Icons Only: One of Two Neutra Homes in Montana Is Restored as a Part-Time Residency

Welcome to Icons Only, a series about loving restorations of historically significant homes.

A dusty-green home sits above a collection of rocky ridges. Its walls of windows, wooden beams, and rectilinear shape hint at hallmarks of its famed architect, Richard Neutra. But this midcentury residence wasn’t built atop a hilly California landscape, like so many of the modernist homes Neutra designed between the 1920s and 1960s. Instead, it sits in Missoula, Montana, making the residence one of two in the state designed by the influential 20th-century architect.

The story of this particular home begins in the 1930s, with Montana native Arthur "Art" Mosby, a local radio broadcaster and founder of KGVO, the first radio (and later, television) station in Missoula. At the time, Montana’s media was tightly controlled by its incredibly influential copper mining industry (its "copper collar"), with much of the local press owned by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, but Mosby’s KGVO refused purchase and takeover by the industry giant. Years later, when his eldest daughter Aline, a rising journalist, was blackballed by Anaconda, she had to seek reporting jobs elsewhere, eventually ending up in Los Angeles.

On a trip to visit Aline, Mosby was struck by all the modernist homes that had come to dot the hills of Hollywood. He saw a similarity in the landscape to the mountains surrounding the valley where Missoula sits, and an idea was born—what if he could bring modernist architecture to the hills of Montana?

In the ’40s, Mosby purchased a large plot of elevated farmland south of Missoula, with dreams of turning it into a new development he called Farviews. The town of Missoula was dubious. "He had a very difficult time getting permits for building and everything," Aline once said in an interview. "Everybody in the city council and the government and in the town said, ‘You can’t build a house on a hill. It will slide down!’" But Mosby wasn’t deterred, and in 1949, when Neutra came to Bozeman, Montana, to deliver a lecture for a university summer program on urbanism, he commissioned the architect to build the pilot house for his development in Missoula’s South Hills area. 

Neutra positioned the Mosby House along a hill on its four-acre lot and added floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding the main living spaces to take advantage of the expansive, westward views of the valley. The architect used locally sourced timber and stone throughout the construction—plywood walls, Douglas fir kitchen cabinets—and, as was his style, designed the four-bedroom house with an open layout. Corner balconies and a flagstone patio connect the interiors to the outdoors. At the time, Neutra’s architectural style was already pioneering, but it was even more so in Montana‌, where the harsh weather and landscapes meant that homes were typically designed more like fortresses than glassy, cantilevered residences.