My Favorite Room: Richard Landry relishes the surprises that spring from a space

Richard Landry, the prolific architect behind some of the most spectacular celebrity homes in the U.S., doesn’t subscribe to a specific style.

There’s the 12,500-square-foot Brentwood behemoth he designed for football star Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bundchen. The 28-bedroom, 32-bathroom estate — which sold to Dr. Dre for $40 million in 2014 — had French country flair and a moat.

Landry’s own home, meanwhile, is a much-smaller 4,500-square-foot modernist block in Malibu. The property, which is currently on the market for $11.995 million, has dramatic oceanfront views but just four bedrooms and three full bathrooms.

A recession in 1984 drove Landry from his native Canada to California, where he launched his Landry Design Group architectural firm in 1987 and went on to attract such clients as Mark Wahlberg, Wayne Gretzky and Rod Stewart.

Your favorite room at home is the area on the third floor. Why?

This is a room that is really, truly an indoor-outdoor space. It opens up to the ocean, and you hear the sound of it. The bar is indoors, but the dining room table is outdoors and open to the sky. The big sliding doors retract into the wall. Beyond that is an outdoor living room with a barbecue and a fire pit. It’s a great place to socialize or relax by yourself and read a magazine.

Name a unique component of the room.

At the bar, there are these shelves in front of the mirror that were a very tricky detail to do. They were clad in nanoglass — crushed glass and marble powder fused at very high temperatures. It doesn’t stain, and it doesn’t scratch.

The whole face of the bar is glass also, with a panel behind it that can change color — purple, orange, green, blue, white. It’s nice because it can change the mood of the space at the touch of a button.

Any interesting stories of what’s happened in that room?

Stories I can talk about? There are days when we have 80 people on the terrace, and suddenly you hear, “Oh my God, oh my God, there are dolphins playing in the water!” The surprise on their face is fun.

You’ve designed thousands of rooms in more than 500 private residences. But the indoor-outdoor living room in the Brady-Bundchen house is your favorite. Why?

It’s very difficult for me to pick one, like asking which of your children you like the most. But with this one, we were trying to blur the boundaries between the indoors and the outdoors, especially because it’s California. So we built the family room to completely open to an outdoor loggia. Two walls — 50% of the room — open to the outside completely and disappear. We created a great hybrid, layered design, with the modern feature of bi-fold doors screened by classic stone arches just beyond. It was, in a very traditional home, a very contemporary gesture, using today’s technology to do something fresh and different.

Critics call your designs “over the top.” Is that a fair characterization of the Brady-Bundchen room?

Not at all. Those comments are subjective. People can call these homes names if they want to. The reality is that this house was about 12,000 square feet, and size is really relative. For somebody, that might be huge. For somebody else who entertains at the level these people do, who hold fundraisers and have large extended families, it’s a comfortable home.

What about runner-up favorite rooms?

We’ve done so many different things for clients: One has a car collection, so we built a garage with a man cave, a game room, a bar. We once combined a playroom, game room and theater together into one space, like a big rec room where you could play air hockey, pingpong, arcade games. There’s a house in Beverly Hills where the basement level looks like a ship. Surprises to me are fun.