A Life in Color: Remembering David Hockney's West Coast Sanctuary
When the art world lost David Hockney at the age of 88, it lost one of the most singular creative voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer, Hockney spent decades reshaping how the world sees light, water, and domestic space. To understand the full breadth of who he was as an artist and a person, there may be no better starting point than the home he created for himself on California's sun-drenched West Coast — a place that was not merely a residence, but a living, breathing extension of his art.
In 1983, Architectural Digest was granted a rare tour of this remarkable property, producing a feature that would become one of the magazine's most talked-about profiles of the era. Decades later, that visit feels not only nostalgic but profoundly important — a document of an artist fully inhabiting his own vision, right down to the tiles beneath the water.
The House That Hockney Built — In Spirit, If Not in Brick
Hockney first arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, drawn by the city's light, its unabashed hedonism, and its freedom from the more rigid traditions of the British art world he had left behind. He settled into the landscape with the enthusiasm of a man who had finally found a place that matched his internal color palette. The sprawling, low-slung nature of Los Angeles architecture, the openness of its interiors, the way the sun cut hard shadows across stucco walls — all of it became raw material for his canvases.
His West Coast home reflected this sensibility entirely. Rather than curating a space that kept art at a careful distance, Hockney lived inside his own aesthetic. Boldly colored walls sat alongside handmade objects, personal photographs, and original works displayed not as trophies but as companions. Guests who stepped through his front door reportedly felt as though they had walked into one of his paintings — which, in many ways, they had.
The Swimming Pool: Art You Can Swim In
No element of Hockney's California home has captured the public imagination more completely than his swimming pool. To say it was decorated would be an understatement. Hockney approached the pool as he approached a canvas — with intention, craft, and a deep fascination with the way light moves through and reflects off water.
The pool's painted surface transformed an ordinary backyard amenity into something closer to an immersive installation. The rippling, shimmering patterns Hockney applied to the interior became a real-world companion to the legendary swimming pool paintings he had been producing since the mid-1960s. Works like A Bigger Splash and Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool had already secured his reputation as the definitive painter of California water culture. His own pool, then, was the logical conclusion: life imitating art, art inhabiting life.
The painted pool also demonstrated something important about Hockney's philosophy. He did not believe that art belonged exclusively in galleries or museums. For him, beauty was a daily necessity, not a weekend luxury. Making the space where he swam each morning as visually alive as the canvases he worked on each afternoon was not an affectation — it was a statement of values.
What the 1983 Architectural Digest Tour Revealed
The AD feature from 1983 offered readers an unusually intimate look at how Hockney organized his creative life. The photographs from that tour show a home that is layered and personal without being cluttered, vibrant without being chaotic. Every room carried evidence of an active mind — books left open, works in progress pinned to walls, the tools of multiple artistic disciplines coexisting in cheerful disorder.
What struck many readers at the time, and what continues to resonate today, was how completely the home expressed its owner's personality. There was no separation between the man and his environment. The choices — in color, in furniture, in the art displayed and the art in progress — all pointed in the same direction. This was the domestic space of someone who had thought deeply about how he wanted to live, and who had the skill and courage to execute that vision without compromise.
Hockney's Legacy in Interiors and Design
David Hockney's influence on interior design and the broader culture of creative living is difficult to overstate. His California home helped shift how people thought about the relationship between an artist's personal space and their professional output. The idea that your home could be a genuine extension of your creative identity — not a showcase, but a workshop, a playground, and a sanctuary all at once — owes something to the way Hockney lived and the images that circulated of his home over the decades.
- His use of bold, saturated color in domestic spaces anticipated trends that would not become mainstream for another generation.
- His treatment of functional elements like pools and patios as legitimate artistic surfaces expanded what designers considered fair territory for creative intervention.
- His willingness to mix high art with everyday objects offered a template for a more relaxed, humanistic approach to collecting and display.
- His California home demonstrated that comfort and visual intensity were not opposites — that a space could be deeply livable and deeply beautiful at the same time.
A Final Reflection on a Life Well Designed
David Hockney lived to 88, and by nearly every measure, he lived well. He worked prolifically, traveled widely, embraced new technologies as enthusiastically as old techniques, and never stopped looking at the world with the freshness of someone encountering it for the first time. His West Coast home was a physical record of that energy — a place where art and life were never separate categories, where the water in the pool shimmered with the same painted light that danced across his canvases.
Revisiting the 1983 Architectural Digest tour today is both a pleasure and an act of mourning. It shows us the home of an artist in full command of his gifts, surrounded by color and light and the daily evidence of a creative life lived without apology. That image — of Hockney's California retreat, its extraordinary painted pool catching the afternoon sun — is as fitting a memorial as any retrospective. It reminds us not just of what he made, but of how he lived. And for an artist of his temperament, the two were always the same thing.