From the Archive: What It’s Like to Live in a Neutra—Two of Them

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s July/August 2006 issue.

In 1938, after living for just a short time in Richard Neutra’s recently built Strathmore Apartments in Los Angeles, the Oscar-winning Austrian-American actress Luise Rainer confessed to the architect that she had hesitated to live in such modernist buildings because she feared that she "could never feel warm and at home inside of one of them.... Bit by bit," she said, "I went closer to such modern places, just like one comes to examine a wild animal, with jitters and a certain curiosity. In the process the revelation came over me that I was all wrong and I felt attracted more and more.... The clearness, the long lines of windows which allow the light to enter and the eye to rove out far, far, all of this gives you a strange sense of happiness and freedom."

Indeed, Neutra brought to his modernist apartment buildings many of the elements he had used in his single-family dwellings—white walls, flat roofs, ribbon windows, crisp detailing, and generally orthogonal shapes—and which in 1932 had been labeled the International Style by the Museum of Modern Art. Yet while exhibiting such identifiable stylistic features, the layout and personality of Neutra’s small, relaxed, nature-accessible, low-rise apartment structures differed markedly from the taller and blockier apartment houses he had known most of his own life. In my several decades of living in Los Angeles, I have been privileged to live in two of these buildings—the Strathmore and the Kelton—and to admire at close range the Landfair and the Elkay, all located within a three-block radius in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. 

Richard Neutra (1892-1970) arrived in Los Angeles in 1925 after a comfortable, well-educated youth in Vienna and architectural apprenticeships in Berlin with Erich Mendelsohn, in Chicago with Holabird & Roche, and at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright. During most of the preceding decade, Neutra had corresponded with his Viennese friend, Rudolph M. Schindler, who had emigrated in 1914, working for Wright in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles, where he moved in 1920 to supervise construction of Wright’s Hollyhock House. In 1922, Schindler built his own studio/house in Los Angeles, and encouraged Richard and his wife, Dione, to join him; in 1925, they did. The Schindler studio/house would be an important model for Neutra in his later search for alternatives to the single-family dwelling. Other iterations of low-rise garden apartments also appeared in tandem with tall skyscrapers in Neutra’s Rush City Reformed, the visionary metropolis he conceived in those years.

Throughout the late ’20s, Neutra and Schindler worked in a loosely structured alliance in which each man usually designed the buildings he brought into the office. Typical of this was the massive four-story Jardinette Apartment House, built for a Hollywood developer in 1927 and largely designed by Neutra. It was one of the first International Style buildings in the U.S. The structure’s concrete facade was strikingly modernist, but its internal layout, as required by the client, contained the usual long corridors leading to individual apartments. Yet by the mid-1930s, in the developing Westwood district near the new campus of UCLA, Neutra achieved a significant breakthrough in his design of smaller, low-rise garden apartments.

The Strathmore complex (1937) was commissioned as an investment by a family who already owned the land and who allowed Neutra to acquire a half interest in the project. Staggered back into the hill as it rises from the street, the Strathmore is a modernist updating of two of Neutra’s favorite buildings: the ancient Taos Pueblo in New Mexico and Irving Gill’s Horatio West Court in Santa Monica (1919). The Strathmore includes six two-bedroom, two-bath units and two smaller studio units, arranged in two groups on either side of a central stairway. Neutra owned the four rental units to the north. As in L.A.’s traditional bungalow courts, each apartment opens to the central garden courtyard as well as to private porches or balconies.

The first tenants at the Strathmore were Dione Neutra’s sister, Regula Thorston, and parents, Alfred and Lilly Niedermann, who had emigrated from Switzerland to retire in Los Angeles. Yet for months, Thorston recalled, they were the only inhabitants, as other prospective tenants found the buildings too "cold" and "industrial" for their tastes. "Moon architecture...hospital architecture," she remembered hearing them mutter. Ultimately, the apartments attracted a number of discerning people, including film star Dolores del Rio and her lover Orson Welles, as well as Luise Rainer and her husband, playwright Clifford Odets. Lily Latte, companion of director Fritz Lang, kept a Strathmore apartment as a private retreat from her demanding life with Lang and the social whirl of Hollywood. The Strathmore became the first Los Angeles residence of Charles and Ray Eames, who used their second bath and bedroom as a lab for producing their first bentwood prototypes. John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture, was a Strathmore dweller, as were the photographer Eliot Elisofon and the composer Vernon Duke.

Though not quite in league with Welles and Rainer, my wife, Dorothy, and I lived at 11005 Strathmore in the early 1970s, shortly after I became an assistant professor at UCLA. It greatly affected our view of Los Angeles, and the world. We loved both the openness and the sense of privacy afforded by our second-story perch above the street. The large expanses of glass made the two-bedroom, two-bath flat seem larger than it actually was. I’ve toured many great buildings in my professional role as architectural historian, but I was never sorry to return home. At the Strathmore we had our first child and, in 1971, suffered our first California earthquake, which the structure admirably rode out. There we enjoyed visits from such architecture people as Pauline Schindler, Rudolph’s former wife; architect Charles Moore; critics Paul Goldberger and Reyner Banham; and especially Richard and Dione Neutra, who dropped in unannounced one Sunday afternoon as we were recovering—with shades pulled low—from an overly festive Saturday night.

At 77, Neutra was as handsome and commanding as photographs suggest. He seemed puzzled at first by our spare but committed use of Stickley Craftsman furniture instead of orthodox Neutra modern, but he accepted my argument of its kinship with the Wiener Werkstätte products of his youth—and hence a strong example of early modern design. Our talk turned to music and I asked him which composers he most identified with and would most want people to think of when they experienced his buildings, and he quickly replied: "Schoenberg and Bach." However calculated that answer may have been, it clearly evoked both the modernist and classical qualities that his best work conveys. As they were leaving, I mentioned a small leak in the living room ceiling. Neutra drolly replied that he would make sure the roof got repaired, but that if the leak persisted, he would personally provide us with a "Neutra-designed bucket" to catch the rainwater. The roof was repaired, but I later regretted that I had not asked for that bucket.

An early photograph of the Strathmore looks north over the building’s crisp flat roofs across the rolling and virtually empty hills to one of the few other structures on that then-lonely Westwood landscape: Neutra’s contemporary Landfair Apartments (1937), whose still-unaltered exterior evokes an image of closely packed urban row houses, but whose interior configuration was radically changed over the years to accommodate the needs of a UCLA student cooperative. When Arthur Drexler and I cocurated the Neutra retrospective at MoMA in 1982, our budget allowed for only two scale models. One had to be the great Lovell Health House (1927-1929). The other, we determined, should be something other than a single-family dwelling, and we happily chose the Landfair Apartments. The model was one of the show’s most admired items.

After living at the Strathmore for several years, Alfred and Lilly Niedermann decided to buy a lot around the corner on Kelton and have son-in-law Richard design a triplex containing a modest apartment for them along with two rental units. Theirs was the first building on the street. The two ground-floor one-bedroom units form the base for the larger, second-floor two-bedroom "penthouse" whose front and rear roof decks reach out into the trees. Less tautly dramatic than the Landfair or the Strathmore, the Kelton looked ahead to Neutra’s more relaxed work of the ’4os and ’50s. While many of Neutra’s houses were featured on magazine covers, the Kelton was the only one of his apartment complexes to attain that distinction, appearing in 1946 on the cover of a special Neutra issue of the prominent French journal L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Beyond its architectural distinction, the Kelton also harbored a rich cultural life. Besides being a renowned civil engineer, Alfred Niedermann was a gifted violinist and was able to summon practically anyone he wished to play with in his various string quartets. After he retired to Los Angeles, his chamber-music colleagues included such family friends as Arnold Schoenberg, who played piano at the Kelton, and whose ghost still happily inhabits it.

In 1975, after five years at the Strathmore, my wife and I decided that, with another child on the way, we needed a dwelling with a regular backyard and moved to a pleasant, if decidedly non-modern, house in L.A.’s Rancho Park. When our marriage ended 12 years later, I discovered that the top-floor apartment at the Kelton was available and I moved there as a bachelor. When my children spent nights with me, I enjoyed driving them from Neutra’s Kelton to his nearby Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School, which he had designed in 1937. I also enjoyed installing the Stickley furniture in its second Neutra environment. It still seems quirky to certain purist visitors, but it strikes me as working even better at the Kelton than at the Strathmore, especially as I have mixed it with pieces by Otto Wagner and Alvar Aalto. As at the Strathmore earlier, I never mind returning to the Kelton from more auspicious architectural sites. The living room especially welcomes the light, but is equally sustaining when the winter rain beats against the glass. Another pleasure of living at the Kelton has been to admire its neighbor to the north: Neutra’s Elkay Apartments (1948), built for renowned violist Louis Kievman and his family. One of his daughters still lives in her family’s apartment while offering the other four as rental units.

For 20 of my 38 years in Los Angeles, I have lived in Neutra’s garden apartments, whose light-filled openness, regard for privacy, and easy access to the out-of-doors have shaped my view of the life-enriching possibilities of architecture—and of Los Angeles. Built at a time when land seemed to be indefinitely plentiful, Neutra’s four Westwood apartment buildings presciently predicted the needs of the denser city to come when both land and single-family dwellings would become more difficult to find and more expensive to build. They thus offer models of how to combine the nature-surrounded virtues of the single-family home with the imperatives of designing for what Neutra liked to call "humans in groups."

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