Added to the National Register of Historic Places on 7/24/2013

The Stahl House’s reputation precedes it. It’s backdropped countless movies and magazine shoots. It was one of just two privately-owned houses on an AIA list of America’s Favorite Architecture, and was featured in perhaps the most famous photograph of Los Angeles, ever. Its design and significance have been evaluated in essays and magazine articles for 65 years, and the consensus is clear: the Stahl House rules. Whether you’re looking at it as architecture, or from an engineering perspective, or as an avatar for the mid-century modernist era, or as a way of understanding the cultural changes afoot at the end of the 1950s…it just rules. 

But somehow I assumed that it would be bigger, that a home with a reputation so outsized would take more than a couple minutes to walk through. At one story and 2,300 square feet, the Stahl House was larger than average for a new house built in 1960, but tiny by the standards of most other historic homes I’ve covered. 

It’s not just the size of the Stahl House that’s unexpected, it’s also the startling simplicity of its form. Two wings wrap around a pool and jacuzzi in an L shape. One wing is dedicated to the living/dining room space and kitchen, really just one long flow interrupted by a standalone fireplace; the other wing houses two bedrooms and a carport. There’s a bathroom, dressing room and service area in the axis. And that’s it. Steel frame, floor-to-ceiling glass on pretty much every wall that doesn’t face the street, some very deep eaves to block out the sun, and a big concrete pad with the two swimming holes sunk into it.

And then there’s that view, the main character in this architectural composition, the thing that every part of the Stahl House is oriented towards. If this home were on the floor of the San Fernando Valley, there’d be a privacy fence around the rim of the pool area, blocking out the neighbors. Up here on a crest in the Hollywood Hills, there’s no barrier between you and an infinite panorama of Los Angeles. On a clear day you can see all the way to Catalina Island. At night, the lights of the city glow below, like a carpet of fireflies. It’s no wonder that the Stahl House’s evening tours are always the first to sell out. 

There’s a lot to talk about regarding the place that the Stahl House occupies in architecture history and the ingenuity of Pierre Koenig, the young architect who designed it. We’ll get to all that in a bit. First we need to meet the people who dreamed up this house.

This home with a view fit for royalty was built for Buck and Carlotta Stahl, “a blue collar couple with white collar dreams,” as their children Shari & Bruce describe it in their book The Stahl House, Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon.

Clarence Henry “Buck” Stahl grew up in St. Louis, the son of a milkman and a homemaker. At 6’3” with a predilection for wrestling and football, he was a natural athlete. But he also showed early interest in drawing and painting. He was the kind of guy who could find work as both a logo designer and a physical fitness instructor for the Navy during WWII. After the war, Buck started designing film posters, including some for Howard Hughes. That connection earned him a job as a purchasing agent for Hughes Aircraft in 1950. And when one day he visited the plane manufacturer North American Aviation on a sales call, he met Carlotta, the blonde receptionist smiling at him at the front desk. 

Carlotta was a Los Angeles native, raised among the bean fields of still-rural Culver City. Her dad ran a rare coin business while her mom ran the house. Carlotta’s brother described her as “the most stubborn bugger I think I ever met” but also “the most popular gal at school,” known for her infectious laugh. When she first brought Buck home, Carlotta’s parents disapproved of their relationship because of the 17 year age gap (he was 41, she was 24 when they met). But their love for each other was undeniable, and in 1954, they got married in Las Vegas. It was the second marriage for each of them.  

The newlyweds lived in Buck’s apartment on Hillside Avenue, a small street on the southern tip of Laurel Canyon. In those days, the Hollywood Hills weren’t nearly as built up with airborne mansions as they are today. So when Buck and Carlotta first gazed across the canyon and saw the outcropping where they would one day build their dream home, it would have all been dirt and chaparral. 

One day in the spring of 1954, they took Buck’s convertible up to the dirt lot they’d been eyeing since they got married. In one of those coincidences so unlikely that it almost doesn’t seem real, the developer who owned the lot, George Beha, just happened to be driving up from La Jolla to inspect it himself, at the same time the Stahls were there. The land was the smallest parcel that Beha marked out in his tract, 5,500 square feet in total, but it was still more than the Stahls could afford without a mortgage. Within a couple hours, Buck & Beha hammered out a deal. The Stahls would purchase the lot for $13,500, with Beha holding the mortgage. They’d have to pay it off in full before they could start building. 

Over the four long years before groundbreaking could begin, the Stahls kept laser-focused on prepping the property for their home-to-be. On weekends they would drive to construction sites throughout the city, asking for pieces of broken concrete that they’d load into the convertible, and cart up the precarious road to their lot. Buck laid those concrete chunks down into retaining walls, arranged in terraces. To fill the gaps between the chunks, he shoveled in decomposed granite from the hillside. By the time the work was done, after about two years of manual grading, Buck had expanded the buildable portion of the lot by about six feet. The Stahl House in its final form wouldn’t have been possible without it. 

With the grading done, in the fall of 1956 Buck turned his attention to designing his home on a hill. He crafted a 3D model, with the terraces sculpted out of clay, caked on top of empty beer and soda cans. Even at this early stage, many details of the built house were already in place. The L-shaped layout, the living room partly cantilevered over the hill, the glass walls. A few things are noticeably different about the model. Buck wanted a butterfly-shaped roof, and a north wing that curved in parallel with the bend of Woods Drive. He separated the master bedroom and the kids’ room with the carport. There was no pool in his model, but he did envision a waterfall, cascading down the hill. 

As they continued to pay down their mortgage, the Stahls shared their model with a few different architects whose work they admired, including the great modernist Craig Ellwood. One by one, they turned the project down, on a variety of pretexts. Those giant glass walls could never be supported by wood framing. The cantilever would never be approved by the city. The lot was too small. No, no, no. It was just as well, because without all that rejection, the Stahls wouldn’t have considered Pierre Koenig. 

As a kid growing up in San Francisco, Pierre Koenig would sketch the steel cranes unloading shipping containers at the marina, and the massive locomotives chugging into the railyard – the trappings of America’s industrial sector. After graduating from the USC School of Architecture in the early 1950s, Koenig brought his interest in steel and other industrial materials to his architectural practice. 

It was a good time to be an architect with a fondness for metal. During WWII, much of the nation’s construction resources catered to the defense industry, so not a lot of homes got built. But the war effort was also a time of huge innovation, with new welding techniques and construction materials developed for military use. Once America switched back from wartime to peacetime, all those advances could be applied to housing. And with all the soldiers returning home and starting families, there was plenty of demand. 

Koenig was all about it. Even before he graduated from USC, he designed a house for himself using steel columns instead of the traditional wood, a corrugated metal roof and sliding glass doors, all for a tidy $5000. His homes were pure distillations of the emerging mid-century modern aesthetic: sleek and open, with straight clean lines and modular spaces, designed for the kind of indoor-outdoor living made possible by California’s temperate climate. They looked cool. But just as important, the prefab building materials that Koenig preferred made his houses quick and cheap to build. There was a philosophical underpinning here, shared by many of the mid-century modernists, the idea that good design should and could be accessible to everyone, and could even change the world.

This idea of stylish, affordable, replicable housing was a revolutionary one, and Koenig was just one of the many Southern California architects taking part in the revolution. Since 1945, publisher John Entenza and his Arts & Architecture magazine had run the Case Study House (CSH) program. The program commissioned architects to design innovative single-family homes that could serve as models for the mass-produced housing of the future. CSH architects got discounted rates on the latest building materials, and building suppliers in turn benefited from the publicity. Each home in the program got a multi-page spread in Arts & Architecture, with an analysis, schematics, photos and explanatory notes written by the architect.

According to architectural historian Esther McCoy, Arts & Architecture was one of the most prestigious architecture magazines in the world, especially popular amongst younger designers. “A & A was known and respected in Europe, Japan, South America and at home,” McCoy wrote in an introduction to her book about the CSH program. “It was the only magazine in the US which devoted its pages exclusively to modern work.” The public was interested, too. McCoy reported that 368,554 people visited the six Case Study Houses built during the first three years of the program – a result of Entenza’s stipulation that every CSH be open to the public for a month or so before the owners could move in. 

June 1960 issue of Arts & Architecture magazine, featuring the Stahl House

The Case Study House architects included some of the era’s biggest names, like Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Charles & Ray Eames, Craig Ellwood (one of the guys who declined to design the Stahl House), Killingsworth, Brady & Smith, Buff, Straub & Hensman and more. In 1959, Pierre Koenig joined that elite crew with the Bailey House (Case Study House #21), a tiny rectangle floating over a reflecting pool, and hemmed in by a mountainside. It wasn’t the first time that Koenig was featured in Arts & Architecture (that L-shaped house he built for himself back in 1950 got him coverage in the February 1953 issue), and it wouldn’t be the last. 

Buck and Carlotta Stahl first encountered the work of Pierre Koenig in a 1956 issue of Pictorial Living, a pullout section of the Los Angeles Examiner. They called up Koenig, and when he visited their dirt patch, he was immediately inspired by the challenge of a difficult site that had scared away so many others. “Pierre was the one with the enthusiasm,” Carlotta Stahl would later tell an interviewer.” “It was like, ‘I want this house! I want to do this house!” 

It was no small feat to realize a dream house for a family with “champagne tastes on a beer budget,” as Koenig described it. He suggested some modifications to Buck’s model that would significantly lower costs. The butterfly roof became flat, and the curved wing straightened out, to avoid the need for custom shaping and welding. The waterfall unfortunately had to go, and the carport was moved to the end of the north wing, instead of between the two bedrooms. But the majority of the Stahl House, its L-shape, its cantilevered living area, and its orientation towards that magnificent view through floor-to-ceiling windows, were preserved. On November 20, 1957, the Stahls and Koenig signed a formal contract. 

Koenig made a lot of ingenious choices in his original plans. He incorporated brand new long-span decking, which meant he could increase the space between vertical window supports to 20 feet, and maximize the size of the windows. The kitchen he designed to be entirely freestanding, with prefabricated cabinets, a bar and appliance shelves floating on top of stubby steel legs, and a hanging plastic drop ceiling, illuminating the kitchen from above. With no drywall to hide plumbing or electrical wires, Koenig put it all underfoot, in the concrete slab beneath the house. There was no space for a conventional HVAC system, so Koenig made the 20-foot glass walls slidable, for instant cross-ventilation. A network of buried copper pipes brought radiant warmth up from the floor, and there was also that floating stone fireplace in the living room for warmth. And in a lovely gesture of architectural poetry, Koenig extended the steel beams beyond the edge of the house, and oriented them along the LA street grid down below – a visual and spiritual extension of the city, and vice-versa. 

You must know when to stop and not overdo anything…I had to suppress the idea of building something egotistical that says, ‘Look at me, here I am sitting on top of this hill as a great house…’ 

-Pierre Koenig, in a 2003 interview with architect Mohamed Sharif 

Some of Koenig’s novel engineering led to concerns with the LA Department of Building & Safety. He argued with the city planners for months, defending the strength of his steel beams, and the security of the site. Eventually he had to sacrifice 10 feet of the proposed 18-foot cantilever at the end of the living room. 

Once the plans were approved, the Stahls faced another challenge: financing the $34,000 building cost. Bank after bank turned them down, arguing that a flat-roofed, mostly-glass building perched on the edge of a cliff was a dubious investment. After months of rejection, Koenig suggested the Broadway Federal Savings and Loan Association, a Black-owned bank that was known for lending to minorities that other banks wouldn’t deal with. On Broadway Federal’s board was the great Paul R. Williams, the first licensed Black architect in California, and a flat roof proponent himself. It was a great irony that this minority-owned bank was the only one willing to underwrite this white couple, living in a part of the city where Blacks were still not welcome due to racist housing covenants (technically illegal by 1958, but still prevalent).

The loan stipulated two conditions that would alter the design of the Stahl House: first, that the carport had to fit two cars; and second, that there needed to be a pool, assumedly because it would add value to Broadway Federal’s investment. Imagine that: one of the most famous features of this iconic house was introduced not by the client, not by the architect, but by a loan agent.

In August of 1958, Carlotta Stahl gave birth to their first child Bruce. Five months later the city of LA finally approved Koenig’s blueprints. John Entenza inducted the new home as Case Study House #22 in April, and by the following month construction had begun. Koenig’s reliance on prefab steel beams, plate glass and roof decking helped the house take shape quickly but by early 1960 the Stahls were running low on cash (Carlotta had left her job to stay home with the baby, and was pregnant again with their daughter, Shari). Construction started lagging behind schedule. 

The house was still several weeks away from completion by April 18, the original date for Julius Shulman’s Arts & Architecture photo shoot. The shoot was postponed to Monday, May 9, and when Shulman arrived, the kitchen wasn’t finished, the fireplace was missing its rock facing on the upper segment, and there was plaster dust everywhere. The staging furniture by Van Keppel-Green just barely arrived in time, and only after Koenig chewed out the truck driver over the phone. Shulman’s assistants had to cut branches and move them strategically to cover up all the bare spots in the yard.

Despite the chaos, Shulman captured the serenity, the composedness of the Stahl House that day. His photos of CSH #22 play up the dramatic geometries of the house, the way the repeating roof beams contrast the thin vertical framing, or how the sharp angles of the overhang mimic the shape of the pool, and open up into a giant mouth, swallowing the view. 

And then, there’s that photo. The one with the two young women in chic dresses, sitting in conversation in the corner of the living room. Where Shulman’s other shots from the same set find the dynamism in a static work of steel and glass, this one hints at something else. In that one image, we sense the glamour, the excitement and a little bit of the terror of mid-century Los Angeles. Those two women (Ann Lightbody, the fiancé of Pierre Koenig’s assistant, and her friend Cynthia Murfee) are just one glass wall away from tumbling hundreds of feet into a twinkling abyss. They seem both part of the dark world outside, and also protected from it. It’s a revelation, even 65 years later. And amazingly, it wasn’t even published in the June, 1960 issue of Arts & Architecture that featured the Stahl House. Its debut in print came later that year, as the cover of Pictorial Living, in a vivid color incarnation. The American Institute of Architects gave it first prize in their inaugural award for a color photograph.

“It was not an architectural, quote unquote ‘photograph.’ It was a picture of a mood.”

-Julius Shulman

The “two girls” photo by Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10 – Job 2980)

The photo, and its countless reproductions, have helped to make the Stahl House one of the most famous houses in America, and a wildly popular location for movie, music video and commercial shoots. As early as 1962, the Stahls let in the crew from an Italian film called Smog, who had to spray gunk on the windows so it looked more like the titular air pollution outside. It was the first of about a dozen feature films that have been shot there. In the 1990s, the pop group Wilson Phillips emoted at the Stahl House for the video to their #1 single “Release Me.” Every model and superstar you can name has endorsed some product or other near the Stahl House pool, and it’s been immortalized in both The Simpsons and the best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In 1989, the house was even reconstructed in full size for Blueprints for Modern Living, an exhibit about the impact of the Case Study House program, staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.

With its legacy as an architectural masterpiece, and its second life as a photogenic backdrop, the Stahl House is as close to a celebrity as a house can get. It’s easy to forget that for the Stahl family, this was their home for 47 years. The corner where those two women sat for the famous photo? That’s where the Christmas tree would go. Buck built those terraces with his own hands; Carlotta graciously hosted countless friends, architecture students and film crews, and raised their three kids there. For Bruce, Shari and Mark Stahl (born in 1966), jumping into the pool from the roof was as much a part of life as eating breakfast, or going to school. 

And just like every home, the Stahl House changed as the family’s story unfolded. They added a partition to the kids’ room in 1968, so the two boys could share one side, and Shari had a side to herself. When Shari got into photography, they converted the small service porch into a darkroom – she would develop her prints on top of the washer and dryer. 

In the 1980s, the pool was joined by a jacuzzi, dug into the concrete where Shulman took his famous photo. The Stahls extended the stone base of the fireplace for a more symmetrical look, replaced their ‘50s-era pink kitchen appliances and added a catwalk around the cantilevered corner, to make it safer to clean the windows. In the rear of the main bedroom, there are now thin vertical mirrors alternating with strips of wood, so you can still see the view if you’re facing the wall. That was one of Buck’s better ideas. Not as brilliant was the green astroturf he added around the pool at some point – thankfully the family undid that one. 

Not all of the changes to the Stahl House over the years arose from intentional choices by the family. In 1969, Buck’s aerospace company folded and the Stahls were forced to rent out the house to cover their mortgage (their first tenant was the manager of the funk-R&B band War, who were about to explode with their first single “Spill the Wine”). When the Stahls moved back in in 1975, a second tenant had terrorized the place – the walls were painted gaudy primary colors, the carpet had been destroyed by a torrent of candle wax, and the pool surfacing was chewed up through sheer neglect. All that had to be fixed.  

Another example: burying all the utilities in the concrete slab foundation meant that the plumbing and electrical wires were hidden from sight. It also meant that if the pipes ever failed, which inevitably they did, the Stahls had to tear up the concrete to replace them. These days, part of the plumbing system runs along the ceiling, but it’s mostly tucked into closets and hidden spaces between rooms.  

One of John Entenza’s original goals for the Case Study House program was to encourage the development of economical, replicable houses on a massive scale. On that count, the program was something of a failure. Despite initial interest from the public in touring these newfangled boxes sheathed in corrugated steel and glass, there just weren’t that many clients interested in living in one. Families that did go for a modernist house often got pushback from the Federal Housing Administration when they applied for a home loan. In an essay for the Blueprints for Modern Living exhibition catalog, urban historian Dolores Hayden makes the point that as the CSH program wore on, its commissions seemed increasingly disconnected from the experiences of middle class families. Later CSH houses tended to be larger, and/or sited on expensive hillside lots. The program ignored the suburban sprawl in the LA flatlands that dominated new residential construction in the 1950s and ‘60s.  

All that said, the Case Study House program had a profound impact on architecture and design, even if that impact wasn’t manifested the way Entenza had intended. It got us used to sliding doors, flat roofs, open floor plans, floor-to-ceiling windows and minimal ornamentation, all of which are de rigueur today. And as the most recognizable avatar for the program, the Stahl House (alongside the Eames House, CSH #8) helped to define the aesthetic that we recognize as “mid-century modernism” today. 

Buck Stahl died of pneumonia in 2005. Two years later, Carlotta moved to Boise, Idaho, where her son Mark had settled after college. Shari and her family moved to Idaho too. Carlotta was surrounded by her family when she passed away in 2011, due to complications from Alzheimer’s.  

Though nobody has lived at the Stahl House full time since 2007, the Stahls still own it, and it’s ever-present in their lives. After Buck’s passing, the three Stahl children formed a company to manage all the restoration and financial comings and goings of the house. Shari would manage the film and magazine shoots, Bruce took care of the upkeep of the place, and Mark handled tours and marketing until he died unexpectedly in 2013. There’s now a small corps of docents who lead 30+ tours per month.

One of my favorite details is one of the first things you see at the Stahl House, while you’re waiting to be let in on the tour. Etched into a glass door, between the carport and the pool area, is the phrase “C.H.S. #22.” At first I thought it was an accidental mis-spelling of the acronym for “Case Study House.” Wrong. It’s the initials of Buck Stahl’s legal name, Clarence Henry Stahl. Carlotta had that done after Buck passed, as a way of honoring his vital role in the legacy of the Case Study House program. Without Buck’s model, without his and Carlotta’s tenacity, we wouldn’t have had this perfect trifecta of architect, photographer and client that brought us one of the most breathtaking, most beloved homes in architectural history. 

The Stahl House is open to the public for tours. Book one at stahlhouse.com.

Thanks to Eric Evavold, Stahl House docent and architectural historian, for putting up with my questions. 

Huge shoutout to Bruce Stahl, Shari Stahl Gronwald and Kim Cross for writing The Stahl House, Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon, the single most helpful resource that I used in my research. If you’re interested in learning more about the Stahl House, start with that book.  

Sources & Recommend Reading

+ “Case Study House #22: The Stahl House | Artbound | PBS SoCal” (VIDEO – @PBSSoCal on YouTube, October 3, 2024)

+ “CASE STUDY HOUSE NO. 22 by Pierre Koenig” (PDF – Arts & Architecture, June 1960 – via USModernist.org)

+ Chase, John: “Rehabilitating Modernism” (PDF – L.A. Architect, December 1989 – via USModernist.org)

+ Chieh, Anthony: “Inside LA’s Legendary Stahl House: 1960 The Mid-Century Dream That Redefined Modern Living” (VIDEO – @AQuietSide on YouTube, February 2, 2025)

+ Diamond, Jamie: “Best house in a leading role” (Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2004)

+ Gronwald, Shari Stahl, Bruce Stahl & Kim Cross: The Stahl House Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chronicle Chroma, 2021)

+ “Have American Homes Changed Much Over the Years? Take a Look.” (Compass California Blog, April 15, 2016)

+ Hayden, Dolores: “Model Houses for Millions: Architects’ Dreams, Builders’ Boasts, Residents’ Dilemmas” (in Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses exhibition program, 1989 – quoted in Peter Moruzzi’s NRHP multiple property form on the Case Study House program)

+ Head, Jeffrey: “Creating the iconic Stahl House” (Curbed LA, August 24, 2017)

+ Kroll, Andrew: “AD Classics: Stahl House / Pierre Koenig” (Arch Daily, October 22, 2010)

+ Martino, Alison: “Alison Martino’s tour of The Stahl House for Spectrum News” (VIDEO – @dantanasgirl on YouTube, March 4, 2023)

+ Melton, Mary: “A Shot In The Dark: The Unknown Story Behind L.A.’s Most Celebrated Photograph” (LAMag.com, December 5, 2016)

+ Moruzzi, Peter, Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee: “NRHP Multiple Property Documentation Form: Case Study House Program: 1945-1966” (December 2012; revised March 2013)

+ Ouroussoff, Nicolai: “Pierre Koenig, 78; Architect’s Designs Personify Modernism” (Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2004)

+ Seward, Amanda, Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee: Stahl House’s NRHP nomination form (January 2009; revised March 2013)

+ Smith, Elizabeth A.T.: Case Study Houses – The Complete CSH Program 1945-1966 (Taschen GmbH, 2002; 2021 edition)

+ Stahl House official website

+ “The Stahl House: Case Study House #22, The Making of a Modernist Icon” (VIDEO – @chroniclebooks on YouTube, June 23, 2021)

+ Thornburg, Barbara: “Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 as home” (Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2009)

+ Waddoups, Ryan: “Design Within Reach Furnishes Stahl House With 2018 Collection” (InteriorDesign.net, March 16, 2018)