Renovations

The home’s interior design, featured in Vogue and widely celebrated, was an unusual foray into residential surrealism by Le Corbusier and his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret.

The challenge of renovating an iconic midcentury house is surely a daunting one for any architect, but apply this formula to a Richard Neutra house, and the responsibility rises exponentially. This was the situation for Los Angeles–based architect Peter Grueneisen, founder and principal of Los Angeles–based Nonzero Architecture, who inherited the task of taking on significant updates to an already-altered Neutra—the 1949 Freedman House in Pacific Palisades, California.

In the master bedroom, a small, cramped closet was replaced with a wardrobe that is partially obscured by a slatted wooden screen that was built by Metalworks & Design Studio of Seattle. "The idea was you see through it, so in a sense it doesn't feel like a small space," Smith says.

The entire house is painted in one color: Sherwin Williams' Ibis White.

Though the home is expansive, the team made certain to waste as little space as possible. Clever moments of storage, like this sliding shoe closet, abound.