Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 25, 2013

Architect Richard Neutra is best known for his modernist single-family homes in Southern California. The Lovell Health House in Los Feliz, the Van der Leeuw Research House in Silver Lake, the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs – all icons of modernism that challenged prevailing ideas of how space, materials, nature and people could interact in a home. 

Neutra was also a believer that good design should be accessible to people at lower rungs on the socioeconomic ladder, and throughout his career he built some wonderful multi-family dwellings. His first solo commission after he moved to LA in the mid-1920s was an apartment complex, the Jardinette Apartments (completed in 1928), considered one of the very first international style buildings in America. Neutra would also return again and again to the Westwood neighborhood, just west of the UCLA campus, to design four apartment complexes within a three-block radius: the Strathmore (1937), Landfair (1937), Kelton (1941) and Elkay Apartments (1948).

The eight-unit Strathmore Apartments are great examples of Neutra’s unique ideas in action. Stylistically, these are quintessential international style buildings. The white stucco walls, arranged at right angles with no ornamentation, horizontal ribbons of windows, flat roofs, asymmetrical massing – all hallmarks of the style. The silver doors and trim scan as industrial at first glance. But Neutra also believed that an organic connection with nature was part of good architectural design, and required for human wellbeing. His multi-tiered plan for the Strathmore allows plenty of spaces for flora to flourish throughout the complex. The deeper you penetrate the walkway toward the uppermost apartments, the more it feels like you’re entering a modernist jungle, full of ferns and eucalyptus, rhododendron and pittosporum. The landscaping here is just unreal, and it provides the perfect bulwark between the living spaces and the busy street. 

The apartments themselves reflect Neutra’s belief that architecture should be tailored to the needs of the individual. They each have a unique floorplan, despite sharing stylistic elements. The terraced design, long walkways and inset balconies all afford a surprising degree of privacy. And the clean lines and flat planes that dominate Neutra’s interiors function as blank canvases for the tenants to let their own styles take over. In the words of the Strathmore’s NRHP nomination form, “[Neutra’s] architecture could respond to the specific needs of any occupant through a unified generic language.”

When the Strathmore was built in 1937, Westwood was just a decade old and still developing. Neutra purchased the property as an empty lot from the Janss Investment Co., owners of all the land that would become UCLA and Westwood Village. Pictures from just after the Strathmore’s completion show a bare hill to the north, and a tree-less dirt patch just behind the top apartments. Those gleaming white walls and rows of windows must have been quite a sight.

The Strathmore was built at a fascinating time for housing in the US. Americans were still grappling with the Great Depression, and there was a lack of affordable housing options available for many. The Federal Housing Administration was established in 1934 to help borrowers take out loans with low interest and lower down payments. The government also encouraged developers and architects to find new ways of building dense, small housing with cheaper materials.

In 1937, Richard Neutra and his wife Dione got a government loan to build a garden apartment with eight units. Originally it was to be just four, but they joined forces with a partner named Adele Friedman who wanted to build a four-unit complex of her own. The Neutras’ goal was to bring Dione’s parents, Alfred and Lilly Niedermann, out to Los Angeles to live closer to their kids, and to rent out the remaining units to tenants. 

The Neutra in-laws moved in in 1938, and they were just the beginning of the parade of notables that lived at the Strathmore. Orson Welles and his lover Dolores del Rio lived here for a spell. So did Luise Rainer, the first actor to win multiple Oscars. John Entenza, who spearheaded the Case Study House program at Arts + Architecture magazine, lived in a unit in the ‘50s. Photographer Eliot Elisofon, composer Vernon Duke, director Vincente Minnelli, playwright Clifford Odets…all residents of the Strathmore. It’s telling that so many creatives found Neutra’s elegant boxes to be conducive to their life and work.

This was also where the renowned designers Charles and Ray Eames lived and worked from 1941 through 1949, just before they moved into the Eames House, aka Case Study House #8; it was in Strathmore Unit 11013 ½ that the Eameses created their “Kazam! Machine” for bending laminated wood, a signature part of their furniture design. 

Ray Eames wrote the following about the Strathmore: 

[Neutra’s] long-developed architectural simplicities impose no style on the tenants, but leave them free to create their own surroundings through color, texture, use of area and objects and equipment needed for everyday life and activities.

In such a shell each family creates its environment without forced direction through architectural details. Our particular needs were set by a pattern of work, which made the prime function of our apartment one of providing moments of calm and rest and pleasure at the beginning and end of each day. It is intended, quite selfishly and quite necessarily, for individual needs rather than to provide a setting for entertainment.

-Ray Eames, undated article in an unknown publication

Charles had lovely things to say, too. Here’s a letter he wrote to Neutra in 1949:

Dear Mr. Neutra, 

This is a thank you note I have been intending to write for the past seven years. During these seven years Mrs. Ray Eames and I have been living in the Strathmore Apartments designed by you. It is an experience that has greatly added to the richness of our lives, and it is obvious that it has had the same effect on others living in the group of apartments. Strangely though, this feeling has no relation to the tastes and background of the tenants in that they were modern or conventional. The apartments you have developed here have given each the opportunity to develop his surroundings in the most expansive way, each feeling that he is living within his own garden, and has complete privacy. I wish there were more like these so that people could enjoy them. Thank you again for what you have done.

Sincerely,

Charles Eames

P.S. You perhaps know that at no time has there been a vacancy in this group of apartments.

-Charles Eames to Richard Neutra, March 18, 1949

There are still very rarely any vacancies in the Strathmore. After being owned by the Neutra family for decades, the complex is now divided into four separate condos on the north side, with a single owner owning the four units on the south side. The last time one of the condos sold was in 2017.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Strathmore Apartments’ NRHP nomination form

+Lamprecht, Barbara: Small Neutra Houses (Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles, 2020)

+Strathmore / Neutra / Eames (Esoteric Survey, 2013)

+Webb, Michael: “Neutra Strathmore Apartments Threatened” (Architect’s Newspaper, 2009)

+Williams, Kelsey Rose: “Eames and the Strathmore Apartments” (for Eames Office, 2018)

+Barragan, Bianca: “One of Neutra’s Strathmore Apartments in Westwood can be yours for $815K” (Curbed LA, 2017)

+”Richard Neutra” (LA Conservancy)

+“Richard Joseph Neutra” (Neutra.org)

+Hines, Thomas S.: “Knowing Neutra” (Dwell, Jul-Aug 2006)

+Eames, Charles & Ray: An Eames Anthology: Articles, Film Scripts, Interviews, Letters, Notes, Speeches. Edited by Daniel Ostroff (2015)