[chantal]

Anjelica Houston - architectural digest online

The Artist Sculpts a Venice House for his Actress Wife
Text by Joseph Giovannini

To lure his new wife, Anjelica Huston, from Mulholland Drive to Venice Beach, Robert Graham decided he would build her ideal house, playing architect to her client. When Huston moved in her furniture to the completed Mexican-style courtyard home, she said, "I felt like a writer confronted by this beautiful vellum notebook that you then have to occupy."

"He gave me a very beautiful shell in which to place my oyster," says Anjelica Huston of her husband, sculptor Robert Graham, who designed their Venice, California, house.


"Bob is training me in restraint," says Huston, "but not in austerity or minimalism." In the living room, needlework pillows by Huston’s mother are scattered on the sofas. The harlequin tapestry is 19th-century French.

"With the courtyard and terraces, the house offers me a full interior and exterior life," Huston remarks. "I’m a Cancer. I have both of what I need here, which is comfort and places to escape to in the house and—so important—the sense of never feeling hemmed in."