“A Very Gay” Fritz Haeg House in Los Angeles Gets a Refresh But Keeps It Weird

At street level, the outline of Pete Galli and Stephanie Wolff’s Silver Lake, California, home is deceptively unassuming, just a single story of redwood siding under a gabled roof. The view from the backyard, however, paints a remarkably different picture, with three stories descending a precipitous hill. They appear to sit inside a box of white stucco with two enormous holes cut out. Inside, however, the rooms are an immersion in wildly unexpected colors, textures, and impeccable views.

This is the Bernardi House, the former home of David Bernardi, an entertainment executive who sold it to Pete and Stephanie last fall. He bought it in 2003 for the now-unimaginable price of $390,000 while it was still an ordinary Spanish-style duplex. Fritz Haeg, a Rome Prize–winning artist who studied architecture under Aldo Rossi, completed its total overhaul in 2008. David had asked him for a home “as visionary” as Rudolph Schindler’s Falk and Sachs apartments, the two specimens of early California modernism located across the street. That wasn’t to say he wanted to copy them. On the contrary, says Haeg: “He really wanted to make his mark with something special and fun and unique and visibly different than anything he had seen before.”