IF THEY EVER make a movie about the Hollywood producer Amy Pascal, the 9,000-square-foot ranch house that she shares with her husband, the playwright and retired Times journalist Bernard Weinraub, set back on a leafy acre in the hills of Brentwood, Los Angeles, deserves top billing. In 1996, the couple moved into what was then a 6,000-square-foot bungalow, built in 1956 by the American designer Cliff May. They got married in the backyard some months later. Their son, Anthony, now 24 and studying law in New York, celebrated his bar mitzvah there. Over the years, the three-bedroom home has been a place to sit shiva, observe holidays and throw awards season after-parties. And in February 2015, when Pascal was pushed out after nearly a decade as a co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment — one of the many consequences of the Sony cyberattack involving leaked company data and employee emails — it also became a refuge. “The house is a part of our family,” says Pascal, 66, on a December morning in their sun-dappled living room, which overlooks a fragrant tangle of peach, kumquat and plumeria trees and a swimming pool lined with green slate tiles. “You look forward to coming back here for serenity,” says Weinraub, 86, as the couple’s dogs lounge next to them on a sofa upholstered in gold velvet.
Although much of the current décor reflects their travels — there are Turkish rugs; hundreds of lanterns from Italy, Japan and Mexico; a Buddha statue from their honeymoon in Bali; a 10-foot dining table carved from a tree trunk that they brought back from Chiang Mai, Thailand — what initially drew Pascal and Weinraub to the building was its West Coast vernacular. The work of May, who was recognized beginning in the 1930s for designing low-slung, pitched-roof houses that blur the difference between indoor and outdoor areas, represents “everything that is great about California,” says Pascal. She recalls walking in and thinking, “This is ours.”
But in 2002, after living there for six years, Pascal and Weinraub decided it was time to renovate. The existing speckled drywall ceilings had, according to Pascal, “that awful cottage cheese texture that was all the rage in the ’50s”; they were replaced with exposed wooden beams and grape-stake battens. The couple expanded the skylit kitchen, which holds Pascal’s large collection of teapots (her mother’s influence) and cookbooks (“I’m not much of a chef, but I love food writing”). At the center of the room, an ebonized oak table by the French furniture designer Christian Liaigre is illuminated from above by ceiling lamps made of old cowbells and West African fish traps. Down the hall in the primary bathroom, a towering bamboo garden conceals a sunken rainbow sandstone tub. “The house is sort of a made-up idea,” she’ll later concede. “It’s just, like, stuff.”