When Hollywood director Breck Eisner heads to his Scenario Lane production company from his home in Bel Air, he never gets stuck in traffic. His studio, a translucent two-story glass and concrete cube on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles, is just a few steps from his front door, down a pathway planted with lavender and thyme.
“It’s a great commute,” said Mr. Eisner, whose last film was “The Crazies.” “I have three young children. There’s that little bit of separation, which is important sometimes, but it’s also really close, so they can pop in at any time.”
The home above the shop has gone upscale. Half of all small American businesses are home-based, according to Brian Headd, an economist with the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. “Most home-based businesses are very small, with median receipts or sales being about $15,000,” he said.
Now, some high-octane professionals are finding they can maximize leisure time—and their own productivity—by creating residential compounds that double as their business address.
Designed by Michael Palladino of Richard Meier & Partners, Mr. Eisner’s 740-square-foot studio has walls of windows on three sides with a panoramic view of west Los Angeles. “For the first six months to a year, I would often find myself in the middle of a meeting, staring out the window,” said Mr. Eisner, 43.
Built during an extensive 2007 remodel of his home overlooking Stone Canyon Reservoir, which was assessed at $2.33 million according to county records, the studio was designed as a multipurpose workspace. Mr. Eisner can hold conferences on the first floor, write in the private office upstairs and host lunches on the teak deck. During postproduction, large monitors and other editing equipment are brought into the studio, and the floor-to-ceiling windows are cloaked by black curtains.
Now that Mr. Eisner is off in Pittsburgh shooting his new movie, “The Last Witch Hunter,” with Vin Diesel and Elijah Wood, his family has found new uses for the studio. “The last time I Skyped with my wife, I saw kids’ wrapping paper and toys all over the place,” said Mr. Eisner. “I saw a yoga mat.”
Although guesthouses and other outbuildings were once built to a lower standard than the main houses themselves, a showplace studio can significantly boost a home’s resale value. “I think you can argue that it’s worth every bit as much [as the house], if not more,” said Gary Gold, a luxury real-estate agent based in Beverly Hills. Compounds such as Mr. Eisner’s Scenario Lane property are a rarity in Los Angeles, Mr. Gold said—and covetable not only for producers, but for actors with their own production companies. “If you are a famous actor, you are not going to have some office on Wilshire Boulevard,” he said.
Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone worked from home—on farms, said Jonathan Levy, an associate professor at Princeton University, who specializes in the history of capitalism. “The irony is that technology moved work out of the home, and now it’s moving it back in—home and work are newly aligning,” he said.
In addition to the easy commute, there are tax advantages to owning a home-based business. Owners can deduct a portion of their mortgage interest, property taxes, utilities and maintenance costs.
Chuck Binder, a personal manager, and wife Lori O’Brien, a psychoanalyst, each have offices on their Beverly Hills property. Ms. O’Brien and Downton in the hallway of her home. MICHAL CZERWONKA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Chuck Binder, a film producer and personal manager whose clients include Sharon Stone and Jon Lovitz, runs his company from an airy 600-square-foot office with white oak floors, exposed beams and equestrian art on wainscoted walls. He built it, along with the three-car garage below, on the property of his Beverly Hills home, a 1937 four-bedroom Colonial assessed at $2.24 million.
Mr. Binder said that his celebrity clients appreciate the privacy of the residential setting. “If you’re a female star, it’s a whole production to go to [downtown] Beverly Hills—you may be photographed,” he said. “If they want to come over without makeup, they can.”
Mr. Binder’s wife, Lori O’Brien, a psychoanalyst and avid equestrian, sees patients in her own home office, a converted 1937 garage annexed to the main house. Ms. O’Brien, who along with her husband declined to reveal her age, kept the original brick floors, converted a carriage door to a picture window and hung a wrought-iron and crystal chandelier from the rafters in the 2000 remodel; she declined to say what the two office additions cost. To prevent awkward encounters between the couple’s two sets of clients, Mr. Binder’s visitors enter through a separate gate; the couple’s three dogs, however, have made unscripted appearances during therapy sessions.
There are other downsides to living over the store. Anthony Blumka has lost sleep some nights, when the state-of-the-art alarm system in his New York City art gallery suddenly goes off. “I run down in my pajamas to see that everything is OK; thank goodness it’s always been a false alarm,” said Mr. Blumka, a fourth-generation art dealer who specializes in Medieval and Renaissance works.
In 1995, Mr. Blumka bought a five-story townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to convert into a home for his family of three, as well as a gallery for the statuary, altar pieces and ivories he sells to museums and private clients. The 19th-century building had been chopped into small apartments, and it had no furnace or boiler—utilities were piped in from the house next door. There was another unusual feature: a large gallery with a double-height ceiling had been carved out of the first two floors of the house during the 1930s, when it was owned by the widow of Karl Bitter, a prominent early 20th-century sculptor.
“When I saw that—even though everything else had to be renovated—that was it,” said Mr. Blumka, 59. “You need the ceiling height for sculpture and tapestries.”
During a three-year gut renovation, Mr. Blumka’s architect, Peter Pennoyer, created a European-style townhouse with baronial interiors and an elegant plaster stucco facade. A balcony just off the home’s oak-paneled foyer overlooks the gallery and its lighted vitrines; the gallery offices are tucked under a double staircase.
The second-floor library and office of the Blumka Gallery. CLAUDIO PAPAPIETRO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
During large exhibitions, Mr. Blumka installs additional display cases upstairs in his mahogany-paneled library. Smaller pieces are exhibited on Italian baroque pedestals in the dining room, which is hung with an early 16th-century Flemish wedding tapestry. A small kitchen off the library is used to cater openings and receptions.
Off-duty, the rooms are the setting for Monopoly games, Christmas tree-trimming parties and book-club meetings. In the library, where Mr. Blumka works at an ornate desk from the French Renaissance, a 15th century English linen-fold oak cabinet—stained with the words “Coward body maketh muche strife”—houses 16-year-old Quintin’s Xbox. The house’s top two floors are more relaxed in style; a 15th-century terra-cotta statue of a monk, clad in a New York Giants hat and scarf, stands guard in the family room.
“It’s a very much lived-in space,” said Mr. Blumka, adding that he once threw a birthday party for his son in the gallery, complete with basketball nets and a juggler. “We were going to repaint the gallery anyway,” he said.
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