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Greene & Greene, Architects Adaptation and Perseverence The Bolton/Culbertson House by Mimi Zeiger The Bolton/Culbertson House in Pasadena wears its more than 100-year history well. Located on West Del Mar Boulevard, just off Millionaires Row, the stately Craftsman bungalow seems to defy time. A herringbone brick path cuts through a trim lawn to a welcoming porch. A wide cedar door, detailed with...

The Kambara House In Neutra's Silver Lake Colony by Barbara Lamprecht Photos (2014) by Cameron Carothers It is rare to find a house designed by Richard Neutra (1892 – 1970) in absolutely original condition. Still rarer to find it beautifully maintained. Rarest of all to learn that it is a member of Neutra’s fabled “Silverlake Colony.” And while his ubiquitous use of silver paint on trim is...

Soaring Space: John Lautner's Silvertop by Frank Escher Photos by Cameron Carothers In a booklet that client Kenneth Reiner and architect John Lautner published for tours conducted at an un-finished Silvertop in early 1960 (to raise funds for another collaboration of theirs, the Midtown School), one finds, among pages describing in great detail the many technical and structural innovations the...

Yucca Valley, California Pedigree: Fast-rising Los Angeles architecture studio Oller & Pejic collaborated with Marc Atlan, a creative director, to devise this enigmatic 2012 house, wrapped around a central courtyard and set in a remote stretch of the Mojave Desert overlooking Joshua Tree National Park. The home's black-stucco facades are meant to evoke shadows on the landscape, while its form takes...

Featured in the Wall Street Journal: L.A. Home Designed by John Lautner to List for $7.5 Million By Candace Taylor Known as Silvertop, the house has a striking design: It is made up of a series of interlocking half-circles, with a massive, arched concrete roof over the living room. The home, which sits on 1.26 acres on the crest of a hill, is reached by a cantilevered concrete driveway that wraps...

Black Desert house by Marc Atlan In 2008, I had the idea to search for a parcel of land in the high desert near the town of Joshua Tree, California, on which I could create a completely unique and radical hideaway. The contrast between the unspoiled, almost prehistoric landscape of the area and an avant-garde 21st century structure appealed to me. During my hunt for an appropriate plot, I met a...

Classic California Courtyard Hacienda Ojai, California by Jocelyn Gibbs Many houses evoke personal memories for current or former inhabitants. Some great houses, if they are recognized and preserved, become part of our collective memory for cultural and historical reasons. The William Ford house in Ojai, California, designed by Paul Revere Williams in 1929, is remarkable for its client, for its...

The "New California House" by Nicholas Olsberg American architects in the first years of the Twentieth Century were in desperate search for an end to what Joy Wheeler Dow called “the reign of terror” wrought by the grandiose, over-wrought and bombastic taste in building of the Gilded Age, with its deference to the chateaux and palaces of Europe. Calling, like many others, for an “American...

The John A. Smith House La Habra Heights, California by Jocelyn Gibbs Cliff May (1908-1989), the designer and builder famous for popularizing the California ranch house, insisted that he “built just one kind of house, had just one style.” The persistence of his vision of what a house should be and how people should live, came from his pride in his family’s California heritage —he was related...

The John Storer Residence, 1923 By Nicholas Olsberg Current Photographs by Tim Street-Porter “Frank Lloyd Wright . . . creates architecture as a plastic whole and perceives the new spiritual forces working in the inner being of the masses, in the abstract form.” — TH. Wijdeveld 1925 The Storer house is one of four homes, built at almost the same time, in experimental textured concrete block....