Sunshine Daydream: Jérôme Mage’s Los Angeles Hideaway

Jérôme Mage is a mythical man who lives in a mythological house. The eccentric founder of Jacques Marie Mage—the cult sunglasses brand whose limited edition primarily Japanese-crafted cellulose acetate frames can cost north of a thousand dollars, without your prescription lenses—drives around Los Angeles in his vintage Buick, in a three-piece Saint Laurent suit and a gelled mohawk, his ring-covered fingers gripping the steering wheel. At the start of the day, he cruises down Route 66 to his office in Hollywood. And at the end of the day, he hurtles up a steep street in Elysian Heights to a cul-de-sac at the top. After parking under the wing tip of a carport, he enters the Lost Lautner.

That’s the colloquial name for the Salkin House, an 1,100-square-foot dwelling perched on a hillside lot, built for violist Jules Salkin in 1948 by John Lautner, the famed midcentury modern architect. Owning a Lautner home is a status symbol: Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière has a Lautner in the Hollywood Hills, seen in the pages of Vanity Fair just last year. Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow bought one once upon a consciously coupled time, as did Courteney Cox and David Arquette. Billionaire investor Ron Burkle snatched up the UFO-shaped Lautner that Bob Hope originally commissioned in Palm Springs, perhaps his most famous project.

Lautners trade for tens of millions of dollars: Ghesquière bought his from publishing heiress Amanda Hearst for $11 million, whereas Cox and Arquette sold theirs for $33.5 million in 2007 to then Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and his wife. Which is why in 2014, it made headlines when a family listed a Lautner that no one had heard of before for the gobsmackingly low price of $999,000. “Scholars of the architect had long classified this as a project that was never built,” Robert Winter wrote of the house in An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles.

How did it remain under the radar? In the 1930s, before Lautner was the Lautner, he was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright’s at the Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin. There he met Salkin, who gave the young protégé a shot at building him a home in LA. And while the later works were indisputably Lautner, done by a man sure in his own talents, the Salkin House bore signs of a man still coming into them: While the exterior featured exposed concrete, redwood, and glass—all Lautner signature materials—the inside has a Cherokee red floor, a hallmark of Wright’s.

‘‘It’s a gift of God, that little place,” Mage says on a swampy August afternoon. Seemingly unbothered, he drinks his third espresso of the day. He has his first when he wakes up at 5:30 a.m., his second after finishing his 10- to 15-mile run in Elysian Park. Mage is a fan of warm liquids—but not of warm foods. His diet consists of raw vegetables, fruits, and various cheeses. “Anything that is not cooked that I can put salt and olive oil on just works for me,” he says. The Tappan stove in the kitchen is the original from the 1940s—and looks like it hasn’t been turned on since then: It’s stuck on a setting for “ham slices, thick.”

Before this, he was living in Venice Beach in a warehouse that doubled as a design studio. But one night a fire burned it down. He and his fiancée, Steffy Bauwens, a leather-​wearing Belgian who is also his creative partner, moved into the Hotel Bel-Air.

When their real estate agent first mentioned the Lost Lautner, Mage shot him down. Yet when they stepped into the house, Mage and Bauwens knew it was theirs. As did the seller, fashion designer Trina Turk. She and her late husband spent years renovating the house, using it as a photography studio while living in another home in Los Feliz. After the 2025 fires, she no longer wanted to maintain two hillside properties. But the Lost Lautner couldn’t go to just anyone—and not everyone would want it: The house has a conservation easement, which means specific development and alteration rights belong to the Los Angeles Conservancy. “If you’re a preservationist, you could say the house is protected. If you just want the maximum real estate value, it could be seen as a hindrance,” says Turk.

Mage was ready to overlook anything—the minuscule bedrooms, the historical restrictions, the rugged location that puts it at a high fire risk—for the light. “I’m someone who likes to live with the light—waking up to the light and going to bed with the light,” he says. His business is based on light: Mage’s sunglasses are known for their colored lenses of yellows, blues, purples, and greens, tints that don’t block light out but enhance it.

He got his start making goggles and technical eyewear for extreme sports brands like Burton and Quiksilver. In 2015, he and his son went to Mohawk General Store in Silverlake. Unmoved by the minimalist sunglasses selection, he decided to make his own: bold, retro, and impeccably crafted. Fast-forward a decade and Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses are regularly worn by names like Rihanna, Harry Styles, and Timothée Chalamet. This year, venture capital firms Stripes and Imaginary Ventures infused the brand with $18 million. Mage, who grew up in France, went from California dreaming to living the dream.

His Lost Lautner is a cabinet of curiosities reflecting his and Bauwens’s hyper-peculiar interests. Bauwens collects Snoopy figurines; Mage, Western and Native American art. First editions of Truman Capote and Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, and a French translation of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews are on the bookshelves. A giant 1960s photograph of Dylan hangs on the wall, along with an original drawing by Jean Cocteau.

The furniture must fit the Lautner, though, so he plans to custom design each piece in the home. “You can’t just put furniture inside. It almost feels like a crime,” he says. He admits this might take awhile. He’s very particular—and very busy. Soon Jacques Marie Mage will launch a fine jewelry collection featuring rings, cuff links, bracelets, pendants of solid gold, and select set stone designs.