A Legend Remembered: David Hockney's Colorful West Coast Retreat
The art world is mourning the loss of one of its most beloved and visually exuberant voices. David Hockney, the British-born painter, printmaker, and photographer who became as synonymous with sun-soaked California as the Pacific Ocean itself, has died at the age of 88. In the wake of his passing, admirers, collectors, and design enthusiasts alike are turning back to the places and spaces that shaped his singular vision — none more iconic than his vibrant Los Angeles home and its extraordinary hand-painted swimming pool.
In 1983, Architectural Digest was granted a rare and intimate tour of Hockney's West Coast sanctuary, and the resulting feature remains one of the most celebrated home profiles in the magazine's history. Decades later, those images still feel alive with color, personality, and the unmistakable creative energy of the man who made them.
The House That Art Built
Nestled in the Hollywood Hills, Hockney's Los Angeles home was never simply a place to sleep. It was a living canvas — an extension of his studio practice and a reflection of his insatiable curiosity about light, color, and perception. From the moment visitors passed through the gate, they were immersed in a world where the boundaries between fine art and domestic life dissolved completely.
The interiors of the home were layered with richly saturated hues, collected artworks, and personal objects that spoke to Hockney's wide-ranging interests. Every surface seemed to carry meaning. Shelves brimmed with books on optics and natural history. Canvases in various stages of completion leaned against whitewashed walls. The home functioned less like a showpiece and more like a working creative laboratory — informal, intellectually charged, and entirely human in scale.
What struck the Architectural Digest team most, however, was the sense that the house had been genuinely lived in and deeply loved. This was not the calculated aesthetic of an artist performing domesticity for an audience. Hockney's home was a place of genuine habitation, and every corner bore witness to the rhythms of daily life interrupted and enriched by art.
The Swimming Pool: Hockney's Most Personal Masterpiece
Of all the remarkable elements of Hockney's Los Angeles retreat, none captured the public imagination more completely than his painted swimming pool. Long before it became a cultural touchstone, Hockney had developed a profound artistic obsession with the swimming pool as a subject — an obsession that found its most personal expression right in his own backyard.
The pool, hand-painted with Hockney's characteristic swirling lines of light refracting through water, was a three-dimensional realization of the themes he had spent years exploring on flat canvas. His celebrated A Bigger Splash series had already fixed the California pool in the popular imagination as a site of leisure, solitude, and visual pleasure. But the pool at his Hollywood Hills home went a step further: it transformed an everyday domestic feature into an immersive work of art.
The undulating painted lines on the pool's floor and walls captured the way sunlight fractures and dances through moving water — an effect Hockney had studied obsessively since his first arrival in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Standing at the pool's edge, one could look down and feel as though the surface of a painting was gazing back. It was quintessential Hockney: playful, technically brilliant, and deeply rooted in the act of looking.
Why Los Angeles Mattered to Hockney
It is impossible to separate David Hockney's artistic legacy from the city of Los Angeles. When he first arrived in Southern California in 1964, he was a young Bradford-born artist stepping off a plane into a landscape unlike anything he had known. The light was different. The colors were different. The architecture was different. And crucially, the swimming pools were everywhere.
For Hockney, Los Angeles was not merely a backdrop. It was a revelation — a place where the ordinary surfaces of life shimmered with visual possibility. He documented the city's flat-roofed modernist houses, its palm-lined streets, and above all its pools with a devotion that bordered on the obsessive. The result was one of the most coherent and recognizable bodies of work in postwar British art, even if its subject matter was thoroughly Californian.
His West Coast home became the physical embodiment of that love affair between an artist and a city. The Architectural Digest tour of 1983 captured a moment in that relationship at its most mature and self-assured — a home that had grown organically around an artist's needs, pleasures, and evolving aesthetic sensibilities.
Hockney's Design Legacy: More Than Paint on Canvas
Beyond his contributions to painting, printmaking, and photography, David Hockney leaves behind a significant design legacy. His interiors, his gardens, and especially his pool remind us that great artists rarely confine their vision to the frame. Hockney treated every surface of his life as a potential site of beauty and meaning.
- His hand-painted pool anticipated the contemporary fascination with artist-designed domestic spaces by decades.
- His use of bold, saturated color in interior spaces influenced a generation of designers who sought to move beyond minimalist restraint.
- His gardens, particularly in later years at his Yorkshire home, demonstrated that his relationship with landscape was not merely pictorial but deeply spatial and sensory.
- His approach to home as creative environment helped redefine what it meant for an artist to truly inhabit a space.
Remembering Hockney Through the Spaces He Loved
As tributes pour in from across the art world, returning to the 1983 Architectural Digest feature feels like one of the most fitting ways to honor the man and his work. There is something deeply moving about looking at those photographs now — the pools, the canvases, the sunlit rooms — knowing that they represent not just an aesthetic but a life philosophy.
Hockney believed, above all else, in the transformative power of looking. He spent nearly nine decades teaching the rest of us to see the world with fresh eyes — to notice the way light breaks across a tiled floor, the way color changes in afternoon shadow, the way a simple backyard pool can become a meditation on time, movement, and perception.
His West Coast home was never just a house. It was an argument, made in color and space, for the idea that life itself could be a work of art. And if the painted pool in those 1983 photographs tells us anything, it is that David Hockney won that argument, beautifully and completely, a very long time ago.