“It’s the feeling of hearing Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’ song for the first time, or enjoying a film projection of an old movie from a warm jacuzzi while drinking a cold beer. It’s the summer breeze with sparklers, sandy hair, and the smell of fresh flowers in the morning.” That’s how Shelby Duncan describes, in the pages of House of Love, what the house on Canyon Drive was between 2009 and 2015: less an address than a feeling.

The house itself was real enough: a classic California craftsman tucked beneath the giant white Hollywood sign, not far from Griffith Park, with a big backyard, a vintage pool, a guesthouse, and a garage studio that sheltered a rotating cast of traveling artists over the years. The door, they say, never closed. “The rule number one and biggest privilege in this house was that you were allowed to show up exactly as you are,” Shelby and Saraï sum up. No invitation, no guest list, just that one unspoken clause that held, for six years, for the 500 artists who passed through House of Love.

What the photographs tell comes closer to a night that never ends. Sparklers and fireworks set off in the backyard, a couple diving fully clothed into a pool ringed with banana trees, watermelons split open by hand for an impromptu shoot, a costume party where a bride in white tulle brushes shoulders with a guest in face paint drinking straight from a jar. On one wall, a mosaic of Polaroids gathers dozens of faces, some anonymous, some not yet famous, all caught in the same half-drunk, half-sincere grin. Elsewhere, in a dim bar, a man holds up a woman tipping backward, hair falling loose, mouth open; the photograph, like so many here, wants nothing more than that particular kind of vertigo.

People fell in love at House of Love as readily as they danced, and it often started in the kitchen. Pantea Ghaderi met both loves of her life there, years apart: “I met both of them in the kitchen years apart from each other, but both changed the course of my life. The first made me a better version of myself and showed me a new way of being and loving. And the second, well he gave me the greatest gift of all, he made me a mother to our twins.” Antoine Debarge sums up that same kitchen more economically: “This kitchen gave me two magical twins, thank you Tefal.” One assumes the pan is still around somewhere. Mégane Quashie found something else in the house: “My heart heals within the walls and the hands of people who pass through the House of Love,” she writes, adding that she learned “how to love again, but more importantly how to love myself again.” A secret garden for Melody Ehsani. A lost paradise for Emmanuel Fansten.

The music never stopped either. Every chapter of the book opens with a playlist put together by Shelby and Saraï: 1950s doo-wop, Woodstock rock, disco funk. Phoenix rehearsed their guitars there before filling the Hollywood Bowl. Mathieu Chedid wrote a song about it, La Maison de Saraï (“Saraï’s House”). One photograph shows Johnny Hallyday from behind, backstage, lighting a cigarette among the amplifiers; having come to dance for a full night, he would later say he hadn’t felt that kind of energy since the seventies, running around with Keith Richards. His wife, Laeticia Hallyday, remembers a freedom rediscovered, a creative period that “became a way of coming back to life,” a light “fragile, intense, and full of gratitude.”

Léa Seydoux, 2010 © Shelby Duncan

The visiting celebrities weren’t spared the rule either. For Léa Seydoux, a bubble in which to feel safe, a house that “will stay in my mind forever.” For Rebecca Zlotowski, a scattered memory, “a collection of images, snapshots, fragments of light,” with Saraï’s bathroom forever resurfacing. For Tessa Thompson, a place “where you could be idle while still buzzing with life.” For Jim Sturgess, freshly landed from London, the Los Angeles he’d been looking for all along, “a collective for the strange and the wonderful.” For Cécile Cassel, a dream of weightlessness: “I thought I could fly. See you soon, House of Love…” All it took, to half believe it, was climbing onto the roof.

Jena Malone remembers that roof quite literally. “I remember getting to know Shelby through heartbreaks and rebirths, all the way up to her small room under the eaves. Climbing onto the roof. That roof, I will always remember it.” Even now, she says, driving through the Franklin neighborhood is enough to make her shoulders drop, and to bring back the urge to “go looking for a little trouble and some good conversation.”

My Prince, 2015 © Shelby Duncan

2015 © Shelby Duncan

What remains is the definition Shelby Duncan offers, in the text that opens the book, of whatever kept the house standing for six years: “Love is not always easy. Love is challenging. Love tests us. Love is hard. Love is painful. Love is vulnerable. Love is the opposite of control.” And further on: “We all surprised each other. We all celebrated each other. We all valued each other.” Rock’n’roll, House of Love? No doubt. But above all, a lesson in hospitality, learned somewhere between a jacuzzi, a fireworks show, and a Stevie Wonder song.

That same energy is being revived in Arles, where the Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz is showing “House of Love” as part of Les Rencontres d’Arles through October 4: the exhibition hangs Polaroids, prints, and handwritten notes the way they once hung on the kitchen walls of Beachwood Canyon. The book itself, published by the agency 37.2 Paris after four years and roughly two hundred and fifty testimonies, is its paper trace. The house closed its doors in 2015. What’s left is that same half-drunk, half-sincere grin, still visible on every Polaroid on the wall.

House of Love****, by Shelby Duncan, is published by 37.2 Paris. The exhibition is on view at Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, in Arles, France as part of Les Rencontres d’Arles festival, through October 4, 2026.

Curators: Shelby Duncan, Nicolas Huet Greub – Major partners: 37.2, La Hune, YellowKorner, LabKorner, Everest

House of Love: The Party, the Love, and a Roof No One Will Forget