Exploring a Mid-Century Modern House Built on a Hillside in Los Angeles | House Tour

One thing that I think is interesting about the design is that most cantilevered houses, you enter from the top, which does save you the hike up from the street, but it usually means that you never see the most dramatic, impressive view of the house. Whereas this one, every time you park at the bottom, you look up and you just go, wow, that house is amazing. Then you think about the fact that they were students when they built it. Taking on a project like this is quite an undertaking. My name is Piper Mavis, and we're in the first house that Raul Garduno ever designed in 1961 in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The architect is Raul Garduno, who's Mexican architect, who was still a student at USC when he designed the home. He built it with his friend, also a USC student named Peter Heiser, and they really built it as a calling card to show what they were capable of. Raul and Pete bought this lot and the lot next door, which has the second home they ever built, for a few hundred dollars, apparently, which was a great deal even then because it was considered to be an impossible to build lot. The previous structures that had been on the lots had apparently slid down in a mudslide. The property had changed hands a number of times as people tried to figure out how to do it. They came along, and because they were self-financing this project, they needed to find an inexpensive piece of land. So I think that's actually how the challenge began, but they really did think that engineering-wise they could figure out a way to make it work. Pete Heiser was a child actor. He drove a Corvette, and he actually ended up having to sell his Corvette to complete the project. Additionally, they had completely run out of money at one point, and they essentially had the I-beams up, the platform for the house, but no walls. Pete brought his grandmother, sat her down on some building material, had her face the view, and asked her for a loan, and he said that essentially she gave him this very moving speech about following your dreams and doing what you have to do, and gave him the loan, and that's how they were actually able to finish the house. In 2015, I was house hunting in the neighborhood, and this house actually hadn't come up on my radar because it was out of my price range until my brother sent me a link from Curbed about this house. My realtor and I came to look at it. After walking up the stairs, I said to her, well, this is not gonna work, and then I turned around, and I saw the view, and it was like this instantaneous thing where I thought, or maybe it can. As soon as I walked around it, I thought that the house was really special, and that was before I even knew that it had been the first home that they had designed or anything like that, but it was in a state of serious disrepair. The previous owner who had had it since the early 1960s and might have been the first owner, I'm not sure, but certainly the longest owner, his wife had passed away in the 1970s, and from what I understand after that, he never really did any maintenance on the property, but you could tell that it was an amazing house, and also, in a way, I preferred it to be in that state than where there are a bunch of different eras that you have to peel back trying to figure out, because you could tell that it was basically what Garduno had envisioned, just in disrepair. Garduno and Heiser built this essentially as a spec house. In the end, it did work as far as getting them their next commission. As Garduno went along, you certainly saw that in his career, that he would learn things from previous jobs. With each house that he built, clearly the clients gave him more free reign, and they were able to be more and more and more creative as they went along. I purchased the house in July of 2015. I had come to a bunch of the open houses and really sat and thought about what it would take to bring the house back, and whether or not it was even really possible. During that time of being at the open houses, I, of course, eavesdropped on everybody else who was looking. I heard so many people talking about plans to, rather than restore it, completely remodel it beyond recognition. Essentially, the big thing seemed to be on most people's mind was how to increase the square footage, rather than how to preserve this house. I was quite concerned that there was a good chance that the house would be remodeled beyond recognition, and that it would be too late for then the next person to ever bring it back to what the original intention was. At the open house, they did have printouts of the house when it was in a 1961 issue of the Los Angeles Times home section, so you could see from the pictures what a lot of the original ideas were. After purchasing the house through my neighbor, I was able to get in touch with Guarduno's wife at the time, and she was able to get in touch with Pete Heiser, and so I had them all over, including Fernando Guarduno, Guarduno's son, over to kind of help me figure out what the intentions were with the house. One of the things that I think made the house so memorable to Pete was this was their first house when they were students, and they did so much of the work themselves in order to save money. I really tried as much as possible to do it according to either what the photograph said or what Pete said. The restoration took about a year and a half. My partner moved in with me soon after, and about five, six years in, we welcomed our first child in this house. It sounds so corny, but it really is a magical place. You do have this feeling of being in a tree house. You're living in a very vibrant, popular part of the city, but because you're so far up from the street level, you always feel like you're much further away from the city than you actually are, and it feels so spacious because of the view. Yes, not an easy house to live in with a small child, but you make do to live in a house that's this amazing and that makes you happy every time you come home, even if you are dragging a kid up a bunch of stairs. In the end, my vision and kind of guide for this house was to not only bring it back to as close to what Guardiño and Heiser had envisioned, but bring it to a state where I felt like it was safe no matter who might own it. That was something that was very important to me. I've always been very interested in historical preservation. The idea that it could make it until 2015 and then potentially be lost, especially these cantilevered houses, are houses that cannot be built again, and once they're gone, they truly are gone. For me, it was just so important to bring it to a place where it would be obvious to anyone who saw it that it was a special house, and it was a house that was built with vision, a house that was built with a lot of thought. After meeting Pete Heiser, Guardiño's wife, and Guardiño's kids, I also realized that it was built with a huge amount of grit, inspiration, and dream to be in your early 20s, take on a project like this, and build something that will last is pretty incredible, and I think worth preserving.