A Rare Look Inside a Restored 1959 Richard Neutra Hillside House in Los Angeles | House Tour

Neutra is now a collectible. It's always a bit poignant to me that the people that he intended it for, the middle class, they can't buy a Neutra house. You know, there's no way. And the other thing that I feel strongly about as a preservation consultant, architectural historian, is that often people, they always feel like they have to make their own imprint on a Neutra. I wish sometimes if people wanted to radically change a Neutra, they would just buy a different house and let history be a witness. You know, we have increasingly fewer and fewer witnesses to what actually went down, to how actually people built. And oftentimes Neutra houses have a certain air of humble dignity to them. When you burden them with expensive materials and inappropriate finishes, the house feels like it's groaning under the weight of all these inappropriate treatments. My name is Barbara Lamprecht, and we are sitting in the Haley House designed by Richard Neutra in 1959. It's in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California. I'm an architectural historian. I've worked with Neutra houses beginning with a summer and a winter and another summer with the widow of Richard Neutra, Dione Neutra. And I had done a master's degree at Cal Poly Pomona. She donated her home to Cal Poly Pomona's archives. And so I was pulled out of a drawing class that was run by Frank Gehry's sister, Dorothy Danziger, and was basically asked, they thought I had lived in Vienna, and they thought I spoke fluent German, that I would be the perfect person to work with Dione Neutra. So that's how this whole thing started. And then much later, I went on to do a master's in architecture and then a PhD at the University of Liverpool in England. Richard Neutra was interesting in that he was born into the cauldron of modernism, which was Vienna at the turn of the century. He grew up running up and down the stairs of Otto Wagner's subway stations and was completely enamored of architecture. As a child, he was drawing incessantly. He was also very good at engineering. And it was only natural that he went to architecture school. Most of his commissions were from clients who approached him and who wanted to live in the house. These two young bucks approached Neutra, and they said, we want to build a spec house. And here's the location. One was a developer, the other was a builder, Jason Haley. It was just interesting that these two young men, I think in their 20s, approached Neutra. That says a lot about them, actually. As you can see, this is a very tight, very steep lot. This is kind of a hairpin turn. Neutra gave them this very compact, very taut design. He said, you know, they had envisioned very neutral colors on the front, on the facade. And Neutra, ever the marketer, said, I think you're going to need a brighter color. We're going to need a splash of color. And so that's when the lemon color, the lemon yellow, went on the facade. Because years later, it was painted over in appropriate Neutra colors. And the more one learns about Neutra, you know, you'll see it in the Lovell Health House, this amazing repertoire of colors. You know, dusty roses and yellows and greens, light beiges that have a very different tenor, and they provide a very different feeling and understanding of Neutra. You know, usually relegated to silver, of course, ivory, Neutra brown, which is kind of a cold, dark brown, you know, and white. I had seen the Haley House some years before, but a friend of mine who was a realtor and also an architectural historian, it said like, hey, the Haley House is for sale again. And I wasn't feeling one. I said, no, it's okay. I'll pass. And he goes, oh, come on. It's just going to be, I'm going to do a drive by. So we stopped. All of a sudden, this guy came up to me and he said, hi, my name is blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to buy the house and I want you to help me. Just like that. I left with my friend and I thought, nah, he's never going to buy the house. I mean, and he did. And that was, that was Patrick. That was the owner. I don't think I've, I've ever had more fun and challenges blending my background in architecture. What I knew about Neutra, because I was responsible for so much and hiring people and acting as a project manager and the general contractor, kind of the architect and guardian of the flame, if you will. Like, let's not rip out the formica. Yes, it has a few knife marks in it, but that just speaks to how careful Jason Haley took care of it. If you really want the continuity between indoors and out, maintain the same interior finish. So we did that because why? I knew that that wall was going to be protected by the overhang. You know, all the beams were, had terrible termite dry rot. The roof was a mess. So I brought in Gunnar Kirchhoff, the best Neutra roofer ever. Very lucky to find wonderful people to collaborate with. Going kind of toe to toe with the inspector to find out what we could do to protect people and meet code. Having the time of my life, really. I wanted to point out that how Neutra determined a sense of procession. Even in this street, the house is so close to the street. And how do you slow the sense of procession into a house? How do you create that when there's really very little to work with? Well, if you start from your car and you're walking like this, you have to turn your body again and again and again. Each time your body is slowing down, right? Because Neutra has introduced this one little landscape element that then is joined to this other part of the landscaping. And so every time you slow down the body as you enter the house, you lose the guy wearing the toga, right? The Roman senator. And as you procession to the house, you become, that's where you don your domestic being. You're a different person. And that's why all these moves that are very typical. And because after Neutra went to Japan in 1930, they have a huge impression on him. And the Japanese do the very same thing. They honor the sense of procession. I definitely feel that we've gotten in Los Angeles and in Southern California, especially Palm Springs, having a very active preservation community and trying to create guidelines, regulations, laws to protect houses. I mean, lots of houses, lots of Neutra houses slipped through the cracks. And I often spend time with owners and the first thing I want to do is start ripping stuff out or changing things. And I'm thinking, just you and the house get to know each other. You know, bitch a little, get angry at one another, just learn to live with one another. And then, then start a real, that conversation about what you want to do. You know, but first let's stabilize it structurally. Let's make sure you're addressing dry rot or failing systems or all kinds of other things, you know, to stabilize first. Neutra is constantly playing with solids and voids and projecting and recessing. So this is another example of a cheap brick made good. This is called jumbo brick. It's typically not found in fine homes or anything like that. It's a building, it's just, it's a rough, you know, it's rough trade. And the mortar is not particularly nice either. But you'll notice that there's jumbo brick here. There's Roman brick as the facing brick in the firebox or kind of firebox. And then a different, a fire brick, a different scale for the hearth, right? So again, if you look at Neutra houses, I mean, even the entrance, the entrance immediately directs you to the view beyond. You're not at, you're not even, you could make a left into the private areas, but your whole, your body wants to go that way, right? So it's like this kind of effortless, again, this trajectory out to nature. And then the other thing is the sense of rhythm, you know, the beams and the tongue and groove. Yeah, so there's so many different elements here that are working in harmony. What I would advise people who are thinking about buying a significant home or even any home is to take your time, get to know the house, get to figure out your paths of travel in a house, get to know what the architect intended for you before any radical moves, you know, secure the safety of the house and just your safety first and learn about the architect because that will change, I think, your understanding and appreciation for the gem that you somehow acquired.