Comforts, but Few Creatures (Unless You Count the Dog)

A visit to the new home of Mia Sara and Brian Henson requires a wavy excursion through the Hollywood Hills and down to a promontory. There you find, perched at the land’s edge, a garage displaying the elegant rear ends of two Teslas, a Model S (his) and a Model 3 (hers).

When a visitor is buzzed in, a gate slides open. Steps descend to a wood and steel bridge that leads over a pocket garden to a bronze Brombal door in a cedar-clad wall.

These are the curtain-raisers on a house in the Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, built by Henson, scion of the Henson Muppet empire and director of the new R-rated puppet film “The Happytime Murders,” and Sara, an actress and poet.

The house was designed by Kristen Becker of Mutuus Studio while she was an associate at Olson Kundig in Seattle. That architectural firm is known for its embrace of natural settings and materials, artisanship and “kinetics”: industrial-scale, movable building elements, like hand-cranked skylights on chunky hinges.

Becker had previously remodeled the couple’s loft in Tribeca and easily grasped her clients’ shared aesthetic, which Sara, 51, called “archaic” and Henson called “contemporary medieval.”

Just over the threshold, stairs lined with Stick Sconce lights — a modern variant of antique metal sconces — led to a very spacious room. A kitchen area — dark with blackened steel and walnut veneered cabinets — is at the back, dining is in the middle and living at the sunny end. Light pours from black-framed and mullioned Brombal windows and clerestories on three sides. The far wall is all glass and looks south onto a stunning panorama of Los Angeles.

The room is filled with idiosyncratic objects — Henson’s cast from a childhood bone break, covered in cartoons by his father, Jim, and displayed in a case, like a relic; a Willy Daro bronze table; African masks chosen by Sara’s father, Jerome Sarapochiello, a former photographer, onetime draftsman for George Nelson and now, as Sara described him, “picker extraordinaire.”

Over coffee at a Finn Juhl teak dining table, under a chandelier made of bicycle chains, with Casper the longhaired dog underfoot, the couple explained why this room, about 900 square feet and 13 feet high, is the heart of the house.

“Mia loves to cook,” Henson, 54, said. “We also just felt like the whole grand-room lifestyle for a family really keeps you all connected, particularly today when everybody vanishes to different corners of the house.”

The couple took cues from an Irish medieval tower keep called Bunratty Castle they had once visited.

It wasn’t the dour architecture they wanted to emulate, clarified Sara, who worked closely with Becker on the design: “I didn’t want to do some oldy-worldy, strange medieval-looking thing in the middle of Los Angeles. But I liked the feeling because there are certain very elemental things like a central hearth and one big room with a sort of great hall.”

And, this being Los Angeles, the “great hall” has an indoor-outdoor aspect as evocative of Case Study houses as castle keeps.

Henson revealed this when he leapt up to turn the wheel of a heavy metal gear-and-chain contraption at the side of the west window. The window pivots like a garage door, opening up the room to a terrace for outdoor dining and to a zigzag pathway down to the pool and guest rooms.

The house, in other words, is both steampunk and greentech, Arthurian and Manhattanite, sumptuous and earthy.

Becker, who was mentored by Tom Kundig, a principal of Olson Kundig, through the design process, mixed blackened steel, a hallmark of the firm, with brass and copper. Floors and stair treads are antique fumed oak; the master bath and bedroom upstairs are separated by a sliding screen made of woven copper strips. The building, composed of intersecting volumes that step down and hug the hillside, has walls that are cast-in-place concrete or clad in stained cedar siding.

And where, you may wonder, are Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog? You won’t find them. With the exception of a mound of stuffed Muppets in the room of their 14-year-old daughter, Millie, and two stone stools on the deck with monster feet, the house does not scream goofy creatures.

Growing up, “we always owned workshops and those places are where you would find all the creatures and that feeling. But home was always home,” Henson said.

If the Henson empire is a looming nonpresence, so too is “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the cult 1986 movie directed by John Hughes and starring Sara as Sloane Peterson, Ferris’ luscious girlfriend. The topic comes up during a visit to the garage, which has two slender vertical windows (one for each Tesla) offering a sneak peek of the view.

Becker joked that she and her clients considered installing a large pane of glass in a “kind of a nod” to the window crashed through by a Ferrari that belonged to the father of one of Ferris’ friends. However, they did not want to tempt the couple’s children into reckless behavior (Sara’s son, Dash, from her marriage to Jason Connery, is now 21). “So we maintained this view, but it’s just now a little bit more modest.”

Solar panels carpet the roof of the garage, but fall just short of fully powering the house — ironically because the two e-cars chug too much electricity.

Nonetheless, the building, which also has a gray-water system, delivers a “super luxurious lifestyle” while being “environmental without being weird,” Henson said. “Weird,” he explained, describes “the people who can never turn their air-conditioners on,” even “when it’s really, really hot.”

That lifestyle is also about occupying a reasonable amount of space. The house, with its garage and mechanical systems, takes up about 4,200 square feet, on an almost 12,000-square-foot site. The family uses about 3,000 square feet, down from 5,000 in their previous home, and an area they believe is just right.

“Particularly in LA, everybody just goes big,” Henson noted.

“We don’t plan on ever selling the house,” he explained. “So the way I approached it was, how much less wealthy am I comfortable being to have a house that I will have forever and I’ll never get a return on the money?”

He likes to think the house sets an example for a certain class of owner: “I think this is the way wealthy people should live,” he said.