Neutra's Overway-Schiff House
Ensconced in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco, the Schiff house was completed by Richard Neutra in 1938 for a pair of Berliners who wanted to move down the hill from Lombard Street. The occasion for the tour was a lecture sponsored by the San Francisco chapter of the AIA and featuring Neutra's son, Raymond, who wrote quite well about his father for Dwell in 2007. He walked us through his lauded father's career, biography, and thinking, and ended with an overview of the famed VDL compound in Los Angeles, where he grew up, his father and brother worked, and is now in something of a state of disrepair.
Not only did Raymond talk about the state of his boyhood home, recounting anecdotes of architectural giants such as Otto Wagner, RM Schindler, Gregory Ain, and photographer Julius Shulman, but the present owner of the 1938 house, architect, Chad Overway, told us about how he came to the place. He bought it in 1993, worked hard to restore it to it's original details. "My stewardship hasn't been to renovate the house, but to return it to what it was, or might have been," he said.
I was lucky enough to wander the backyard, two floors and the 800 square-foot roofdeck, which looks directly onto the Golden Gate bridge. As far as I know, this is the first Neutra house I've seen in person, and I'm now very curious to seek out the other two in the region. I understand that there's one at the foot of Union St. A long seems very near at hand.
Have a look at this slideshow of the house as Overway has it now to see some of the details and layout of what makes the Schiff house such a success.
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A wonderful tour of this marvelous home... J
but, where's the view you mentioned?
@victoria - click the link that says "slideshow" at the top right of this article!
RE Neutra's Overway-Schiff House - Slideshow 8 describes "the Marcel Breuer steel tube chairs". The chairs shown are Mies van der Rohe design of 1927. Did the editors not proofread this article? Don De A
Hmmm, they sure look like Marcel Breuer's chairs to me: http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/1646-popup.html
Thanks for the comment, Don, about the steel tube chairs. I've removed the attribution. They are indeed MR chairs by Mies van der Rohe.
what a cold, soul-less place. it feels like a doctor's waiting room. i can't imagine growing up there.... even the plant is spiky.
I like the design, good space allocation, modern and clean... I just copied your staircasing and divisions for my inspiration file...we're building our home too.
Great style.
So where are the window handles and 30's louvers? Tease!
why are there no photographs of the exterior?!?!?! without, i can't grasp the dimension or layout of the place.
I saw this house featured in Sunset magazine a few years ago. It looks very timeless. I noticed in the Sunset magazine photos that the street facing windows of the living room were frosted near the bottom. Was this part of the original design or is it a later modification? It's an imaginative way to give an urban house some privacy without dimishing the daylight.
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