When The World of Interiors featured Tony Duquette’s Malibu home, known as Sortilegium, in 1997, his beloved estate, visited by everyone from Greta Garbo to the socialite Doris Duke, was just a memory. Antique Venetian gondolas, Georgian shop fronts from Dublin, windows from Garbo’s guest-room, treasures from the MGM studio backlot where Duquette had worked as a set designer – all these had been reduced to ashes four years earlier by the Green Meadow wildfire. The blaze had swept out of the mountains, destroying everything in less than an hour, and was witnessed by Duquette himself, who recalled: ‘In its last moments each little house and pavilion lighted up in glory and was beautiful, and then they were gone.’
Duquette had bought this dramatic 150-acre stretch of land, overlooked by the Mordor-like crags of Mount Boney and with views down a long valley towards Santa Barbara, in the 1950s. Christening it Sortilegium (Latin for divination and fortune-telling), he began the creation of a village-like enclave of fantastical pavilions and pagodas, each given a distinctive name and fashioned from his vast repository of found and repurposed objects.
As Hutton Wilkinson, Duquette’s former business partner, tells it, the legendary set designer was discovered almost simultaneously in 1941 by designers and tastemakers Billy Haines, Elsie de Wolfe, James Pendleton, Vincente Minnelli and Adrian, all of whom were taken by his instantly fashionable decorative objects and table pieces. He was soon working for MGM, creating elaborate sets for films such as Kismet and Ziegfeld Follies. In 1951, his one-man show at the Louvre was the first for an American artist. He later produced costumes and settings for the San Francisco opera, with productions including The Magic Flute and Salome. He designed residences for the likes of Doris Duke, J. Paul Getty and Elizabeth Arden. Also an accomplished jeweller, Duquette created boldly scaled necklaces for the Duchess of Windsor and the actor Sharon Stone.
Fire had haunted the work-obsessed Duquette, who displayed all too little concern for preventative measures for much of his career. The Pavilion of Saint Francis, his studio and gallery in an abandoned San Francisco synagogue, had been struck just four years earlier in 1989, possibly as a result of overloaded electricals. Invaluable artworks, antiques and the building itself were destroyed in the process. Two lesser fires at Dawnridge, Duquette’s residence in Beverly Hills, caused minor damage. A friend sent to inspect the wiring in the illuminated gardens, an exotic landscape filled with Thai pavilions, had warned him: ‘If it rains, don’t turn on the lights.’
Ironically – or prophetically, perhaps – Duquette allied his inspirations and fortunes with the phoenix, which became a recurring motif in his sculptural work. ‘My own phoenix vision,’ he once said, ‘is one that has made my life and work a personal adventure.’ But he was unprepared for the Sortilegium fire. Brush had been left uncleared around the property, while the creative landscaping added to both sides of the road rendered it too narrow for fire engines to enter. By contrast, Wilkinson had cleared the land around his neighbouring residence, Argyle Farm, and it went unscathed. During the drama his farm became a way station for the firemen, who were served coffee round the clock as they fought to save Sortilegium.
Then, two years after the blaze, Duquette’s adored wife, Elizabeth, an artist known to friends as Beegle, died. Wilkinson, my wife Annie Kelly and I rallied to restore his spirits with a trip to the 99 Cents Only Store in West Hollywood (his obsession with stockpiling vast collections of raw materials for future use was well known). I still remember Duquette, by now 80, pushing a gaudy Flash Gordon-style shopping trolley along the aisles, scooping up armfuls of plastic objects and filling our station wagon to the brim. Wilkinson later commented: ‘I never dreamed of anyone spending $1,000 at a 99-cents store.’
More was needed to restore Duquette’s flagging spirits, and Wilkinson finally distracted him with a new creative venture, offering a row of neglected stables languishing just off his driveway as a decorating project. Hutton’s one stipulation was: ‘Do what you like with the interiors, but don’t touch the outside.’ Tony being Tony, this was like a red flag to a bull, resulting in the phoenix-like transformation still happily intact today.
Duquette died in 1999, at the age of 84. Two decades later, in 2018, the renowned architect David Hertz and the photographer Laura Doss-Hertz bought Argyle Farm together with Duquette’s transformed stables and renamed the property Xanabu (a portmanteau of Malibu and Xanadu, Kublai Khan’s mythical pleasure palace). Getting to Xanabu entails a dramatic, vertiginous four-mile climb up from a solitary ocean stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. A tree-lined drive leads to formal gates heralding the transformed Duquette stables on one side of an avenue and then the Hertz residence at a lower level. All along, a line of antique Indian soldiers rescued from Sortilegium stand to attention, rifles at the ready. At mid-point, doors open into the guest quarters, with a living room dominated by a Duquette Phoenix sculpture and illuminated by a skylight that was installed by Wilkinson. On either side are well-appointed bedrooms, their Duquette furnishings still intact.
Hertz, who is well-known for his adaptive reuse of materials, happened to be working on a house for the new owner of the incinerated Sortilegium, unusually created from a sliced-up, decommissioned 747 plane. He recalls his wonderment on discovering Tony’s Shangri La-like fantasy next door. ‘Wandering down a path between the two properties and leading to the back side of Duquette’s stables, I thought I’d stepped through a portal and been transported into a Tibetan hill town or Thai village,’ he says.
Duquette who resolutely avoided. anything ‘new’ and fabricated his creations with flotsam from film sets and antlers sourced from San Simeon – would seem to have little in common with Hertz and his repurposed retired jetliner. Yet, seen together, their bold and wildly disparate works show a shared dedication to inventive recycling. Hertz has an almost reverential respect for Duquette’s final masterpiece and is seeking to preserve his legacy by establishing a historic landmark status for the property. Xanabu, he says, represents ‘a great burst of creative energy at the end of his remarkable life’.
For more about Tony Duquette, visit tonyduquette.com
A version of this article also appeared in the December 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
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