Las Urbanistas

Noah Berger for The New York Times

Like anyone who builds in Big Sur, Zachary and Langka Treadwell had to satisfy a lot of California and local environmental regulations. Their hillside home, a cube of glass and rock, has a sod roof.

DRIVERS passing through Big Sur on Highway 1 between Los Angeles and San Francisco are inevitably awed by the duel of sea and sky played out against the rugged Santa Lucia Mountains. Indeed, the pristine slopes facing Highway 1, a designated American National Scenic Byway, are some of the most rigidly protected in the country, guarded by a phalanx of agencies that range from the Monterey County Resource Management Agency to the California Coastal Commission.

Big Sur, Calif.

Noah Berger for The New York Times
The Treadwells have views 600 feet above the Pacific from their bedroom and terrace, but the house is relatively invisible to the outside world.

Noah Berger for The New York Times
Peter Mullin spent a decade building a home that clings to the rock.

But turn down one of the dozens of private roads along the coast, and you’ll discover teams of builders laying stone walls and installing hot tubs at multimillion-dollar properties, trucks full of building supplies groaning up the steep switchbacks and poles set up on the hillsides with orange plastic netting fluttering between them like Tibetan prayer flags.

There’s a mini-construction boom happening in Big Sur, local real estate agents say. And, these days, more than half the homes in the region are owned by part-time residents who live mainly in Los Angeles or around San Francisco Bay.

“For the past six years we’ve been seeing a lot of fund managers and dot-commers coming in who want to buy a slice of heaven,” said Robert Carver, an architect whose firm, Carver & Schicketanz, specializes in Big Sur. “Contractors here have been so busy that folks are importing outside contractors, and builders from as far away as New York.”

Big Sur’s epic landscapes, studded with redwood forests, hot springs and misty coves, have attracted metaphysical types for at least three generations. “It was here in Big Sur I first learned to say Amen!” the novelist Henry Miller wrote in “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch” after settling here in 1944.

Even so, more than a quarter of the properties along the coastline have changed hands the last decade, said Martha Diehl, a member of Monterey County’s planning commission, altering the region’s demographics. In 2005, building permit applications submitted to Monterey County were up about 50 percent from five years before.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises for anyone who has watched how the Hamptons or Palm Beach have developed is the complete lack of large housing or even fencing around the pricey acreage being bought up by wealthy city dwellers seeking second homes. “You don’t move to Big Sur if you want to host a lot of people,” said Mr. Carver, citing his clients’ disinterest in Aspen-size mansions. “This has always been a place to go to for solitude.”

Peter Mullin agrees. “I read, I hike, I sit in the hot tub and watch nature in all its glory,” said Mr. Mullin, a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who has spent the last decade converting a 30-year-old cabin into a magnificent, yet understated, weekend home.

Clinging to a rock shelf suspended between the waves and Highway 1, Mr. Mullin’s retreat is an interconnected series of wood pavilions that have Asian touches — right down to a koi pond that surrounds the front entrance. Despite the spectacular construction, the place has just enough beds for Mr. Mullin and his family.

“The freewheeling hippie feeling of Big Sur has modified,” he said. “But the big swells of the sea are raining on you. And you still have to know where your candles are for the power outages. Most newcomers cherish the scenery there, and they try to blend in.”

EVEN so, the change is noticeable. “My neighbors are a lot different now than when I moved here,” said Monique Bourin, who has lived in Big Sur for 20 years. “The flower children and counterculture types who came here in the ’60s and ’70s without any money were suddenly sitting on top of multimillion-dollar properties, and a lot of them moved. The buy-in for a coastal plot is now around $3 million.”

Ms. Bourin, who was helped by her late husband, has spent the last two decades building a house in an isolated highland valley facing the sea. “We were hippies who were going to homestead and build our house with our own two hands,” she said, indicating a pile of lumber outside her front door, awaiting a new project. “It’s been a lot of work, but I’m almost done.”

Her cedar and redwood home rises out of a ravine near Pfeiffer Beach like a vision from the Whole Earth Catalog, complete with stained-glass windows and a well-tended vegetable garden. It has solar power and a water cistern so that it’s entirely self-contained, right down to an 1893 wood-burning stove salvaged from the Los Alamos, N.M., train station.

On the hills surrounding her home, sculptural modernistic dwellings that range in value from $2.5 million to $6 million are replacing the simple wooden cabins and modest bungalows that once made up most of the housing here. Orange flagging across the ravine indicates another structure about to be built on a neighboring property.

A gleaming BMW convertible parked on the dirt road in front of Ms. Bourin’s homestead gives a hint to the mixed feeling she might have about all the changes going on in Big Sur; she has become a successful local real estate broker. (By the way, if her house were for sale, she said, she’d price it at $3.7 million.)

Given all the newcomers, some fear that Big Sur is becoming another Aspen or Sedona, where the wealthy have bought into the local counterculture lifestyle while indelibly altering it.

“People think of gentrification as something that happens in downtown neighborhoods,” said Chris Calott, an Albuquerque-based urban planner who has been camping in Big Sur for more than 30 years. “But now we’re seeing it happen on an unprecedented scale in rural areas all over the country. The questions facing Big Sur are the same ones facing the Hamptons, Taos, Marfa and other bucolic destinations that become popular with urban elites. Can a place be considered ‘preserved’ if the local store now has a fantastic imported cheese section, but you have to drive an hour to buy twine?”

Ms. Diehl, the planning commissioner, who has lived in the area for 20 years, said, “We don’t want a Disney or Colonial Williamsburg Big Sur — we want to keep it real. The only people who can go through the process are people who can afford it, and that brings social costs.”

Michelle Rizzolo understands the problem well. “We can’t find any place for our employees to live,” said Ms. Rizzolo, who left the kitchen of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to open the funky Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant on a lot she shares with a gas station tucked off a wooded knoll on Highway 1. “In fact, when we started this place, we all had to sleep on the floor of the bakery.”

Although two of the area’s biggest employers, the Post Ranch Inn and the Ventana Inn & Spa, have housing for their employees, on weekday mornings workers from Salinas, an inland city an hour’s drive away, are crammed in cars and trucks going south on Highway 1 to their jobs in Big Sur.

While Big Sur is changing, it isn’t so easy to tear down an old cabin and build a modern house. The region has some of the country’s strictest building laws, officials and contractors say, and new construction tends to be limited to existing building footprints. There are rigid standards regarding water and natural preservation.

“I usually tell clients to count on one, or even two, years between buying the property and putting the first shovel in,” said Jay Auburn, who procures building permits for Carver & Schicketanz. “You have to factor in an additional 5 to 10 percent of construction costs just for getting over the regulations.”

Two Carver & Schicketanz clients, Zachary Treadwell, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, and his wife, Langka, recently built a 1,500-square-foot sod-roofed retreat half-buried in a windy hillside 600 feet above the Pacific and only accessible by a steep and winding private road in the narrow canyon that leads to Pfeiffer Beach. The road was only blacktopped last December. Ms. Bourin, the real estate agent, estimated that the Treadwell property would go on the market at $6 million.

As is typical with most new construction in Big Sur, not even a fence delineates where the Treadwells’ land ends and public space begins. The home, a glass-and-rock cube with a stone-lined in-ground hot tub, appears Zen-like in its simplicity. Yet the effort involved in the logistics and regulatory hurdles the Treadwells had to overcome seems akin to the building of the Pyramids. Even choosing the grass for the roof was complicated.

“Some of the oak grass is considered endangered,” said Fred Ballarini, one of the naturalists hired to help shepherd the Treadwells through some 18 different presentations to the Monterey County Resource Management Agency. “We were required to replant three times the amount of the grass that was affected by the construction nearby.”

The biggest hurdle for getting a building permit is keeping new construction invisible from Highway 1 and other areas of public access. “General rule of thumb is if you can see it, you can’t build it,” said Dale Ellis, director of the management agency. Hence the rise of flagging scaffolds that outline proposed construction throughout Big Sur’s back roads — erected so regulators can determine the visual impact of new construction.

FOR the Treadwells, the effort has paid off. During a recent visit, coyotes and a wildcat scurried along the patio while midway to the vast horizon a line of migrating gray whales spouted like sea locomotives.

When the sun set, the glass house seemed suspended by invisible threads between the starry sky and the pounding surf below. Highway 1 and any other sign of civilization were hidden behind the hills that had merged into the night. Despite the sweeping view of the California coast, one could be the last person on earth. “All that matters is that the miraculous becomes the norm,” Henry Miller wrote — and every weekend, that possibility exists for the Treadwells and other denizens of Big Sur.

“It was a major thing, getting all the permits,” Ms. Treadwell said as her three small children played outside in the steaming hot tub. “But we knew that when we got into this, and we’re fine with it. Even with all the building going on, we think the magic of this place is going to be preserved.”

In Ho Chi Minh City, a building boom clashes with efforts to preserve the old city’s historic character.

By Simon Montlake| Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor; HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM from the March 15, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0315/p07s02-woap.html

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Fourth Floor, Museum Side Jeanne Giordano and Robert Frasca bought toward the end of the Modern’s reconstruction, and moved after both it and their new one-bedroom apartment were complete. More Photos>

A FEW years ago, Douglas McGrath, the screenwriter and director of “Emma” and “Infamous,” was having lunch at Michael’s with his friend Paul Blake, a producer of contemporary musicals like “Roman Holiday” and “White Christmas.” The two were at one of the tables nestled in that restaurant’s brightest corner, in the garden of the Rockefeller Apartments, the swankily modernist, bifurcated building whose two undulating facades erupt north onto 55th Street and south onto 54th Street, right across from the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden.

The Rockefeller Apartments

Mr. McGrath’s eyes wandered happily up and down the elegant, glassy bays and he said, as he recalled recently: “This is a building that looks like the architect actually cared about it. I’ve always wanted to live here. I wonder who I’d call?” And Mr. Blake said: “Well, I live here. I know exactly who to call.”

This week, the one-bedroom that Mr. McGrath bought then is on the market for $750,000, and he’s in a bidding war for a two bedroom a few floors up (the south-facing museum-side one-bedrooms can sell for more than $900,000). I won’t tell you which apartment, in deference to Mr. McGrath, who’s hoping not to fan the flames, but I can say it used to belong to Nils Bruun, a sculptor, and Elena Lesser Bruun, a marriage and family therapist, who now live in a maisonette on the south side that they bought in 2002 for $700,000. (The Bruuns themselves are pining to buy the studio next door.) And the Rockefeller Apartments, finished in 1936 and given landmark status in 1984, are having “one of their hottest years ever,” said Leslie Crossley, a senior vice president and managing director at Brown Harris Stevens, who has been the building’s primary broker for three decades and these days finds herself selling its co-ops two or three times over, many to people who already live here.

“This building has had terrible slumps,” Ms. Crossley said. Right now is not one of them.

While the Time Warner Center towers to the northwest have irrevocably altered the ecology here, as has the Modern’s recent expansion, drawing deep-pocketed, glitz-loving buyers from all over the world, the actual and would-be residents of the Rockefeller Apartments, which sit smack in between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, are their own, rather more modest breed.

These are a self-selected group of architecture, design and art makers and aficionados, for whom the sans-serif International Style type still found on each front door is a meaningful reality. Owning an apartment here, as one potential buyer and design editor said the other day, is a bit like owning a Rudolph M. Schindler house in Los Angeles. It’s a club whose membership is determined by eye, not by bank account.

Stephen S. Garmey, a sculptor and collector of Russian Constructivist works on paper, and Jane Garmey, a food and garden writer, arrived nearly two years ago, after Mr. Garmey retired as vicar of Calvary Episcopal Church on Gramercy Park. They live on the north side, and their windows frame the weirdly wonderful “Czech cubist garage,” as Mr. Garmey described the concrete Corbusian building across the street that is, indeed, a parking garage.

“The first time we were here,” said Mr. Garmey last week, “I just took in the hallway — the doors flush to the walls, the hardware, the whole thing, and I thought, oh my God, I’m having an aesthetic experience!” “Whatever you think of Harrison,” he continued, meaning Wallace K. Harrison, the architect who went on to design the United Nations building and the Metropolitan Opera, “he was an architect who knew how things should be done. It may be one of the most completely designed buildings in the city. I think it’s his best building.”

Many would agree. The building, commissioned by a young Nelson A. Rockefeller as pieds-à-terre for businessmen working in Rockefeller Center (and spending weekends at home in places like Tuxedo Park), was designed by a young Harrison, then a vociferous modernist, “before the creativity got squeezed out of him,” as Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of The New Yorker, put it. The building made the first real high-end architectural statement in Manhattan during the long, dry years of the Depression. With their floor-to-ceiling windows and open layouts, the apartments express a generous modernism — Harrison embracing the International style, and then warming it up.

“There was always in Harrison this attempt to make modernism less stern, less puritanical, almost sexy,” Mr. Goldberger said.

Scrupulously designed, from the narrow channel scored six inches above the floor — more like a gesture describing “the essence of a baseboard” than an actual baseboard, as Jeanne Giordano, an urban planner living on the museum side, said — to the flat-disc chrome doorknobs, the apartments are nevertheless voluptuous in their detailing: the hinges on the kitchen cabinets (for those lucky enough to still have them) are tiny, fat missiles; the hinged triptych chrome mirror on the bathroom medicine chest makes a machine-age window into the future.

Certainly these apartments — mostly one- and two-bedrooms, with a sprinkling of studios — were designed to be the future, as it appeared in the mid-1930s: the transition from what David M. McAlpin, a principal at Fradkin & McAlpin Associates, called the “served lifestyle” to a more modern one.

The kitchens seem to have a foot in both worlds: they are efficiency galleys, long slices running behind the living room walls, originally with doll-size stoves and refrigerators (just big enough for the lemons and the vodka). There are doors at each end, one facing the dining alcove in those cylindrical bays, the other the front hall: the presence of an invisible, hovering domestic can be felt (some floors even have a public bathroom that can be entered only from the common hall for this phantom). In fact, a company called Scientific Housekeeping Inc. provided maid service to the original tenants.

Mr. McAlpin’s grandfather David H. McAlpin was an investment banker, art collector and original tenant whose first apartment was on the museum side but who later moved to the north side because he wanted less light. After his widow’s death, Karen Stein, the editorial director of Phaidon Press in New York, the arts book publisher, bought his north-facing apartment in 2002, along with the silvery torchères that had been there from the beginning.

“There’s nice art karma here,” Ms. Stein said last week, opening a Phaidon monograph on Edward Weston, who had been a friend of the senior McAlpin and clearly spent some time in the apartments. In one 1941 photo in the book, a nude lies on a bed set perpendicular to a wall of windows sliced by Venetian blinds. It’s Ms. Stein’s bedroom (the watertower landscape hasn’t changed); in a nice touch, Ms. Stein, too, has Venetian blinds over all her windows.

And the younger Mr. McAlpin, who lived here one summer when he was taking drawing classes at Pratt in the 1970s, was the architect for the Bruuns’ apartment downstairs (a match made, like so many in the building, by Ms. Crossley), carving out a wide, airy space from the tangle of treatment rooms that had been there. The Bruuns bought the apartment from their neighbor, Joyce Schwartz, a curator of public art and the building’s unofficial mayor; Ms. Schwartz’s husband, Harold, a dentist, had had his offices there on the first floor, making this a rare live-work space in a co-op building. The Schwartzes lived in the other first-floor maisonette on that side. Little connections web the Rockefeller: Jeanne Giordano and Robert Frasca, a principal at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, an architectural firm, are friends of Ms. Stein and Ms. Schwartz; they moved in a year and a half ago. Just before Paul Blake bought his first apartment here, a one-bedroom, he found himself on a plane with Michael McCarty, the owner of Michael’s, who urged him to make the purchase. Now Mr. Blake is in a two-bedroom he bought three years ago.

Mr. McCarty opened the restaurant that would become a publishing world power canteen on the north side of the building in November 1989, after waiting 10 years to buy the space, he said. In 1979, he’d asked a broker friend to find a garden space between 52nd and 59th Streets and Park and Sixth Avenues. “Of course we came up empty- handed,” Mr. McCarty said. “We were really down and tired and the broker, a guy who lived in the Rockefeller, said, ‘Let’s go have a drink with my friend Guido,’ the owner of the Italian Pavilion on 55th Street. It was dark and truly gnarly, and the wall of windows you see now was then a solid wall with a door in it. My friend the broker says, ‘Guido, know anyone with a garden restaurant who wants to sell?’ And Guido opens the door, and there’s the garden. I had to bite my tongue. In August of 1989, Guido calls me: ‘Mike, are you still interested?’ It took him a long time to be ready to sell.”

David Hanks, a curator of architecture and design exhibitions, has been here since the mid-1990s. He used to be on the co-op board, and helped update the building’s lobbies three years ago (there had been an unfortunate cork-and-velvet moment in the 1980s).

The two garden-facing lobby spaces were redesigned by Réjean Tétreault, a contemporary Montreal designer, in the spirit of ’30s modernism, with steel pipe chairs and sofas made by Antonio Citterio. (The original Barcelona chairs were too low, Mr. Hanks said, for many of the building’s older residents to climb out of.) Mr. Tétreault also designed Mr. Hanks’s spare, museum-facing apartment, one of the few with an original kitchen, complete with the Monel drainboard and sink designed by Gustav Jensen — quite a prize.

“It is true that all the architects love this building,” Mr. Hanks said. “That it’s for people who love the modern. There are a lot of people like me here. It can be like a dormitory.” “But there are those” — he paused, choosing his words carefully — “who are not so interested in the restoration or preservation of what’s here.”

The other day, a young woman wearing a long chestnut-colored fur coat that matched her tan stepped onto the elevator on the 54th Street side and rolled her eyes at the dimly lighted hallway now vanishing behind the elevator doors. She was not a fan of the blackand- white terrazzo floors, she admitted, and she said she truly loathed the lighting. “God, I wish they’d redo it all,” she said.

Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Foreign Exchange Teak houses like this one in Thailand are being disassembled by wood traders, who sell the lumber to American homeowners like Robin Howe and Andy Grossman in Bridgehampton, N.Y.

THE house that Robin Howe and her husband, Andy Grossman, share in Bridgehampton, N.Y., is only a year old, but their living room floor dates back a century. Made of wide-plank teak, the floorboards have “a lived-in feel that is attractive and old and gentle on the feet,” said Ms. Howe, a fashion designer.

Richard Humphries/Polaris, for The New York Times
Robin Howe and Andy Grossman.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Recycled Retreat The teak gazebo in the Oakland, Calif., backyard of Dr. Richard Ostreicher,is made from an ornate Indonesian home. He said he was drawn to the hand-carved wood in part because “you’re not taking down any new trees.”

Richard Humphries/Polaris, for The New York Times
What Price Teak? Erika Carpenter inspects the floor of a teak house in Thailand. She often pays $50,000 or more for a house, then re-mills the wood. Some preservationists say that traders like her encourage tear-downs.

John Christenson for The New York Times
Looking East Mark Suess, a designer for Global Surroundings, used teak floorboards from an Indonesian building and an old reliquary to decorate his Minnesota home.

Before the boards were in Ms. Howe’s living room they were in the McCloud, Calif., warehouse of TerraMai, a company that sells so-called “reclaimed” wood from around the world; before that, they were the floors and walls of a factory, probably near the Burmese border in Thailand, 8,000 miles from Long Island.

As Southeast Asia continues to modernize, many teak-wood homes and buildings like that factory are being torn down and replaced with Western-style brick or concrete ones. While this architectural turnover has been going on for decades, in recent years American companies like TerraMai have increasingly been buying up the old-growth teak wood and selling it to homeowners like Ms. Howe, which has raised some concerns among preservationists.

“In the last three years, our sales of reclaimed teak have tripled,” said Erika Carpenter, TerraMai’s co-founder. “People are becoming aware, appreciating the material and designing their projects around it.”

In 2006, the company disassembled 12 structures in Southeast Asia, and this year Ms. Carpenter expects to tear down about 20. The wood, which sells in the United States for between $16.50 a square foot and $30 a board foot — slightly more than new teak from the same region would cost — is re-milled and used to make flooring, decking, countertops, staircases and cabinetry, among other things. (For teak flooring, the cost is about three times that of a typical oak floor.) Global Surroundings, a furnishings manufacturer near Phoenix, has had similar success with its Rusteaka and ChicTeak lines of outdoor furniture made from Indonesian homes. According to J. L. Jackson, the company’s founder, Global Surroundings imported six shipping containers of vintage teak furniture in 2006 and will double that number this year.

Ms. Jackson said she initially had difficulty convincing retailers to stock her tables and chairs, but an increased interest in the environmental benefits of recycled resources has helped spark sales, as has the popularity of outdoor furniture, for which old teak is well suited. Then there’s the matter of character. “You have to buy into it, and understand that this is a great story when you’re sitting around your coffee table,” she said.

Old teak lumber seems to hold much the same appeal for many Americans. “They’ve definitely had previous lives,” Ms. Howe said of her floorboards. “There’s a history in them that may be hundreds of years old, and I’ve become a part of that.” Not everyone, though, is happy to see Westerners like Ms. Howe claiming a place in that history. Tanet Charoenmuang, the vice president of the Urban Development Institute Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which advocates for historical preservation in the rapidly modernizing city, is worried that his country is slowly losing its identity, as old teak villas, docks, hotels, tobacco barns and granaries vanish.

“Houses are sold one after another after another, and, finally, all gone,” Dr. Tanet said. “Finally, the culture will be gone, too.” Although Ms. Carpenter, like other importers of reclaimed wood, says that she only purchases buildings that were going to be demolished anyway, or are already for sale, Dr. Tanet believes the money offered by these dealers inevitably encourages teardowns. “At first, someone may have never thought of selling” a home, he said, but the financial incentive, combined with the growing popularity of Western-style brick and concrete houses with modern conveniences like air-conditioning, has spurred the selling off of teak. The result, Dr. Tanet said, is that “the wooden culture gives way to the concrete.” Nonetheless, Jeffrey Hayward, an auditor for the Rainforest Alliance conservation organization, who lived on the island of Java in Indonesia for six years, sees some benefit in the demand for vintage teak, in that it promotes reuse. “If there was no market for recycled teak,” said Mr. Hayward, who witnessed a similar selling off on Java, “it would basically end up as waste.”

The perceived ecological advantages of building with vintage teak appealed to Dr. Richard Ostreicher, a California-based dermatologist who drives a hybrid car and owns a vacation house in Hawaii that uses solar power. When he wanted to put a gazebo in his Oakland backyard two years ago, he bypassed the big-box home stores and found a structure made of teak from an old joglo, an ornate style of Indonesian house. “It’s original, it’s gorgeous and you’re not taking down any new trees,” said Dr. Ostreicher, who bought the gazebo from Gado Gado International, a furniture and crafts importer in Santa Rosa, Calif., paying about $11,000. “This is a beautiful work of art, and if it were just left on the road somewhere it might be lost.”

Teak is “a pretty wood, it’s extremely durable and it’s multipurpose,” said Harvey Green, the author of “Wood: Craft, Culture, History” (Viking, 2006), explaining teak’s centuries-old popularity with furniture makers and shipbuilders, who valued the way its resin repelled water, rot and termites. While teak is still grown and harvested in parts of Southeast Asia, salvaged wood is especially prized, Mr. Green said, because much of it came from old-growth forests, which produce the sturdiest and handsomest lumber.

After years of these supplies being depleted, many countries in the region have strict laws limiting over-harvesting, and old-growth teak has become a rare commodity, according to Mr. Hayward.

Finding and exporting this sought-after old-growth teak is the job of hunters like Ms. Carpenter, who has gone on buying trips to Southeast Asia every one to three months since TerraMai began selling teak in 2000. On one such trip last July, she visited a village outside Chiang Mai, on a tip from one of TerraMai’s local agents that a woman there was interested in selling her house. Approaching the home in question, one of a row of simple but sturdy wooden structures raised on stilts, she scratched a support beam, sniffing for the sharp, leathery smell of teak. A white-haired woman sitting at a table nearby pointed to garlic drying beneath the raised floor and asked Ms. Carpenter if she had come to buy some. “No,” Ms. Carpenter told the old woman in Thai, “I came to buy the house.”

After locating the property owner, a middle- aged woman, Ms. Carpenter spoke to her through an interpreter. The owner exexplained that she had inherited the house from a relative, but did not need it. Her reason for selling to Ms. Carpenter was simple: If the home were put on the local market, the lot would bring a modest sum, but traders in salvaged teak — both local buyers and foreigners like Ms. Carpenter — are willing to pay hundreds of dollars per cubic meter, or more than $50,000 for an entire house.

Many homeowners in Southeast Asia use teak “like a bank,” said Philippe Guizol, a researcher who frequently works with the Center for International Forestry Research, a conservation organization based in Indonesia. “If you need cash and you have teak in your floor, you just sell it,” Mr. Guizol said.

But Ms. Carpenter says she avoids buying houses that people would otherwise continue living in, as well as historic landmarks like temples. She noted that she is required by the Thai government to process the wood — re-mill or dry it — before shipping it to the United States, so the country’s resources are not being removed without an investment in local labor.

Importers point out that the wood can last another century or more, even if the shift in context is stark, said Mark Suess, a designer for Global Surroundings. In his home in St. Cloud, Minn., the pocked floorboards running from the front door to the dining room were planed smooth years earlier for use in Indonesian homes. The cabinet where his family stores cookbooks was for decades an altar and reliquary where people prayed. The result is an exchange of cultural styles, as Americans like Mr. Suess embrace an old-fashioned Asian aesthetic, while many Southeast Asians look to contemporary Western design.

Ms. Howe of Bridgehampton, who frequently travels to Southeast Asia for business, said that in the last decade the replacement of wooden structures with Western- style buildings has been obvious.

“It seems almost natural that they would be changing and updating,” she said. “And then one day they’ll probably want their old teak back again.”

LOS ANGELES, March 14 — Shortly after moving here last year to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan started looking at houses — not as a place for him to live but as potential museum pieces.

The 850-square-foot office that John Lautner designed in Century City.

His idea — one that has rarely, if ever, been tried on a large scale by a major museum — is to collect significant pieces of midcentury residential architecture, including houses by Rudolf M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright, and to treat them as both museum objects and as residences for curators.

While he has yet to acquire any properties, Mr. Govan said this week that he certainly had his eye on some, including Frank Gehry’s landmark residence in Santa Monica, a collage of tilting forms. In an interview Mr. Gehry confirmed that Mr. Govan had discussed the idea with him but said that no agreements about the house’s future had been reached.

Mr. Govan, who moved here in March 2006 from New York, where he directed the Dia Art Foundation, said his project had been driven by the immediate impression that in Los Angeles, a city defined by outdoor spaces, architecture is inseparable from art.

“It started with an effort to rethink the museum, looking at the resources that are both locally powerful and internationally relevant,” he said. “It’s clear that the most important architecture in Los Angeles is largely its domestic architecture. I’ve talked certainly to a number of people who have interesting architecture, and I’m beginning to talk to other people about raising funds to preserve these works.”

The potential cost of the houses varies widely. Many of the most distinctive properties, in Beverly Hills or the Hollywood Hills, have most recently sold for millions of dollars. Others, like Schindler’s Buck House, on Eighth Street, barely two blocks from the museum, sold for less than half a million dollars in 1995, although it clearly would be worth more than double that today.

Mr. Govan was reluctant to discuss his plans in detail, partly because he has taken only “baby steps,” he said, but also because he does not want to set off bidding wars for houses in which he is interested. He said he hoped the museum could either buy houses or have them donated, the same ways that a museum would go about acquiring paintings or sculptures.

“This whole initiative will depend on generosity,” he said. “In the same way that someone would donate a Picasso, we want people to think of ways to see these houses as works of art and to think about ways to preserve them.”

Although he said he had received an “enthusiastic response” when he presented the idea to the museum’s trustees, “we have no funds at the moment” dedicated to the effort, he added.

But the idea has already started to generate chatter in the architecture community here. Richard Koshalek, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art , said Mr. Govan’s effort was “not only crucial for the city of Los Angeles but for the history of modern architecture.”

“Architects learn from other architects,” Mr. Koshalek said. “This history will be lost if people like Michael do not take this kind of initiative.”

While owning an architecturally significant house in Los Angeles has long carried a certain cachet, many potentially valuable works have fallen into disrepair or been greatly altered by renovations undertaken by a succession of owners.

“A number of them haven’t been touched,” Mr. Govan said. “But many have been badly renovated and fundamentally changed. So I think it’s kind of the last chance to try to preserve a group of these as a collection.”

Mr. Govan’s idea is perhaps all the more remarkable because the Los Angeles County Museum does not have a department of architecture or design, unlike some older institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But one of the museum’s first acquisitions after Mr. Govan moved to Los Angeles, after 12 years as director of Dia, was a high-rise office interior by the Modernist architect John Lautner.

The Lautner office was formerly owned by James F. Goldstein, a real-estate investor who had Lautner design the space in 1987 for the 20th floor in a building in Century City, the commercial development on Santa Monica Boulevard in west Los Angeles.

In 2005 Mr. Goldstein was informed that his lease for the space would not be renewed, and a foundation devoted to saving Lautner works began seeking a patron who would preserve the space.

The Los Angeles County Museum initially turned down the proposal because museum officials felt it did not have the room to display the 800-square-foot office. But once Mr. Govan arrived, he seized the opportunity to acquire the work for an undisclosed amount and use it not as an exhibit but as an office — specifically, his.

The museum now plans to install the office, which includes copper walls, a wood ceiling and a floor of black slate, as part of the renovation of the May Company building, a former department store that is on the western edge of the museum’s 20-acre campus on Wilshire Boulevard. That renovation is planned for 2008 or 2009, and Mr. Govan said he hoped to use the space as his regular office, allowing visitors access to it as an exhibit on weekends.

Similarly, he said he hoped to use the houses that he collects not strictly as museum pieces but as housing for museum staff members, a perk that he said he believed would help the museum attract new curatorial talent.

“A lot of curators here have sought out interesting houses,” he said. “I thought, ‘You could just have house tours on a regular basis to allow the public to have access to them.’ “

Although it does not have a design collection as such, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has hardly ignored the city’s architectural history. In 1987 it organized a tour in the Silver Lake community of houses by Schindler, Neutra and other architects of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. In 1965 the museum published “A Guide to Southern California Architecture,” a book that, although out of print, is prized by real-estate agents here who specialize in architectural gems.

Various Los Angeles organizations have also sponsored tours of houses that were built as part of the Case Study program: two dozen prototypes of modern architecture, by Charles and Ray Eames, Neutra and Pierre Koenig, among others, that were commissioned by Art & Architecture magazine and built from 1945 to 1964.

Silver Lake, an area around a man-made reservoir in the hills east of Hollywood, is the site of dozens of houses that would be potential acquisitions for the museum. The 2200 block of Silver Lake Boulevard, for example, has no fewer than five houses by Neutra, who was encouraged to migrate from Vienna to Los Angeles by Schindler, who was himself born in Austria and had worked in Chicago and Los Angeles as a construction supervisor for Frank Lloyd Wright.

Schindler’s work is also ubiquitous around Los Angeles. In 2001 the magazine ArtForum listed 32 significant works by Schindler, several in the parts of Los Angeles that visitors to the city rarely get to, including Torrance, Glendale, South Central and Woodland Hills.

Mr. Govan said that because the institution was a county museum, he did not intend to limit his collection to the area immediately around the museum’s west Los Angeles location.

With Mr. Govan’s plans already being discussed in architecture and real estate circles, the museum is certain to face some competition to acquire properties, including that of Mr. Gehry. His Santa Monica house, built in 1978 and remodeled in 1993, is known for its distinctive exteriors, which include corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing.

It is also in the sights of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mr. Gehry said, which has talked to him about its registering the house or acquiring it once he completes a new residence in nearby Venice, Calif.

“In the meantime,” Mr. Gehry said, “I’m living in it.”