Photography by Nils Timm
QUIET INHERITANCE
PROJECTS
Before House of Rolison touched a single room, this Bel Air estate already carried a story. Built in the 1950s as a Japanese inspired retreat, its glass doors once framed the ocean, its plan built around stillness rather than spectacle.
For Taylor Hahn, one half of the practice alongside Amanda Leigh, the house also carried a family connection, a tie to its original spirit that shaped every decision that followed. The mandate was not to remake the estate but to let it breathe again for a new generation, across seven bedrooms and ten bathrooms plus separate guest quarters, without losing the calm it was built for.
The living spaces open beneath dark stained timber trusses, a crossed lattice of beams that reads almost temple like against the pale plaster walls below. Deep set steel framed glazing runs the full length of the room, sliding back to blur the line between hillside and interior, while a rounded boucle sofa sits low and centred, built for gathering rather than display.
In the adjoining sitting room, a fireplace in brushed metal and dark oak anchors a quieter corner, its herringbone lined interior catching the last of the day's light.
Materiality throughout stays grounded and tactile. Tumbled limestone, natural clay and hand chiseled marble edges recur across the house, chosen for how they age rather than how they photograph, in keeping with the practice's wellness led approach to material selection.
Outdoors, walking trails were cut into the hillside, threading from the pool deck to the guest quarters, extending the sense of retreat beyond the walls of the house itself.
The primary bedroom takes a softer register, a dusty rose velvet armchair and ottoman set against a burl edged headboard in deep green, with a chrome floor lamp and a large scale abstract painting doing the work of colour in an otherwise muted room.
Elsewhere, a second bedroom leans into texture and personality, a woven bouclé bed frame dressed in bronze toned linens beneath a gallery of black and white portraiture, hand blown glass globes scattered overhead like something caught mid fall.
What holds the house together is restraint. Nothing here performs for a camera that isn't there. Instead, natural materials, low light and a consistent hand across every room let the estate settle back into the quiet, private character it was designed with seventy years ago.
