People and Products

'Now, the early guys got it. Schindler, Neutra, Wright,' says Barton Myers, sitting on a ledge of the terrace outside of his most recent steel and glass house in Montecito, California, completed in 2009. What those guys, the ones Myers reveres, got was the dialogue between the inside and the outdoors. A West Coast house should embrace the garden, not shutter it out. This isn't Canada, where Myers practiced early on in his career. Myers's Modernism here ' Barton Myers Associates is based in Los Angeles ' is a distinctly regional one, rooted in the mild, bug-less climate of Southern California. It embraces Spanish and Moorish influences that migrated north from Mexico, and the Eastern idea of the garden as paradise.