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With its marble floor, columns and archways, the interior of the new Getty Villa in the Malibu Hi

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The Getty Villa is designed to house the museum’s antiquities collections in an environment

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At the bottom of the list of things one might do with hundreds of millions of dollars would be to bury it, or to leave it virtually out of sight. Yet a large portion of the $275 million used to renovate J. Paul Getty’s replica of an ancient Roman villa will remain unseen – or at least unnoticed – by the thousands of visitors to the Malibu villa in the next six months, as it was used to fund a groundbreaking anchor-and-art support system to ensure that most of the 1,200 antiquities on display would remain unharmed in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster.

And the rest of the large renovation sum – which, incidentally, is comparable to the amount spent to build downtown’s Walt Disney Concert Hall from scratch – has been spent to amplify and improve a stunning visual and architectural statement from its inception into one of L.A.’s prime landmarks. But unlike Frank Gehry’s design for Disney Hall, which essentially ushered modernism into the city’s skyline, the Getty Villa, redesigned by Machado and Silvetti Associates, takes visitors back in time to the classical empires of Greece, Rome and Etruria. Consequently, the “renovation” actually becomes a “reimagination,” designed to evoke a “restoration.”

Oil tycoon and businessman J. Paul Getty originally conceived the idea for a replicated Roman villa to house his considerable collection of art, which was primarily based in Greek and Roman antiquities but also consisted of European paintings and furniture. The original architectural firm, Langdon Wilson, based its design on the floor plan of a Roman country house in Herculaneum, Villa dei Papiri, and completed the work in 1974. But years after Getty’s death in 1976 and his bequeathal of the majority of his estate to the J. Paul Getty Trust, the museum’s board of directors agreed that a more substantial museum needed to be built to showcase a larger part of the Getty collection as well as new pieces they were rapidly acquiring. The Getty Center, completed in 1997 and located in Brentwood Hills, served this purpose well.

With the opening of the substantially larger Getty Center, the board of directors needed to rethink the niche of the Getty Villa, and eventually decided to return its collection focus to that of its architecture – antiquity.

“They’re two distinctly different museums, but at the same time they’re very similar. The concept is one Getty but two locations,” said villa curator Karol Wight. “It’s true that the campus of the Getty Center is certainly much larger than that of the villa, which is a much more out-of-the-way, quiet, solitary place rather than having a huge urban view of the city of Los Angeles. But within both museum environments, these are very intimate spaces.”

The Getty board selected Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti to shift the focus of the villa’s galleries to antiquity, creating spaces that are in visual and historical harmony with the pieces that they display. Machado and Silvetti brought natural light into the galleries with the addition of 58 windows and additional skylights, which also give museum-goers a better sense of orientation within the building.

“You can see the landscape; you can see across; you can see people, and you can see where you came from and where you’re going, which you couldn’t do before,” Silvetti said. “It’s a very close relationship here between content and form.”

Machado and Silvetti’s work extends far beyond the villa itself. They designed an entirely new outdoor theater, cafe and conservation buildings for the villa grounds. The architecture of these buildings is original, not based on the classical influences that inspire the villa. Yet Machado and Silvetti skillfully integrate these diverse styles, resulting in a site that is cohesive and balanced.

The entry pavilion serves as the link between times and cultures, designed to complement the natural topography of the Malibu Hills, and creates the illusion of entering an excavation site not unlike the one surrounding the original Villa dei Papiri, upon which the Getty Villa’s floor plan was based.

“It is surreal in the sense that you walk into a hill, and you’re in a room that gives you the sense of being inside, in the earth, and the ceiling is the sky,” Silvetti said. “It sort of lifts you up and you just go up the stairs.”

Upon reaching the top of the stairs, visitors come to an open-air theater intended to continue the Getty’s long tradition of performing classical drama.

“We studied classical theaters; we visited them. We didn’t design one exactly like them, but we have the same geometry, sidelines and acoustics,” Silvetti said. “We had to create those conditions – the visual lines and the acoustics that would recreate the way these works were performed in antiquity.”

From the entrance alone, the villa grounds give visitors the impression of stepping back in time, from the cobblestoned roads at the entrance to the excavation-like descent to the villa itself. And this postrenovation villa actually doesn’t so much update itself as recreate itself in a more historically accurate context.

“We are working with a building that has its footprint in antiquity. This is a building that’s modeled after the Villa dei Papiri, and the room plans are based on domestic architecture from various other buildings and villas,” Wight said. “That house was not designed as a museum, so it’s very challenging to move from one room to another, and the rooms are of varying sizes, and none of them is really large.”

To make the villa’s design more accessible to its visitors, Wight and Getty leadership made the unconventional decision to organize the collection thematically, rather than by culture. Instead of galleries labeled as Greek, Roman or Etruscan art, the pieces are grouped together by content, resulting in galleries with titles such as “Gods and Goddesses,” “Mythological Heroes,” “The Trojan War,” and “Athletes in Competition.” Each piece’s label contains a time line revealing where the object fits into history.

“By organizing it thematically, we were able to rethink the collection, combine pieces that would otherwise never have the opportunity to be displayed next to each other because they’re Greek, Roman or Etruscan, and really to create an experience for visitors that doesn’t have a preordained path,” Wight said. “You don’t have to start in gallery A and end in gallery Z. You can look at your brochure, and look at the thematic galleries and really visit the parts of the collection that appeal to you the most.”

Part of the villa’s renovation included the art itself. Many of the antiquities with missing fragments were restored to resemble their original form as closely as could be determined.

“The trend now in museums around the world, not just at the Getty, is to put those restorations back on because we find the lack of body parts disorienting and disfiguring,” Wight said. “It’s hard for visitors to know what to look at when you’ve got a leg that stops here and a pole in between. It’s just not the kind of presentation that we want to make. In fact, we see previous restorations from earlier centuries as part of the modern history of the piece. Many of them are just as important as the ancient form. They were carved by leading sculptors of the day; they’re beautiful pieces.”

The beauty of individual sculptures or vases on display is occasionally matched by the beauty of the gallery space itself, as in the Basilica, where statues are arranged between classically designed columns; the Room of Colored Marbles, which contains 14 different varieties of marble in intricate designs across its walls and floor; and the spectacular Temple of Herakles, which houses the piece that was Getty’s favorite of his entire collection, the Lansdowne Herakles statue, surrounded by an elaborate, illusionistic circular marble floor modeled after a room in Villa dei Papiri.

The Mediterranean influence extends through the villa’s grounds in the classical Roman inner-and-outer peristyle gardens, traditional herb garden, and vegetation of olive trees, laurels and pomegranate trees among others.

All of these elements work together to create an entirely unique museum-going experience; the intimacy and design of the renovated Getty Villa infuse new life into the art itself, and allow visitors to imagine what it would have been like to view the pieces in their original displays.

“It’s not by any means the best museum building that you can think of, but it has the charm that it’s something else,” Silvetti said. “Visiting this museum brings to you the ambience of what the house of a very rich family in antiquity might have been like, and the environment where art was actually exhibited, because these houses were full of art.”

The Getty Villa officially reopened its doors to the public on Saturday, Jan. 28. Already, tickets (which are free, but need to be reserved in advance) are booked through July. For more information, visit www.getty.edu or call (310) 440-7300.