Tour a Netflix Executive’s Hollywood Hills Home, Defined by Low-Key Drama

Peter Friedlander cannot help but identify analogies that connect his professional life in the entertainment industry to creating a home for himself in Hollywood. “I felt like this house was telling a fun story,” he recalls about his first encounter with the sloped hidden gem set in a hillside neighborhood. “The way that it was nestled into the hill, the long entryway, the drama of driving up the driveway—and the reveal” made the property immediately tracking-shots-worthy to Friedlander, Netflix’s head of scripted series for the US and Canada.

The angular two-level structure originally built in the early 1970s hews to elements of its Hollywood locale as a romantic ideal. Sheltered by mature trees with adjacent rambling terrain and the LA basin unfurling in the distance, the juxtaposition of the natural and manmade worlds generates a certain magic. “I was excited about all of those geographical features and the beauty of the trees, and the hillside and the quiet,” Friedlander observes. “It’s a nature retreat.”

After engaging Fleetwood Fernandez Architects to alter aspects of the flow and fenestration, he needed guidance navigating the house to the next act. While it was already well-suited to a regular party host who values privacy, its whitewashed, anodyne interiors called for a heady dose of imagination and verve. Enter production and interior designer Gille Mills, whose own narrative-rich Echo Park home impressed Friedlander.

At the terminus of the long driveway, Mills interrupted the rectilinear bright façades and warmed up the front entrance with darkened wood paneling, along with ladybug-inspired sculptures by Andres Monzon-Aguirre mounted above a 1970s Italian vintage wood bench from Lawson-Fenning.

Mills’s eagerness to craft a residence with lasting personal significance—in other words, a shift away from his decades spent constructing ephemeral photoshoot sets on blink-and-you-miss-it timeframes—was an intuitive match. “I have a no-rules approach, but it’s got to feel right in my gut,” Mills, an AD PRO Directory designer, says. “So much of the creative partnership is if you share that energy,” adds Friedlander. Even though he came to the project with expertise in shepherding complicated collaborative endeavors and a lifelong interest in architecture and design, he considered himself somewhat of a novice. “[Mills] really did feel like the right energy, and I trusted him very quickly,” continues Friedlander.