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.