hour drive from the San Vicente Bungalows, where I’m staying, to Baldwin Hills, a neighborhood that emerged in the 1950s. (Known as the Black Beverly Hills, its residents have included Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner, Lenny Kravitz, and the former LA mayor Tom Bradley.) The couple had been looking “forever” when Govan found the house five years ago while scrolling Zillow on a flight back from Mexico. It’s taken them all this time to make it ready to move in.
The one-story, one-bedroom, simple-but-glamorous space is a perfect setting for their lives. Walking into the house, the magnificent view is not the first thing that strikes me—it’s the Jorge Pardo floor. Before coming to LACMA, when Govan was the director of the Dia Art Foundation, the nonprofit champion of impossible art projects, he invited Pardo to create floors for Dia’s site in Beacon, New York. Ever since then, he has wanted to live in a house with a Pardo floor. I don’t blame him. Flowing through every room in the house, it’s a work of art unlike any other, consisting of 237,000 tiles, each one a different size and shape, in colors ranging from pale to dark blue with touches of green and orange-red—a 1,900-square-foot canvas. “I feel happiness and color and uplifting joy every time I walk in,” Ross says. “It’s a floor of endless possibilities.”
Govan joins us at this point. He’s wearing a shiny silver silk jacket by Prada that he found on eBay, and he’s just been to an IMAX screening of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “When we got this house, I asked Jorge to take a look at it,” he says. “The idea was to do something really simple and clear.” Pardo says his floor is “like the city, sort of bubbling with energy.” Looking out the window at the complexity of Los Angeles, that’s what the floor is all about. At night, it reflects the city.
Before they could do anything with the house, though, they had to keep it from sliding down the hill. Mining for oil and gas in the 1920s had left the terrain so unstable, repairing the hillside would cost a million dollars or more. They were encouraged to “run, not walk” away from the project. But a soil engineer Govan was working with on the LACMA building suggested replacing the contaminated earth, which would cost a lot less—and Govan and Ross opted to take a chance on mountain-moving. It took almost two years, but it worked.
Barbara Bestor, an architectural authority on mid-century California houses who had known Kappe, offered to manage the restoration and interiors. She also brought in Ana Saavedra from Planted LA for the landscape design. Part of the rationale for buying this house was that the interior hadn’t been designed by Kappe. The original owners, to save money, had done it themselves. (It was one of Kappe’s earliest houses.) “What you had is a shell, like a canvas,” says Govan. The house itself is like a big New York City loft but with a garden and a carport. The garden, which seems to flow in and out of the house, is intimate in scale, low and open to the grand city views. Saavedra describes it as “a finely curated architectural plant collection—a celebration of the silhouettes, textures, plant character, and color.”
“This will be our last house,” Govan declares. It’s a turning point. Ariana is now a sales assistant at Hauser Wirth in Los Angeles, and Gabrielle is in her junior year at Otis. The couple is “committed to Los Angeles,” Govan says. “We’re a much younger metropolis than New York. Our institutions are still very young and developing. Most big encyclopedic art museums are products of the 19th century, and they need an update. Los Angeles is a good place to try something new.”
We’ve moved on from the house and have spent the last hour touring the Zumthor building, which strikes me as a miracle of glass and concrete and, of course, views. A few days earlier, Govan had invited the public to a preview; the saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington and 110 musicians played throughout the galleries. “I wanted to open the building before any of the art came in,” he tells me. This way, he figures, critics can write about the architecture now and then focus on the art next April. (The LA Times art critic Christopher Knight has been a relentless detractor of Govan and Zumthor’s new building.)
Finally, I head for the airport, and Govan and Ross return to the new house, where their friends the artist Tacita Dean and the writer Evgenia Citkowitz are coming for dinner. It will be take-out food from Goop Kitchen. “Tacita and Evgenia both visited the house before we started construction and we all had the same order-in dinner,” Ross says. A lot has changed, some things have remained the same. Next time, hopefully, there will be running water.
In this story: hair, Kelly Peach; makeup, Lilly Pollan.
Produced by Hyperion LA.