Architect Virgil McDowell walked into his career by chance. It was a sweltering day on the Cal State Northridge campus and McDowell, a sophomore at the university in the 1980s, detoured through some air-conditioned buildings on his way to football practice. ‘As I was walking through the art building, I saw renderings–sketches–on the wall and they bowled me over,’ McDowell says. In retrospect, he jokes that the student sketches probably weren’t all that good, but at the time, they inspired him to begin taking fine art classes (Northridge didn’t have an architecture program). When he separated his shoulder playing football and lost his football scholarship, art became a priority and a passion. McDowell, who now runs a three-person firm in Pacific Palisades, was fascinated by architecture at a young age. He grew up in South Los Angeles and remembers visiting the Wiltern Theatre at Wilshire and Western with his siblings when he was 10 or 11. ‘They would run up to the balcony and I’d be in the lobby, looking at the ceiling,’ he says. As a student at Washington High School, McDowell studied mechanical drafting as part of a vocational program. These skills, combined with his college experience in fine-art drawing, helped him land a job working for an architect for $5 an hour when he was 20. He gradually began educating himself, realizing that some of the people he was working for were not the kind of mentors he wanted. One of his bosses would simply change the roofing material for a project depending on what style home the client wanted–tile for a Spanish, shingle for Colonial, slate for French. McDowell started reading about the architects he admired from the 1920s and 1930s–American classicists like John Russell Pope and Philip Trammell Shutze. ‘They all did these Grand Tours,’ he says. ‘They’d take a boat over to Europe and stay six months–sketch, photograph, draw–then come back, reinterpret [the architecture] and build American houses.’ McDowell decided to follow in the footsteps of these masters by making ‘study tours’ in Europe. Beginning in the early 1990s, he would choose a country and region, fly over for an extended weekend (Thursday to Sunday), stay in hostels and photograph architecture. ‘I’d come home, get the photographs produced and weed through what worked and what didn’t work, and [discover] what I actually should have been looking at,’ he says. McDowell would research the architecture, wait six months, and return to photograph the same region again. Over a period of six years, exploring England, Ireland, France and Italy, his eye became fine-tuned. He then started traveling to the East Coast to tour the homes designed by well-known regional architects who had either studied in Europe (at schools such as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts) or made Grand Tours. ‘One of the most difficult things is to see a villa or an Irish Georgian country house [in Europe] and ask, ‘How does this translate over here [in the United States]?” McDowell says. ‘Because it’s not going to be the same scale. So, when you tour homes by American architects like William Bottomley, David Adler and John Staub, you see their interpretations.’ McDowell, who has particular expertise in the American Renaissance (1880-1930), worked as a draftsman before establishing his firm, Virgil W. McDowell, Inc., in 1989. He initially worked on small-scale projects that helped him understand how homes were put together–what type of hardware to use, where to put sconces, how rooms should be lit. He recalls that, early in his career, he was hired to do restoration work on Paul Williams homes in Toluca Lake, Hancock Park and Beverly Hills ‘purely because [the clients] were trying to find someone who just did detailing, not because I was knowledgeable of [Williams’] work.’ The project that really got his firm going in 1998 was a Georgian cottage in the Hollywood Hills. The owner, an antiques collector, ‘was disenchanted with the whole process’ of working with architects on the design of the cottage, McDowell recalls. ‘He had started construction and shut his job down, and let it sit there for eight months because he was so unhappy.’ What McDowell offered this client was a home that would work with modern technology but would feel and respond like a traditional, classical home with symmetry and proportional relationships. ‘What the architects practiced back then [in the ’20s and ’30s], or searched for, was this enduring beauty,’ McDowell says, ‘but it was also about the way a house functions–well-made and honest architecture–so people can live in and enjoy it.’ He adds, ‘What most people will consider difficult clients are actually my best clients. What they’re trying to achieve is that enduring beauty, that timeless quality. And it’s hard to pull off.’ In order to show clients his European approach to design and his knowledge of traditional classical architecture, McDowell decided to create an office that was a showroom as well as a working space. He found the perfect location three years ago in the Business Block building, a small, narrow space above Starbucks overlooking Swarthmore. McDowell turned the office into what he describes as ‘a library you might see in Manhattan, overlooking Central Park–classical, with restraint–something that David Adler or Paul Williams would do.’ A cased opening divides the space into two rooms–a fabric room with linen walls and a wood-paneled room. Reproductions of French sconces hang on the walls and carriage lanterns adorn the ceilings. ‘The existing door is actually a great proportion for two doors,’ says McDowell, who designed the paneled double doors with European proportions. The reeded gold doorknobs are much lower than the keyhole, as would be in England and France. These ‘classically sound’ designs are often cost-effective, according to McDowell, who says, ‘A proportion window doesn’t cost more than an ill-proportioned window.’ He explains that, in many cases, when a classical home is not designed with attention to detail, ‘the owner may feel the house is not responding correctly, so they pump up materials–like they’ll use more stone or granite to try to get some feel out of it, which is more costly. ‘The challenging part of any project is when to stop,’ he says. ‘What you try to do is design and build in a manner so the house actually looks its best when it’s finished.’ McDowell is currently working on a David Adler house in Lake Forest, Illinois, and two Roland Coate houses–one in Hancock Park and one in San Marino. The latter house, a Spanish Colonial Revival completed in 1925, was one of many large-scale estates designed by Coate in which site, landscape and architecture were interwoven. ‘We did not change the footprint,’ McDowell says, standing over the original blueprints. ‘We’re going to gut some rooms to make a larger kitchen and a large family room in a seamless manner that will feel like it’s always existed, like we weren’t even there.’ McDowell attributes his ability to figure out difficult spaces to a game he played in his youth with his four siblings. ‘My dad used to give us [jigsaw] puzzles as kids but he would take the box cover away, so what you’re looking at are just shapes and colors. It took time, but after we started [doing puzzles this way], I couldn’t do it looking at a box.’ McDowell’s firm specializes in the planning, design and landscaping of custom residential projects, including additions, restorations and the adaptive reuse of existing space as well as new construction. Many of his designs feature handcrafted limestone and custom ironwork as well as older, traditional materials such as slate, Spanish tile roofs, antique heart-of-pine floors and unique architectural antique doors, floor tiles and hand-carved stone reliefs. ‘What has pushed my career forward is when people purchase homes that have a rich history, in certain areas like in Lake Forest, Illinois, or in the Hamptons, or Hancock Park or Pasadena, and they want to work on the house, enlarge it or embellish it,’ McDowell says. ‘There’s a search for who can make this happen. That’s been the bulk of my work–how to interpret these individual homes and make them great without ever feeling like I was there. It’s so seamless.’ Contact: Virgil McDowell at 459-8838 or visit www.virgilmcdowell.com.
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