WHEN IN ROME.(Getty Museum, Malibu, California)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 27-FEB-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the nineteen-seventies, the Getty Museum built itself a home in Malibu, California, in the form of an imitation Roman villa from the first century. There was something undeniably kitschy about the notion of putting a make-believe classical villa atop a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean and calling it a museum, but nobody seemed to mind. This was Los Angeles, after all, and so what if the overdecorated galleries, with their damask wall coverings and trompe-l'oeil murals, gave the museum's interior the feeling of a mogul's mansion in Bel Air? Then the Getty grew up. In 1976, its eccentric founder, the oilman J. Paul Getty, died, leaving the bulk of his multibillion-dollar estate to the museum, which suddenly became the world's richest cultural institution. The museum morphed into the Getty Trust and spent a billion dollars constructing the Getty Center, a pristine modernist campus by Richard Meier, on top of a steep hill in Brentwood, thirteen miles east of Malibu.

The trust was obviously eager to leave behind its arriviste beginnings, and the villa could easily have become the most upscale condo conversion in Los Angeles history. Instead, the Getty came up with a more imaginative, and more costly, idea: it decided to give...

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