Tichenor & Thorp Architects

09/26/2026

The DeMille Estate sold this week, for the second time since we completed the restoration and landscape design, as well as original design of the additional pool and exterior structures.

Our own watercolor rendering from the project, followed by photos of the property from one of our final site visits.

Architectural restoration and additions, landscape design: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Photography: Michael Tichenor
Watercolor: Michael Tichenor

09/23/2026

Had the pleasure of returning last week to a private Bel Air garden we designed, this time with the The Garden Conservancy Society of Fellows on their Garden-Study Tour of Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Though we’ve walked (and drawn) it many times over the years, we somehow still always happen upon details that surprise us. A few of them captured here.

Landscape, architecture & interior architecture: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Decorating & art consulting: Thomas Beeton Interior Design
Photo & video: ava

09/19/2026

A few moments from a garden-filled week with The Garden Conservancy Society of Fellows. Such a pleasure having this year’s Garden-Study Tour of Los Angeles and Pasadena begin with welcome dinner in our very own Venue 66 and stop by three of our local gardens.

Architecture & landscape design: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Video: ava

08/31/2026

The wall color in these Francophiles’ living room was keyed to a single hue, plucked from the sky in one of the two Barbizon School paintings the space features. Grayed moldings and deep aubergine-lacquered doors followed from there.

The furniture plan came first, though. The room never lacked grandeur, with its symmetry, taffeta, buttons, antique trims, and great many French heirlooms. Beautifully furnished with antiques, with it discernibly did lack, however, seating scaled for the 20th century onward. As a result, this room—the home’s central point—was not a space that invited people to gather or linger, but merely that one admired in passing through.

To make the space more functional, more welcoming, we scavenged seating from the couple’s other properties, storage, and elsewhere within the house, then reupholstered in a palette derived from the same two paintings that inspired the room’s backdrop.

The sense of welcome is now palpable—and still very, very French.

Photography: Roger Davies
Architecture, landscape & interiors: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Decor: Mary Beth Crowley

08/21/2026

Situated beneath the San Jacinto Mountains, near downtown Palm Springs, historic Old Las Palmas is known for its star-studded history, iconic architecture, striking views, and the towering, mature palms that line its secluded, curvilinear streets and give the desert enclave its name.

It was clear from this project’s outset that the lot’s most remarkable assets were embedded in the existing landscape—including a particularly extraordinary mountain backdrop that demanded it become a focal point.

A conventional plan would position the house at the forefront, towards the street, with garden and pool behind. Here, though, heeding that convention would have proven a critical mistake, as the spectacular scenery came with one caveat: it faced forward. The standard orientation would have thus rendered the whole of outdoor life on the blind side.

So, we reversed it.

Borrowing an idea from Myron Hunt, we designed the drive as a palm-lined procession rather than a mere practicality. Running the full depth of the lot and fenced along its length, this left a deep space behind the property’s enclosed perimeter and allowed us to shift the heart of the house toward the rear, where it could look out upon the peaks.

A strong axial plan configured the poolside pavilion, bocce court, and plantings around a focal pool. Here, illuminated across its surface, the mountains would appear again in reflection, doubly accentuating their presence.

Ringed by tall hedges, the layered spaces toward the back of the lot frame the lot’s surrounding landscape while offering a heightened sense of privacy within. To a passerby on the street, the couple’s own multifaceted desert oasis, sitting just on the opposite side, remains wholly unsuspected.

Landscape, architecture & interiors: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Photography: Roger Davies, Michael Tichenor
Renderings: Michael Tichenor

08/19/2026

Among the perks of designing for one’s own family is the chance to return, year after year, and see how a project continues evolving long after construction concludes.

During this week’s visit to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, we once again had the privilege of gathering with loved ones inside the modern farmhouse we tailor-made for them to inhabit and enjoy for many years to come.

As this was one of the first houses in the area, we oriented the residence and its surrounding garden expecting others would crop up nearby in time, setting the windows to frame the property’s formidable mountain view and not one day look out on eventual neighbors.

The first-floor rooms, configured in an open enfilade, still aptly suit the family’s use while tying the interiors to key focal points of the panoramic sweep outdoors. A capacious ranch-style porch leads to a substantial barn door and a small foyer, whose first view is of the double-height living room’s central hearth and the landscape through the tall windows. The dining room flows into the open kitchen and on to the w**e cellar. Every room is oriented so the light streams in from more than one direction, opening on the mountain-facing side to a terrace with an outdoor fireplace, dining area, and grill.

In the decade since Roger Davies so beautifully captured the space for our monograph, Outside In, the property has continued to grow with the owners, their lifestyles, and its role within them—as has the intentionally layered garden of natural grasses calibrated to interweave with the surrounding landscape as they mature, along with the reintroduced gooseberry, cottonwoods, and pines. The layer of privacy we drafted as a hedge against a onetime hypothetical has become a vital safeguard of the home’s private tranquility amidst an increasingly populated community.

Here, Roger’s photos paired with our own captures from the past few days show a plan, conceived first in pen on paper, both in its growth and constancies across intervening years.

The Tetons, for their part, have not changed at all.

Architecture, landscape, and interiors: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Photography: Roger Davies
Video: ava

08/09/2026

For international cat day, we’re celebrating some of our favorite (furry) clients/coworkers.

📸: Roger Davies (3-4)
📐: Tichenor & Thorp Architects

08/02/2026

Yet another heat wave in Los Angeles this weekend makes our principals’ own neighboring West L.A. backyards (and their combined five bodies of water) feel especially oasis-like. The swimming pool and natural pool next door are just about the only two things that could actually make us want to spend a sweltering August afternoon like this one outside.

Landscape: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Video: ava

06/24/2026

06/23/2026

The DeMille Estate is recently back on the market—a fitting moment to look beyond the headlines and behind the walls of one of Los Feliz’s most storied properties.

We were entrusted with the home’s architectural restoration and renovation nearly a century after B. Cooper Corbett’s original 1913 design. The home was famously Cecil B. DeMille’s private residence from 1916 until his death in 1959 (and, most recently, home to Angelina Jolie, the property’s first buyer following our restoration).

Our charge was to restore the house and rebuild its relationship to the two acres surrounding it. Working with the lot’s own character—sloping lawns, terraces, and mature trees—we composed a landscape that draws the property’s elements, inside and out, into a single, reciprocally complementary whole.

The six-year-long project was an exercise in studied understanding and delicate balance—sustaining narrative continuity with a vision from a mind and era long bygone, and recontextualizing its spirit and sensibility for modern legibility and living without stripping away the historicity and character that make the house’s legacy.

Inside, we kept the living room’s Doric columns, the molded ceilings, and a Prohibition-era w**e cellar. Former servants’ quarters—a relic of antiquated household infrastructure—became a library and kitchen. We removed a breezeway that once bridged the home to Charlie Chaplin’s next door, but preserved the atrium that had been its point of origin.

We raised ceilings where the structure allowed, laid new floors, and opened rooms with glass and skylights, foregrounding the home’s architectural heritage while establishing a single throughline between interior and exterior. Outside, the garden unfolds as a continuation and expansion of that narrative, descending the hillside toward the city view.

Photography: Melba Levick for Rizzoli Publications (‘Classic Homes of Los Angeles’ by private.library); Michael Tichenor
Architectural restoration & design, landscape & interior: Tichenor & Thorp Architects
Original architecture: B. Cooper Corbett