Several years ago, Los Angeles designer Mark D. Sikes received a call from a couple who had recently purchased a pied-à-terre in Bel Air. An acknowledged master of interiors that combine history and tradition with an updated sensibility (who will soon be releasing his third book, Forever Beautiful), Sikes is no stranger to taking on projects with impressive provenance: a villa at Palm Beach’s legendary Colony Hotel, countless Hollywood manses, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden’s office in the East Wing of the White House. As it turned out, his soon-to-be clients’ home had its own cinema-worthy backstory, too.

In 1925, Italian-born silent-film star Rudolph Valentino, arguably the most famous man in the world at the time, went in search of a residence fit for a Hollywood prince. He landed on a white-stucco Italianate mansion, set behind iron gates in then-sparsely-inhabited Benedict Canyon, that had been built by the real estate baron George Read. Valentino filled it with antiques that he and his wife, costume designer Natacha Rambova, found in their far-flung travels, and dubbed it “Falcon Lair” after The Hooded Falcon, a film that the couple was planning to make. The film was never completed; tragically, the actor died a year later of complications from gastric ulcers, at age 31. But Falcon Lair, or at least the idea of it, has lived on through its various incarnations—and some remarkable inhabitants over the past century.

Although it was said to be haunted by Valentino’s ghost, the notoriously audacious Gloria Swanson, whose film Sunset Boulevard was set in a house not so different, rented it for a while; in 1953, it became the home of the troubled, dazzling tobacco heiress Doris Duke, who turned the stables where Valentino had kept his Arabian horses into a guest cottage. In 2006, after the property was sold and a planned restoration of the mansion scrapped, the main house was bulldozed. However, the three-bedroom, three-bath guesthouse—Falcon Lodge—remained intact, a flag in the sand of a more gracious era.

Several years ago, it was purchased by an East Coast couple: a documentary filmmaker who was often in L.A. for work, and her husband, an entrepreneur and philanthropist. They instantly knew that Sikes would be just the right person to transform it into a refuge that was modern and livable while still evoking the chic Mediterranean ethos of Hollywood’s early Golden Era.

Collaborating with the architect Marc Appleton, who also designed the profuse and verdant landscape, Sikes kept as many of the original details as possible—woodwork, plaster, tiles, and light fixtures. He wanted to recreate Old Hollywood’s unique alchemy of seaside Italian ease, Art Deco detailing, fine metalwork, and Craftsman contours. “The challenge was making those work within a functional layout, and having furnishings of the right scale that would evoke the feeling the owners were after,” he says.

Many of Sikes’s subtle interventions can be found in the outdoor spaces, which lend the house a relaxed, vernacular charm. In keeping with the Jazz Age aura, there is a cabana at the top end of the rectangular pool, fashioned from a custom burgundy-and-white-striped canvas. Surrounded by magenta bougainvillea, vintage planters, and wrought-iron chaises shielded by fringed umbrellas, the atmosphere is pure vintage Positano on a sunny summer day. For a walled garden off a guest room, Sikes created a Moroccan-inflected seating area with plenty of cushions, a line of hand-painted tiles, and banquettes upholstered in a deep maroon stripe.

Inside, the feeling is intimate—tailored but relaxed. And, as in the outdoor areas, stripes play a starring role. It is one of Sikes’s signature motifs; among his favorite interiors is the famous Tent Room at the Charlottenhof Palace in Potsdam, designed in 1824 by the famed architect and painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel as the summer residence of the prince who would become King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Sikes reinterpreted Schinkel’s bold visual innovation in the second-floor guest bedroom, where nearly every surface is now covered in a green-and-white Fermoie textile. With cozy slanted ceilings and windows overlooking a leafy canopy, “it feels like you’re in a treehouse,” he says.

A similar top-to-toe approach—which Sikes dubs “the power of one”—was used in the primary bedroom, where everything from the upholstered headboard and bench to the walls and curtains are done up in a gentle-yet-enlivening Carolina Irving floral stripe. “One of the things I love about stripes is that they have no gender, no hidden message,” says Sikes. “They comfort everyone.”

While the 3,000-square-foot house may be fairly modest in size, it doesn’t lack in ambition—nor do the owners’ grand plans for their Beverly Hills hideaway. They recently purchased the long-dormant property next door where the Falcon Lair mansion once stood, and have again enlisted Sikes to join their cause. Their dream? To build a house that honors the indomitable Hollywood legacy of the larger-than-life figures who once called it home.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 13 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!