Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 1986

APRIL 2024 UPDATE: I got a tour of the inside of the Jardinette Apartments. Take a look at how the restoration progress is coming along.

Drive by the Jardinette Apartments today and you’re faced with the ugliness of urban decay. Broken windows, others boarded up, graffiti coating the security fencing. “NO TRESPASSING” and “CAUTION” signs up all over the place and a trash chute dangling from the upper story into a dumpster. The unsympathetic green and peach paint could use its “vibrance” levels turned up a couple notches. You’d never know this was one of the most significant pieces of architecture in the city.

The Jardinette Apartments were the first US solo commission for Richard Neutra, the architect known for injecting a European-style rigor to American modernism. Neutra had emigrated from Austria to the US in 1923, studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1924 and then moved to LA in 1925, living and working for five years with that other great Austrian émigré in LA, Rudolph Schindler (and both of their wives) at Schindler’s famous Kings Road house. 

Early on, Neutra and Schindler shared work and clients. Schindler brought on Neutra as landscape designer for the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, a pioneering work of the international style. In 1929 Neutra completed the Lovell Health House in the Hollywood Hills for the same client. In between, they collaborated on a design for the League of Nations, and formed a partnership called the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC) as a means of securing bigger commercial commissions. 

The opportunity came when Joseph H. Miller came to town. Miller was part of a syndicate of developers who purchased 7.5 acres in Hollywood with the intention of building seven large housing projects for employees in the growing film biz, both movie stars and the more workaday industry types. According to architectural historian Thomas Hines, Joseph Miller hired AGIC to build three apartment buildings after meeting Neutra at a party in 1927. By the following year the Jardinette Apartments were finished, but not before Miller went bankrupt, eventually skipping town to elude his creditors. Ownership of the building transferred to its contractor, who finished the job. Neutra’s wife would later say that AGIC was never paid for their work. Not for the Jardinette, or for the other two unbuilt designs that Neutra had completed for Miller.

The Jardinette’s Mills Act application from 2017 posits that Joseph Miller requested something more striking, more modern than the other apartment complexes going up all over Hollywood in the 1920s (e.g. Walker & Eisen’s Halifax Apartments and Leland Bryant’s Colonial House). Neutra was the exact right dude to hire. 

To truly understand what makes the Jardinette Apartments so special, it helps to know what was happening in Los Angeles architecture at the time. To be very reductive about it, the approach that defined a lot of residential and commercial buildings from the 1920s was essentially backwards-facing: Spanish colonial, renaissance revival, English tudor style, French chateau, Georgian colonial – they all adapted centuries-old European building styles. 

What Neutra brought with the Jardinette Apartments was something radically forward-facing. Sanborn maps show that for decades, the Jardinette was the only concrete building in the neighborhood. From the outside, it appears almost machine-like in its clean regimentation, with a flat roof, and horizontal bands of light concrete alternating with long stretches of steel-framed windows in neat stacks. Compared to the decorative facades of some of the other apartment complexes nearby, the Jardinette is downright spartan. There’s no ornamentation whatsoever on the walls, and in fact the only things keeping the exterior from being completely flat are the cantilevered balconies that open up the edges of the building.

There is a surface-level severity to the Jardinette Apartments, very much in fitting with the “international style” emerging in Europe with architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Neutra was inspired by advances in manufacturing and materials that could make housing stronger, cheaper and easier to replicate and customize out of standardized pieces. He was gung-ho about the machine age.

But Neutra didn’t ignore the human experience of living in a space, far from it. He thoughtfully arranged these 43 small units (each one from 403 – 693 square feet) to make them seem less cramped, even employing murphy beds in some units to maximize floor space, or translucent glass in the walls between rooms to help light penetrate deeper into the apartment. 

At the Jardinette, you’ll also see Neutra’s preoccupation with the health benefits of a life lived in communion with nature. Those generous bands of windows admitted tons of natural light, and those balconies came with built-in planters – pictures from the 1930s show vines spilling over the walls below. A breathless writeup in a 1928 issue of The Christian Science Monitor (unsigned, but written by Rudolph Schindler’s wife, Pauline) described the Jardinette as a harbinger of a garden utopia: “Light and sunshine flood the apartment house and create a new harmony of family life and contentment … Imagine the possibility of seeing an entire city block built up with these garden apartments … with balconies would yield the fragrance of many flowers.” It’s no mistake that the name “Jardinette” means “little garden.” 

Despite their difficult birth, the Jardinette Apartments made an impression quickly. An LA Times spread from early 1929 placed the Jardinette next to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House (see visit #21) and Schindler’s Lovell House in a pantheon of recent architecture defining “A New Art” in Southern California. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius was reportedly very impressed when he visited the Jardinette in 1928. Architectural great Harwell Harris was impressed enough with the Jardinette that he looked up Neutra in the phone book after seeing them, and ended up working for him for a few years. In 1932 the apartments were featured in a seminal MoMA exhibition, organized by architect Philip Johnson and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock, which laid down the tenets of the international style. Neutra was the only architect from the west coast to merit inclusion. And in 1937, the Jardinette Apartments were the only American apartment complex included in The Modern Flat, an influential book of 50 apartment buildings worldwide deemed “modern.” 

Though the Jardinette Apartments have changed hands many times over the 95 years since their construction, there’ve been very few major alterations to the building. There’s also been very little maintenance over the past 50 years or so, which has led to its current deteriorated, uninhabited state. 

In 2016 the Jardinette was purchased by Clippinger Investment Properties, with plans to rehab it. But by 2020 Clippinger’s lender foreclosed on the company, a sad call-back to the fate of its original owner Joseph H. Miller, 90 years earlier.

Late in 2020 Apollo Capital bought the Jardinette. I spoke with its owner, Cameron Hassid, about the slow pace of the restoration efforts. He explained that even though there were building permits on file from the previous owner, Hassid spent more than half a year getting permits in place for electrical and mechanical upgrades in the middle of COVID. As of mid-September 2023, Hassid says, the Jardinette was down to its studs to rewire and re-plumb. He brought on board Dr. Barbara Lamprecht, a Neutra scholar with a long history working on preservation efforts at the Jardinette, to ensure that any work on the building conformed to the Secretary of the Interior’s standards.

The plan, Hassid said, is to restore the Jardinette to as close to original as possible – but with LED bulbs, a mini-split ducted A/C system in the walls, and electric appliances to replace some of the original gas ones. There are 13 layers of exterior, mostly lead-based paint to scrape off before they can restore the original colors, and the custom steel-framed windows take a long time to replace.

Hassid told me that he hasn’t decided for sure whether the 43 units at the Jardinette will all be market-rate, or if Apollo will reserve some of them for subsidized housing. In the meantime, it’s nice to hear that at least they seem to respect the historic nature of the building. An examination in 2017, co-authored by Lamprecht, revealed a surprising amount of original interior doors, cabinetry and hardware still intact. So let’s hope none of that stuff ends up in the giant bin at the bottom of the chute. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Anderton, Frances: Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2022)

+ Barragan, Bianca: “Richard Neutra’s Jardinette Apartments are scheduled to sell at public auction” (Curbed LA, March 11, 2020)

+ Betsky, Aaron: “Neutra’s Radical, Free-Form Style First Took Shape in Hollywood” (Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1992)

+ Epstein-Mervis, Marni: “Looking Back at Richard Neutra’s First US Commission” (Curbed LA, April 25, 2014)

+ Hatheway, Roger G. & Richard Starzak: Jardinette Apartments’ NRHP nomination form

+ Hawthorne, Christopher: “Southern California architecture: the missing early years from PSTP” (Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2013)

+ Hines, Thomas S.: Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (Oxford University Press, 1982)

+ Kanner, Diane & Fred Chriss: “Pioneer Architect Neutra to Be Honored” (Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1992)

+ Lamprecht, Barbara, Matt Dillhoefer & Laura Orozco: Historic Structure Report: Jardinette Apartments (2017)

+ Marsak, Nathan: “The Jardinette Apartments: Will They Return from the Dead?” (RIP Los Angeles, September 29, 2023)

+ Millier, Arthur: “A New Art” (Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1929 – via ProQuest)

+ “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition – Feb 9–Mar 23, 1932” (moma.org)

+ Reiner-Roth, Shane: “The future of Richard Neutra’s first U.S. building remains uncertain” (The Architect’s Newspaper, March 12, 2020)

+ “Richard Joseph Neutra” (Neutra.org)

+ Winter, Robert: “Book Review: Neutra as Architectural Father Figure” (Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1983 – via ProQuest)