Inside an 1890s Pasadena Home Transformed Into an Art Gallery & Music Studio | House Tour

I always enter projects without knowing where they end up. I sort of travel down a river and I don't know what's around the corner, responding to what happens, responding to what happens in my life, what happens in my business life, my personal life, and it sort of evolves. So over four years of construction, this project evolved. My name is Stefan Simkovits and we're at Hill House in Pasadena. We started building this place in 2021 and we finished a couple of months before the fires and we're extremely lucky to have missed the opportunity to be burnt down. I don't know precisely when the home was built but it's around 1890s. It was a classic farmhouse on a one-acre property. So it was sort of rustic farm as you've seen a lot of houses in this neighborhood like this. The house was in a terrible state when we bought it. It was really ramshackle and run down and I didn't really know what to do with it. An artist I work with named Petra Courtright called me and said there's a property down the street that I think could be interesting for you and we bought it. We decided to run it as an artist residence space. So we'd invite artists to live here and there were sometimes two, three, four, five artists living here and working on the space. So we turned the old ADU into a studio and it was a wonderful place and we hung art in here and then I worked with Johnston Mark Lee who's a very well-known architect. A woman by the name of Katrin Terstegen when we worked with Johnston Mark Lee was our account manager and she was our designated architect. She left the firm to teach and I called her up. I said Katrin, being the cost-effective art dealer, audio dealer, entrepreneur that I am, I said would you be interested in working on this project with us? And she said yes. She drew up some plans, came up with some of the beginning fundamental ideas of the property and she designed these two barns that were sitting in here. That seem like almost ready-made barns but aren't because they've got like a slice in the front like a sort of they're slightly off-angular. Really sort of standard but subtle and we started construction. Really not even knowing whether we'd live here, how we'd use it but it began to form over time as we built that it would be a great exhibition space, a great space to share my love of art, my increasing love of audio. With COVID, with the homeless population, a lot of problems running a gallery space and a retail environment in LA, really difficult. Also, people in Los Angeles generally don't like to leave their homes unless initiated by the impulse to make a lot of money or socialize or at a gala or, you know, sort of. The galleries really, you know, you'd have an opening and then during the week, they're sort of sat empty and the spaces are quite, you know, people come and look at art for three minutes. It's always annoyed me when artists make paintings and spend months or a year making a show and then people will look and three seconds they've seen the show. Wanted to construct this as a space to support the exhibition of artists who I finance and to somehow get people to engage with art in a way that sort of slowed them down, forced them to sit. Made it pretty, we put a couch, people sit on the couch if it's comfortable. Acoustically treat the room so you don't want, you can talk in a room, you don't want to leave because it's acoustically bad. And then the music, the music is really engaging. That became kind of the idea. I loved the property instantly. I loved it because it had about 16 oak trees. It was a giant property. It was inexpensive when I bought it. They were asking X and I offered like 30% less and they accepted. I was like, oh, wow. I was like surprised and I was really uncertain and, but I was like, okay, well, I realized like artists in LA have no place to work or live. It's very expensive, especially young emerging artists. So I was like, well, this can be a home for artists. We had four artists, three artists living here at a time, rotating and they produced here. And they sort of, I think the artist taught me how the space could work, how they use the kitchen, how they use the outdoor spaces, how they use the workspaces. Catherine Sustaken, the architect, did a presentation. She really explains it very well. The place functions like a chess board. Chess board has different pieces, pawns, kings, queens, and they can be placed on the board in different ways. There are seven structures on the property and each structure can be utilized in different ways. It can be used as an exhibition space. It can be used as a studio space. It can be used as a gathering space. It can be used as a space that a guest can sleep. Sometimes we move the bed out and that becomes a studio sometimes. So the idea of a space having, being able to function in different capacities at different times with different needs. The main house is less of a home but more of a gathering space that connects all the ancillary structures together. It's a space where people in the ancillary structures can gather, can eat, can cook, can watch TV, relax. And also we have many artists we work with and many people who've traveled through our lives. Sometimes we have 11 people sleeping here. The soul of the house was in that 1890s structure. We did stuff to modernize it. We reduced one of the peaks of the roof. We cleaned it up. We built an extra bedroom above the kitchen and sort of we modernized the look but really as much as possible we kept the porch structure. We did the whole porch. There's something about the way people used to live in the 1900s that we could learn a lot from today. They lived in a specific way where community was important. I think a lot of this area is about that. Also the oak trees which are great, fit with the house. So it really became important to us to preserve that envelope and not knock it down. It would have been much cheaper and much quicker to knock it down. And these are pains that you learn through suffering. But I wouldn't change a single decision today. I'm not really interested in the history of the house or the pedigree of the house or the pedigree of the architecture. I'm interested in what I myself have been able to contribute working with Catrin, working with Petra Courtright who did the landscaping with me, working with myself to do the interior decorating. I don't believe in this legacy of orthodoxy of things are special because they come from somewhere. I think things can become special because you recreate them in a specific way. Even as an art collector, I don't really care where the artists went to school. I don't care if they're educated. I don't care. If they're good, they're good. If the work speaks to me, it speaks to it. And I think a lot of the ideas I have with art collecting, even with audio, like so many things are elevated because the orthodoxy always wants to generate an origin story that oftentimes is far greater than the thing that thing actually is in real present time. And that orthodoxy essentially creates a recreation of myths that you end up with bad quality architecture, but, oh, but this is a so-and-so. I'm really philosophically very much against the origin stories of many things, whether it's architecture, culture, art. My father was an art collector in South Africa. I was always around art. I went to boarding school in England. I went to boarding school in America. And I then went to Stanford undergrad. You know, when you're sort of from South Africa, you're at boarding school in Connecticut, you kind of watch a lot of movies. You know, you're kind of a bit dislocated, so culture becomes important. And I watch a lot of movies. Movies, I think, are formal, but really consumed movies, not just watched, like French New Wave, you know, consumed. And then I came to LA and I wanted to go to film school. So I applied to AFI after Stanford and I got in. It was an amazing year because that year I had myself, Darren Aronofsky, Matthew Libatique, Scott Silver, who wrote The Joker, Todd Field, Doug Ellen, who created Entourage. It was a crazy year. It was like one of these magical years at film school. And I partnered with Scott Silver, made movies like John's House of Yes, Darren Aronofsky made Requiem for a Dream, and got into the movie business. One of the people I met in LA early on was a guy named Jim Corcoran. It's a crazy long story and journey. I've always liked art. I've always liked culture. It's always been important to me. It's in my background, my DNA, my epigenetics. I don't know. And I've always liked clothes and aesthetics and, you know, and I sort of taught myself. Petra Courtright is an artist I work with, very important to me. I've been working with her for about 12, 13 years now. And she's a digital artist, but she considers herself in many respects a landscape artist. And she has an absolute passion for landscaping, roses and flowers, and she knows everything. For many years, we've been going to landscapes around Southern California. And she collaborated to do the landscaping with me. And it took many years in itself of buying material, selecting material. It's a fundamental part of the house because the landscaping exterior is as important as the interior. We preserved the oak trees, got a lot of exotic material out there. The maples, the esplanade apple trees, the 40 variants of aloes, the cycad, the autofun bismarcks, the cacti. Something, again, really intentional. In itself, a large project that had as much intention as the building of the architecture, as the art, as the audio, really integrated into one complete, sort of unified space. Hill House is a compound with eight structures. This is the small red barn. My favorite room because I have my Simcoe One speakers, my new business, Simcoe Audio, where I'm a purveyor of high-end audio equipment. I try and get people to listen to vinyl records on turntables, on these amazing speakers that we build, manufactured in California. We make integrated amplifiers. We make cables. We make everything. We have events every eight weeks where the entire property is rehung with either a group show or a single artist show who's presented. You're in Ken Taylor's show right now, Ken Taylor Renaga. We opened this Sunday. Beautiful exhibition. Everyone's welcome to come see it. I spend a lot of time in this room putting people on the couch, having them listen to music, look at art, sharing classical, jazz, rock, everything. To explain what this place is, it's kind of difficult because it's not necessarily a traditional home. It's kind of like a commune. We have artists stay. We have visitors all the time. Sometimes we have 11 people staying here. Sometimes I'm not even staying here and we have 11 people staying here. It's really a space to share culture, to exhibit art, to change the way we think of living. For me personally, living isn't an isolated experience of I come to my home and it's empty. Living for me is sharing with as many people as I can. We don't have VIPs here. Everyone's very important. We welcome people who want to engage in culture from every walk of life. We're very proud of what we built here and we're very happy to have open space here today covering Hill House. Sharing art is actually difficult. You build a beautiful place like this, you think people swarm. It's difficult. And I think I overcome these things by making sure that we really welcome people in our environment. When we have an opening, if we have food, if we run out of food, we order more food. I think what I've done here is made it so welcoming, so engaging that when people come, they have an emotional experience. And they do, if they come. And they're like, you know, I was a real turd. And just being part of this history of the city, of this kind of collapse, recycle, refurbishment, it's not a home. It's a place. And it's a place for people to experience. And you can come listen to music and have to buy a piece of stereo gear for me. You can come if you want. And I have people who come. And you know what? When they come, I'll spend five hours with them playing their music. Because their time is equal to anyone's time. And it's valuable. And these are philosophies that imperfectly, as much as I can, I try to live by. And I would like to see an art world and a cultural world where we see more of this. When I built this, I realized from my almost two decades in the art business that I needed to do something very different to create an environment that I believed is appropriate for the experience of art. And that is intimacy, time, giving people something they understand. People do understand music much better than they understand art for a simple reason. They listen to it all the time. Music is legible for people. Art is so far away from most people and so illegible. When people are confronted by it, if they don't like it or they think they don't like it, they reject it. Someone they don't recognize from a culture they don't recognize. They don't recognize those values, therefore those values are bad. No, they just don't understand those values. They don't understand where it's coming from. So I think music is like a form of glue that can bind things together. But more than that, once you learn about audio equipment, reference audio equipment, what it can do, we today in the last decade have access to the entire catalog of mankind's musical output available to us through our cell phone to be reproduced authentically through systems that present it in a crazy good way. And I'm not talking about sonos and compression. And if you just spend some time and a little bit of money or a touch of intention, you can have this amazing experience at the tip of your fingertips. Kind of have a time machine. In each of these rooms, you have a sound system that's referenced. But what you have is a time machine. Each of these rooms has a little time machine in it. When you sit and look at the art, sometimes as an art dealer, you learn this as you learn art. You look at something and you're like, I hate that. 10 years later, you revisit it and you're like, that is one of the best paintings I've ever seen. It's a muscle. That the aesthetic muscle of understanding and appreciating art, there's no ways to develop it. We talk about the orthodoxy of value prior. You walk into a gallery, guy hands you a press sheet immediately. This artist was just acquired by blah, blah, blah museum. He's in a group show at blah, blah, blah museum. This museum, and he just sold at auction for blah, blah, blah. I'm not in the door. I was handed a piece of paper with some notes on it and told by a gallerist or an assistant why the art I'm about to see is important. My foot has not crossed the threshold of the gallery. And I walk into the gallery, I see a painting or sculpture or video or whatever and I hate it. But I've been told five minutes ago, it's important. It has value financially. It's important because there's curators and institutions who have said it's good. And I look and I'm like, what do you think of the painting? I'm like, wow, it's good. So I don't want to be an idiot. That's one way of doing it. The other way, give people a glass of water, it's hot in Pasadena, couch, make them comfortable, play some music and let them look at it. Don't tell them what it is. Let them take it in. I think it's very important. And if you allow people to do that, they can begin to see art. It's a meaningful space and life is not like, you don't build houses so you're as conveniently isolated from the rest of the world as possible. You build homes and spend money to share things. Spaces that are not shared, in my opinion, they don't exist. If we start to redefine how we live, the very spaces in which we live can be redefined themselves. I think that is one of the hopes of architecture.