#163: John Lautner - Harvey House (Hollywood Hills)

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

In the only monograph on John Lautner that the architect himself participated in, the Leo M. Harvey House from 1950 gets barely any coverage – just a small photo in the chronology in the back. It seems a strange kind of neglect, especially from the vantage point of today, 25 years after the house was purchased and lovingly restored by actress Kelly Lynch and her husband, screenwriter Mitch Glazer. In the Harvey house Lautner designed an inventive, visually exuberant house that fits perfectly onto its majestic setting in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking the entire LA basin. What was there to be ashamed of?

One theory, advanced by Jan-Richard Kikkert & Tycho Saariste in their book Lautner A-Z, was that Lautner’s fraught relationship with the client soured the house for him. Leo M. Harvey was an inventor and businessman, the owner of the Harvey Aluminum Company, which pumped out new metal alloys for the aerospace industry at plants around the world. He was a self-made man, driven and committed to high standards, but also exacting and often unwilling to compromise. One of Lautner’s longtime project architects, Guy Zebert, remembered Harvey as “the only client who ever intimidated Lautner.” Lautner’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Honnold once recalled her stepdad’s “dinner table rages about the unreasonableness of the guy.”

Harvey also covered up his home’s warm wood walls with antique tapestries, and crowded Lautner’s highly modern spaces with French antiques and other signifiers of old-world luxury. Alan Hess wrote in a 2001 issue of Architectural Record that “its authentic nature was obscured even when the house was new…Lautner must have felt the house slipping away from him.”

Contentious as their relationship may have been, Harvey gave Lautner the biggest commission of his career so far, a 5000-square-foot opportunity to show what he could do with a big lot and a larger budget. In return Lautner gave him a highly unusual house compared to his neighbors in the Hollywood Hills – luxurious for sure, but aesthetically much more daring than a typical mansion on a hill.

The first thing you notice about Lautner’s Harvey House is its symphony of different textures. Floors might be polished stone, terrazzo or parquet; Arizona sandstone clads the exterior walls (at least, the parts that aren’t glass), with the occasional concrete column for variety. A melange of exotic satinwood, padauk and bleached mahogany adds warmth to the interior walls and built-ins, and rich pink or black marble line the bathrooms and fireplace (the latter was Harvey’s choice, not Lautner’s). Windows and doors are framed in aluminum, a winking homage to the metal that paid for this house.

At the Harvey House, we see Lautner playing with the geometric forms common in “organic architecture,” the philosophy of design inspired by Lautner’s former teacher (and employer) Frank Lloyd Wright. The Harvey is based around a central circle for the entrance court, with two rectangles extending to either side – the garage to the right, bedrooms to the left. Hugging the circle are the connected living room and dining room, plus a womb-like, wood-clad office space with a built-in desk and shelving. Seen from above, the floor plan looks like a worm crawling over a log, or maybe a sushi roll, midway through the process of getting rolled up by a bamboo mat.

That circular entrance court is easily the most distinctive feature of this house. It’s a huge space, with a thick central column supporting an indoor trellis of wooden beams that radiate out from the center. Concentric wood circles add some visual flair underneath the beams, and above the beams are much more tightly packed rows of wood slats to fill in the space. The entire effect is like being on the underside of a giant mushroom.

Lautner played with a similar, circular wooden roof at the Foster House, also completed in 1950, though on a much smaller scale. He would return to circular roofs and spaces over and over again throughout his career, at the Hatherell House, the Elrod, the Pearlman Cabin and the Harpel in Alaska, among others. There’s a difference at the Harvey House though, in that massive central column. Lautner tended to prefer his spaces unobstructed by internal supports. So why do it here? As it turns out, that column had a different role in the original design. When Harvey first moved in, half of that space was covered but unenclosed by walls, to direct the eye towards the Griffith Observatory on the east, and soften the division between indoors and outdoors. It wasn’t until over a decade later that Lautner was asked to enclose the space.

He would return to the house over the decades for slight remodels, adding a maid’s room and bathroom in 1963, a swimming pool a couple years later, and some small remodels for the home’s second owner, Dr. Chester Barnes. By the late 1990s, the house was in bad shape. Much of the beautiful wood had turned gray from weathering and roof leaks. Barnes had started adding bits of sheetrock to divide up the entrance area, but hadn’t finished the job. When it went up for sale in 1998 as a teardown, electrical wires were left dangling from the ceiling for the next owner to deal with.

Thankfully Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer saw the essence of this house, despite its sorry state. They ended up outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio for it. And although Lautner had died about five years prior, they hired the next best thing to restore the place, a true dream team of Lautner’s most trusted collaborators: Helena Arahuete, who had worked as an architect in Lautner’s office for 25 years and took over Lautner Associates after he died; Robin Poirier, a contractor who had worked closely with Lautner on numerous projects; and John de la Vaux, the legendary builder who originally constructed the Harvey House, 48 years earlier.

View towards the Griffith Observatory
View towards downtown LA
Pathway to ???

The restoration involved a careful balance between stripping the house back to its original design, and updating things that might have worked in 1950, but weren’t up to modern standards. They replaced the damaged wood and marble, got new aluminum frames, tore down those sheetrock additions and restored the chandeliers in the entrance court. They decided to keep the court enclosed, instead of going back to the original indoor-outdoor version. A small slit window in the master bathroom was expanded into a full window, to better take in the view. They also solved a watersealing problem in the original design, and replaced the hot-mopped asphalt roof (itself a replacement for the faulty concrete one that Lautner had originally designed) with a copper one. During a recent reception at the Harvey House organized by US Modernist, Lynch mentioned that the kitchen restoration was coming next. She said that they won’t take it back to Lautner’s tiny galley design, and they don’t need the maid’s quarters that he added in the ‘60s. But otherwise, the kitchen will end up as Lautner intended it.

Lynch and Glazer have hosted benefits for architecture organizations at the Harvey, chamber music concerts, even a 95th birthday party for famed architectural photographer Julius Shulman. The two of them recognize that what they have on their hands is not just a great house by an iconic architect. It’s also an opportunity to show what can happen when you treat a house as a living work of art, worthy of respect, preservation and sharing with others. And also the occasional video shoot: