Of course you’d need to write a whopping check for such a cool place today. You see pictures of ’50s and ’60s houses-lovingly restored and furnished by young Hollywood hotshots-in the pages of upscale shelter magazines. But many of these million-dollar houses weren’t built for the very rich. They were part of a trend to use modern design and off-the-shelf materials to create modest houses for the masses.
The most famous of these postwar California residences were the “Case Study Houses,” which continue to inspire architects and fascinate design groupies. Now Taschen has published a lavish, large-format book (priced at $150) that documents each of these designs. The houses were created as part of a program sponsored by Arts & Architecture, a legendary West Coast magazine. In 1945, its editor, John Entenza, anticipating the postwar boom and the severe housing shortages, began to commission experimental prototypes for dwellings, using top architects and innovative, relatively inexpensive materials. Thirty-six of these designs for living-some built on spec without clients attached-were published periodically in the magazine over the course of the next 20 years. They had a huge influence not just on housing in Southern California but all over the country. It was a brave new world of steel framing in domestic design, carports instead of garages, vinyl tile floors instead of parquet-and not a cute pitched roof anywhere. The most famous Case Study House was the one designed by Charles and Ray Eames for themselves. Set in a grove of sycamore trees in Pacific Palisades, the two-part house-a structure for living and one for a studio-was built entirely of industrial prefab elements, from its steel framing to the glass and brightly colored modular panels that form the walls. Among the pleasures of the new book are its inclusion of original detailed plans and sketches (no cold CAD images), as well as period photographs: the famous one of the couple standing high up on the steel frame during construction, or of the two of them in their living room. (Anyone who thinks that modernist designer icons like the Eameses lived in austere minimalist surroundings, think again. Every beautiful surface of their house is chockablock with tchotchkes.)
But less-famous houses are equally fascinating. Near his own house, Charles Eames, along with Eero Saarinen, did a house for John Entenza himself. Describing the two houses at the time, one writer called them “technological twins but architectural opposites.” The Entenza house used the same ready-made steel and glass components to create a simple boxy structure, but unlike Eames’s own house, which expressed its structure inside, the interior of this house was sheathed in wood and plaster. It’s softer and more serene, with a few pieces of furniture-built-in Eames cabinets and sectional sofas-and a carpeted conversation pit. Not far away, another famous architect, Richard Neutra, designed an elegantly simple two-bedroom house for a young family, made primarily of steel, glass and wood-its street facade looks plain and almost blind with its simple clerestory windows, but an all-glass back wall opens onto the landscape, and the ubiquitous flagstone patio furnished with canvas butterfly chairs. Two unbuilt Neutra houses are detailed in the Taschen book, as well.
Almost as iconic as the Eames house is Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House in West Hollywood-the house in the famous picture of a glass box of a room cantilevered over a bluff with the twinkling lights of the L.A. basin stretching away down below. Here in the Taschen book, the whole house is detailed-the pool, the decks, the innocuous street side with its carport, where a station wagon is parked. There’s lots more to be discovered in the book, particularly the dazzling work of many 20th-century architects who aren’t well-known outside California, such as Craig Ellwood or Raphael Soriano. But perhaps what’s most fun here is the flavor of the period captured by the photographs (many taken by Julius Shulman), the best of them in living color (and the favorite color of the time, it seems, was orange). Hollywood honchos of the digital age may lust after these houses now, but no one can quite bring back a certain ’50s cool you see in a picture of the Bass House, designed by Buff, Straub & Hensman in Altadena, with a lady perched poolside in a curvy Saarinen chair, or in an image of a snowy white Koenig interior, where a guy in a crewcut is turning on the hi-fi for a lady on a black-leather couch (with orange throw pillows). Just download some Sinatra songs and dream.
