Ring the bell and Laurie Frank soon appears with a gracious smile, delivering the warmest of welcomes before uttering so much as a word. She swings open an arched door dotted with 25 star-shaped windows, and shafts of sunlight sweep across the entry floor like little hands beckoning you inside.

By the time you reach the living room, the urge to kick off your shoes takes hold. The rippled teak floor, the intriguing silhouettes by artiste Qingnian Tang that stir the imagination, even the painstakingly selected shade of taupe paint warming the walls - it is all so peaceful, yet revitalising. It is so pleasant, you hate to mention October 27, 2004. But you must.

Painful memory

The fire, you say. How did it start? Frank pauses. The smile - the gentle one that can make strangers feel as if she is a long-lost friend - ebbs from her face. "By the time I got here, there were seven fire trucks," she says, shaking her head. "It was surreal." Surreal to her and news to many.

She was profiled in 2003 by a newspaper as a Martha Stewart-meets-Marie Curie party alchemist, throwing together an unlikely mix of friends and strangers for fabulous soirées at her home in the Hollywood Hills.

Entertainment-industry connections from her days as a screenwriter mingled with a circle of artistes from her new life as owner of Frank Pictures Gallery.

Guests remember the parties well. "She just would have this gathering of interesting people - some you knew, some you didn't, some you hadn't seen for ages. It was just a really fun, relaxed atmosphere," says Michael Besman producer of Georgia Rule and About Schmidt.

Short circuit

Back then, the cover photo showed a dinner host's dream: candlelight and fine food, guests lost in conversation. The 1926 Mediterranean, once owned by Maurice Chevalier, glowed with good cheer. Sixteen months later, the home was gone.

A passing jogger was the first to notice something amiss and knocked at the neighbouring house. Frank Newcomer answered the door. "I opened it and a woman calmly said,

‘Did you know the house next door has black smoke rising from it?'" says Newcomer, who went out in stocking feet to investigate. An electrical short in a clock had turned Laurie Frank's kitchen into an orange ball of fire .

Newcomer and a neighbour broke into the house and beat back the flames until the fire crews arrived to finish the job. Meanwhile, the calls went out: Where's Laurie? Neighbours phoned friends, friends called party acquaintance, and word spread through Frank's vast network of dinner companions.

Devastating sight

The subject of their frantic search, it turns out, was on her way to friend Ana Roth's birthday party and not even Frank knew that her cellphone battery was dead.

By the time she arrived at the restaurant, Roth was waiting with the news. The two drove back together, arriving to find the flames already subdued. "It didn't look that bad from the outside," Roth says. "But the water damage was the worst. When she went inside, it was devastating."

Dozens of friends and neighbours, who had heard about the fire, converged - to lend their support. In some ways it was a classic Laurie Frank get-together, except the party was more like a wake, the poached salmon and caviar potatoes replaced by soot and smoke. The devastating loss was offset by the relative pleasure that came with moving into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, courtesy her insurance company, while plans for rebuilding took shape.

Frank began collecting replacement furniture and stored it at her art gallery. Visitors began flocking in specially to see her latest decorating purchases and some asked to buy her epic sofa designed by Julia Winston Adams or the hand-soldered, hand-painted metal dresser, a ‘completely bizarre' piece that Frank says is her new favourite.

But for every pleasant surprise, she endured a dozen setbacks. As a resident in a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, Frank needed all building plans to be approved by a board that could not gather a quorum for six consecutive months, she says.

Near-record rainfall deluged Los Angeles that first winter, delivering more than 17 inches of precipitation in one 15-day period. Whatever had not been ruined by smoke or doused by firefighters' hoses was soaked by Mother Nature. Construction ground to a halt. Then came news from the insurance company: It would pay for the Marmont no more. "She was kind of scared," Besman says. "She was wondering how long before the insurance money ran out. It was incredibly stressful."

Familiar comfort

He took Frank in, letting her use his basement as her home for the next year-plus as construction dragged on.

What is most amazing about Frank's home today is that you would never know that it - and she - had been through so much. Walls, windows and furniture may be new, but the place feels lived-in and familiar - comforting, like the face of a childhood friend.

"This house has been my husband. In many ways, it has been my most fulfilling, most difficult and most exciting relationship. Hanging onto it has been the focus of my life," Frank says.

In the rebuilt kitchen, Frank's vintage O'Keefe & Merritt stove has been re-enamelled to its original fire-engine red and a 200-year-old carpenter's table now serves as her island.

Artiste Greg Jezewski took cedar window frames and doors salvaged from a demolished house in Morocco and crafted them into Frank's glass-fronted kitchen cabinets and closet doors.

The Moroccan motif is carried outside to the concrete tile on her deck, whose railings echo the star pattern that is on the front door.

What used to be the dining room is now a sitting area, facing a wall of photographs taken by the celebrated Horace Bristol from the early 1930s to the mid-Fifties.

The living room is equally warm and gracious in the daylight. Soft sunshine spills from the new dining room, formerly the sunroom, where windows frame that most prized LA work of art: a view.

Friends struggle to define the finished product, complaining that no single label does justice to the house or the woman who calls it home. Besman spins through several words - warm, loving, adventurous, fun - before finally settling on an apt adjective. "Canny," he says. "Canny about people, trends, taste." Daddy, Frank's dog, for a rare moment, rests quietly on the floor. The house is quiet, almost too quiet, but not for long.

By Craig Nakano, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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