A Los Angeles Dealer's Own Collection Comes Home to Laurel Canyon

Thomas Lavin is a Los Angeles design dealer, and his home in Laurel Canyon was reworked around the pieces he collects. Lavin and his partner, Destin Bass, started with an ordinary ranch house. They brought in designer Gary Hutton, and the house was fitted out, room by room, to give the collection a proper setting. For our readers, that order of priorities is the story: the objects came first and the architecture was shaped to serve them. The house reached its new form through custom work, not by adding a few pieces to rooms built for something else. In a dealer's own home, the collection usually gets to be seen the way its owner sees it. That is often the most telling view a collector can get of a dealer's eye. This one sits in the hills above the city where Lavin does business.

With reporting from Galerie.