Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 19, 2016

Two decades before he landed an octagonal spaceship on top of a pylon at his famous Chemosphere house, architect John Lautner designed a small home for his family to live in, on the downhill side of Micheltorena Street in Silver Lake. It was the first house that Lautner designed by himself. It’s only 1,244 square feet, and it cost just $4500 to build. But in its modest footprint, you can find many of the creative details and forward-thinking spatial ideas that would define his early work.

“It captures very much how Lautner approaches the making of space, the making of structure,” says Frank Escher, co-founder of Escher GuneWardena Architecture. “It’s a very significant house, both in his career, as well in – I would argue – the architectural history of Los Angeles.” Escher has a long history with Lautner. He worked closely with Lautner for over two years on the monograph John Lautner, Architect, administered the John Lautner Archive from 1995-2007, and now serves on the board of the John Lautner Foundation. In the late ‘90s, Escher’s firm was involved with restoring the Chemosphere; they’re now restoring the house on Micheltorena. 

The Context

Lautner designed the house in 1939, soon after moving to Los Angeles with his wife MaryBud. It was a time of transition for him, both personally and professionally. They had a new baby, their first daughter Karol, and after five years of apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner was ready to strike out on his own. 

Los Angeles before WWII was a haven for cutting-edge architecture. The fertile arts and entertainment communities out here attracted free-thinking (and often quite wealthy) clients, willing to commission outré houses from architects with big ideas. Art deco was changing the dominant look and feel of major commercial and government projects (consider that 1939 was the same year that LA’s Union Station opened), and the rapidly developing city gave architects, urban planners and landscapers new opportunities to experiment with how neighborhoods could be organized.

In this context, we can look at Lautner’s house on Micheltorena (what Escher’s partner Ravi GuneWardena calls Lautner’s “Opus 1”) as a calling card, a proof of concept for what he could do. It was something of a tradition for great LA architects to build radical homes for themselves. Rudolf Schindler’s house on Kings Road was completed in 1922; Lloyd Wright designed his studio and residence in 1927; Richard Neutra built the original VDL Research House in 1932, and expanded it around the same time that Lautner was building his own home just across the Silver Lake Reservoir. 

The calling card approach worked. A year after it was completed, architecture critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote in House Beautiful magazine that the John Lautner House was “the best house in the United States by an architect under 30.” He attracted a dozen or so clients in the early ‘40s, and Lautner would tell an interviewer with the UCLA Oral History Program that “10, 15 years later, somebody would come to me, and they’d say, well, they saw this little house that I built for myself 10 years ago, and they remembered it, and they wanted me to do something…I started right from scratch the way Mr. Wright did and built up my practice from my own work, without any PR or promotion or sales or anything.”

The Home

The piece of land the Lautners purchased was far from ideal for building a forever home. “These roads, they were cut into the hills, and they would always push the dirt to the downhill side,” describes Escher. “All these downhill lots on Micheltorena have a lot of fill. So he develops a house on this very difficult little site, it’s narrow at the street, it widens to the back, it’s very steep.” There’s an incredible photo of the house (see above) from right after it was built, sitting on a barren hill with a few sparse trees in the background.

Lautner had recent experience with compact homes on difficult lots. The same year he designed his house on Micheltorena, he oversaw construction of Wright’s Sturges House, built on a steep hillside in Brentwood. The original contractor for both the Sturges and the Micheltorena homes was Paul Speer, who would build many of Lautner’s designs over the years. 

For his own home, Lautner conformed the living space to the slope by introducing separate sections, each separated by short sets of steps, so you would move downwards gently. “At street level, you have the carport, then you have a few steps going down to the entrance, and that is at the same level as the dining room and the kitchen,” explains Escher. “Then there’s a few steps down again to the living room…and the living room opens out to the views.” From the living room, you would open a door to the balcony, which then leads to two bedrooms and a bathroom. 

Lautner opens up the small space in creative ways. The floorplan resembles something of an exploded hexagon, which means most of the corners are wide, obtuse angles. The living room/dining room/kitchen flow freely into each other with just a short dividing wall to separate the dining area from the rest of the space. The sloped roof also helps increase the perception of openness, drawing the eyes out to the amazing view – you can see all the way across Los Feliz to the Griffith Observatory. And if you prefer to experience your flora a bit closer, the dining area opens out to an enclosed patio garden, sunken below street level. 

While Lautner would later bend concrete and steel to his will, early on he was drunk on wood (see Schaffer House, Etan Does LA visit #76). At the Micheltorena house, he used stained redwood (later painted a deep wine color for the streetside exterior) for the exterior, the door and window frames and the ubiquitous built-in furniture; the living room floors were most likely mahogany. There’s also a fireplace made of humble firebricks, topped by clay tiles that are oriented vertically, a nice visual counterpoint to the rest of the home’s horizontality. “He had an incredible sense of material, what each material can be used for,” says Escher. “You can tell that in these small houses.”

The Changes

On the westernmost side, furthest downhill, the house is supported by a massive solid wall. Originally the space behind the wall was empty, but in 1945, Lautner converted some of it into an office for himself, added drawers and cupboards and a drafting table, etc. In the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, after Lautner had moved out (more on that later), the open balcony was enclosed to offer more privacy en route from the living room to the bedrooms. A later owner converted the remaining crawlspace into a storage area by adding a concrete floor and support walls.

Escher GuneWardena are currently working on a multi-pronged restoration and remodel for the home’s new owner. They’ve brought in a team with deep ties to Lautner, including one of his favorite engineers, Andrew Nasser, who collaborated with Nous Engineering on the structural portion of the project. Also on board is general contractor Roban Poirier, who worked with Lautner extensively on numerous projects in the latter part of his career.

There’s a ton of structural work to be done, repairing some of the damage that the house sustained in the ‘94 Northridge earthquake, and ensuring it doesn’t come crashing down the hillside. They are also restoring much of the upper level to its original condition, removing part of the balcony enclosure, cleaning surfaces, returning the exterior walls and concrete floors back to their original colors – that kind of stuff. 

They’re also working on transforming the crawlspace into a studio apartment, something that will deliberately not look like Lautner designed it. “In historic preservation, there are guidelines from the Secretary of the Interior that when you’re dealing with historic buildings, new interventions need to be recognizable as such,” says Escher. “But then, how do you distinguish this? How do you differentiate this? What is the architectural language? Those are decisions that the architect has to make.”

John Lautner didn’t live in the house for very long. In 1947, he and MaryBud separated and eventually divorced. She kept the house and the kids and remarried, and he left to start a life with Elizabeth Honnold, who at the time was the wife of Lautner’s architecture partner Douglas Honnold. 

Despite Lautner’s short time living here, it was a vitally important home for him, for reasons both personal and professional. For architecture fans, it’s of course a crucial one from a historical perspective. But it’s also just a terrific house, “an absolute gem,” in Escher’s words.

“There’s not a lot of other Lautner projects that I would like to do,” he says. “We’ve restored the Chemosphere; we did all the drawings for the Harpel guesthouse that is now under construction…But because it’s such an important, very beautiful house, it’s not just any old house, it’s Lautner’s own house. All of that combines to make this a really terrific project to work on.”

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Endless gratitude to Frank Escher for his generosity in answering my questions about Lautner and this house. Also thanks to Tristan Walker, Project Manager at Escher GuneWardena, for providing the treasure trove of images included in this post. 

Recommended Reading/Watching

+NRHP Multiple Property Submission (PDF): Residential Architecture of John Lautner in Southern California, 1940-1994

+Interview of John Lautner (UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research, 1982)

+The Only Home John Lautner Ever Built for Himself Is Listed for the First Time in Decades (Dwell, 2020)

+Interview with Frank Escher & Ravi GuneWardena, shot at Lautner’s home (Sci-Arc Channel on YouTube)

+LA Before 1940 (LA Conservancy)