A triumph of light and space for mid-century modernist John Lautner, the Harpel House pointed the way to his later masterworks

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

This son-of-an-LA-architect is embarrassed to admit that prior to beginning Etan Does LA in September of 2021, I had never heard of John Lautner. It’s kind of like an LA rock fan who is unfamiliar with the Beach Boys, ya know? Brian Wilson and crew had a sound that was so quintessentially here – it felt like it was born out of the sun and sand and waves and asphalt. In a similar way, Lautner’s work feels very SoCal to me. He basically invented googie architecture, a style that still looms large in LA visual culture even decades after it faded. But Lautner’s best known as a prolific designer of private homes, which also feel aesthetically connected to LA, in their embrace of big open spaces and horizontality and sunlight – all things that this city has in spades. In a Lautner home, the main rooms tend to be oriented to the best view, as if the goal of being inside is to get you outside, where you’ll probably not be cold about 90% of the time. 

This is all to say that I had a lot of anticipation going into my first visit to a Lautner, the Harpel House, built in the Hollywood Hills in 1956 for sports radio announcer Willis “Bill” Harpel. Looking back on it, this was a great place to start on my Lautner journey. While the Harpel House may not be as immediately breathtaking as the gravity-defying Garcia House or the Chemosphere (more on that later), it crystallized a lot of the principles of organic architecture and mid-century modernism that influenced him, and also demonstrated some approaches that would become more prominent in his later work.

+Check out Lautner’s original floor plan for the Harpel House (Parson Architecture Blog)

This commission found Lautner experimenting with combinations of materials, especially concrete, wood and stone. In fact this was the first time that he used concrete so extensively. The house’s structural grid is organized around a series of concrete columns that support the wooden roof beams, so that there’s almost no need for interior walls; the columns extend to the exterior spaces too, one of the many ways that Lautner unites inside and outside with this home. Sure, these innovations are modest compared to the soaring concrete roofs of his Sheats-Goldstein residence or Silvertop. But they point the way there. 

Willis Harpel was by all accounts a great client, and even got involved with the construction alongside Lautner’s favorite builder John de la Vaux. Harpel poured the concrete himself, and chose the rocks from a local quarry that were used for the stonework throughout the house. When Harpel moved to Anchorage, Alaska in the mid-’60s, he hired Lautner to design a second home, the skull-crushingly awesome Harpel House #2 (which I will own one day and don’t you try and stop me). After only two years of living in it, Harpel died in a snowmobile accident – quite a way to go for such a colorful character.

As often happens, subsequent owners of the Harpel House didn’t understand Lautner’s design philosophy. They added a second story, remodeled the kitchen and removed some of the built-in furniture. Enter our hero: the Harpel House’s current owner Mark Haddawy, founder of Resurrection Vintage, who undertook a two-year “forensic restoration” of the home in 2008. He removed the second floor, went back to Lautner’s original plan, even re-created the custom triangle light fixtures. As you can see from the above video, Haddawy seemed legitimately moved by the poetry of this house, and respects the intentionality with which Lautner made his design choices. Haddawy is also responsible for the current restoration of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 21 (see Etan Does LA visit #52)…so fingers crossed that it turns out as well as Harpel did.

One thing that Haddawy added that was most definitely not in the original Lautner plans: a Futuro house, a plastic UFO-shaped orb on stilts that sits on the hillside above the main house. Designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, the Futuros were intended to be mass-produced and portable and usable in any environment. But the 1973 oil crisis hit after only about 100 of them had been manufactured…so now they’re ultra-collectible for the “I would be happy to spend $200,000 on a 26-foot-long egg” crowd. 

A note to Lautner-philes interested in visiting the Harpel House: all of the above info was gleaned from reading and looking at a lot of photos and videos. There’s simply not much to see from the house’s driveway on Torreyson Street (just south of Mulholland Drive), just some white pillars and a short rock wall, the flat roof profile and a sloping hill of greenery. The rest of the home is obscured by a gate, some trees and a circular building under construction (perhaps the guest house that was referenced here?). Your best bet is to befriend whoever is currently living at the Chemosphere, another iconic Lautner joint just up the street. I’ve read that its first owner, aerospace engineer Leonard Malin, met Lautner onsite at the Harpel House. I can only imagine how that conversation must have gone. “So you dig Willis’s house, huh? Except you wish that it was an octagon balancing on a pole? Sure, I think we can work something out…”

Recommended Reading

+Harpel House nomination form for NRHP (PDF)

+House tour: the mid-century home restored by a vintage enthusiast (Vogue, 2018)

+John Lautner’s Harpel House, 1956 (Parson Architecture Blog)