Brad Lynch, a founding principal at architecture firm Brininstool & Lynch, was watching a horizontal ice storm out his Chicago office window when a longtime client called. The client in question was ringing to ask if Lynch would fly out to Malibu, California, “tomorrow” to see a 1955 modernist home that he was thinking of buying. Astoundingly, the architect replied, “I can’t. Maybe in a few weeks,” and hung up. Lynch then spent the next few minutes contemplating the weather outside before calling back with, “I’ll be there.”
That house, in a verdant canyon encircled by the Santa Monica Mountains, is about as opposite as it gets from any city. What’s more, it proved to be the perfect excuse to regularly escape Chicago for the next couple of years as Lynch and his team devised its complete reimagining. The architect, who began his career restoring Frank Lloyd Wright houses, reveled in the chance to remake something that truly reflected the aura of its locale. “The f