WHEN Jerry and Alan Simmons decided to remodel their 1963 Gregory Ain-designed house in Tarzana, they knew they would save as many original elements as possible and preserve the midcentury modern feel as best they could.
Working from Ain's drawings, Jerry spent months looking for the right 7-foot panel of combed wood for the eaves and even longer in search of the exact American Standard toilet in Ain's original. Work on the copper-plated fireplace, shellacked a distressingly ugly shoe-polish brown, lasted four years.
But those were all simple tasks compared with the hexagons.
The Tarzana house is one of Ain's last custom homes and represents a departure from the International Style for which he is best known. The defining motif here is the hexagon, most notably seen in twin hexagonal ceilings in the living-dining room downstairs and the master suite upstairs.
"The hexagons do dominate the house," Jerry says. "My husband always says there are no right angles anywhere here."
The one room that needed to be taken down to the studs was the master suite, a post-Ain addition in what had been a 400-square-foot aviary. The question for the Simmonses: What to keep and what to throw away?
"It was almost like playing with tangram," architect Alice Fung says, referring to the Chinese puzzle.
She and partner Michael Blatt were hired for the remodel, their third project with the Simmonses.
"With the hexagon, it can be very centering," Fung says. "But at the same time, if you take it off center, work off the trajectory of the sides -- which is what this house is based on -- you end up with a lot of unexpected geometries."
The 1970s addition upstairs was defined by a central hallway that bisected the space, with the sleeping area and a fireplace on one side and twin closets on the other; the bathroom lay behind the closets, at the end of the hallway. It's essentially a rectangle, Blatt says.
"It wouldn't have been hard to drop a flat ceiling in there, losing the hexagons, and just start from scratch," he says. "But then it would have none of the character of the rest of the house. It would have no character at all."
The biggest challenge was creating a large closet for Jerry's vintage clothing yet making the bathroom that lies beyond still feel like part of the suite.
