Inside a Timeless 100-Year-Old Rudolph Schindler Home in Los Angeles | House Tour

I looked at this house two times before purchasing it. To be honest, I was really scared moving in because I knew that this wasn't just going to be me moving my stuff into this house. This was a lifelong venture of bringing this thing back to life and being the custodian to Los Angeles history. My name is Spencer Velasquez and we're at Rudolph Schindler's Howe House in Los Angeles. We're in Rudolph Schindler's Howe House, built in 1925. Rudolph Schindler was born in Austria in 1887. Rudolph Schindler came to the United States in the early 1900s, I would say in the teens at some point. He learned about Frank Lloyd Wright and wanted to study under him in Chicago and ended up coming out to Los Angeles as a draftsman to work on the Hollyhock House. His first structure was the Schindler House on Kings Road and that was built in 1922. From then, he really kept all of his work in Southern California. I don't know if there's really much else that's surviving outside of Los Angeles County. This house was commissioned by James E. Howe and was completed in 1925. James E. Howe came to Los Angeles in the early 1920s. He kind of inherited most of his money from his family, who was deeply embedded into the railroad industry of some kind. He wanted to use a lot of his money to help the hobo transient population here in the United States. It's all kind of speculation, but the house was situated right here in Silver Lake, overlooking some of the train tracks down here in the Elysian Valley. I just know that James E. Howe commissioned this from Schindler. They must have been in some socialist, kind of radical community here in Los Angeles, and this must have been such a radical expression of the architecture at the time. I mean, this must have looked like an alien structure over here. I bought this house in 2016. I lived in it for a couple of months and realized that the house needed some work. There was some heavy rains that year, and the house kind of was not in disrepair, but there was definitely some work that needed to be done to the roof, windowsills, there was some rain damage. I spent six months doing a little restoration on the roof and the windows, some floors, and then moved in at the end of 2016. In 2020, during the height of COVID, I reached out to Pamela Shimshiri to do renovation work on this house because I saw the work that she did on her own property and felt that she was the best solution for this property because it's a big undertaking. During the two years that that process was going on, I ended up working with TASCA Cleveland, and she was the main designer that helped me formulate what needed to happen in this house. The main things that we did were, I mean, all interior, because this is a Mills Act house, I can't do anything and nor would I do anything to the outside of the house, but there was a lot of work that needed to be done over here. There was two lights in this room, a single light downstairs, and we redid the electrical, and we redid the roofs, we redid the redwood in here to bring it to its original redwood luster. We wanted to reference some old photos and bring some of the original furniture that was in here. Along with this built-in that we did, we brought in some custom furniture that was from some local furniture makers down here in Silver Lake. The other things that we did were we built a banquette that we saw some old photos from in the kitchen, redid the floors, redid all the hardware in the house, and brought in some custom furniture as well. My name is Taylor Robitaille. I was first introduced to the house years ago. Spencer's owned the home since 2016. My first introduction was a little bit before he did the big renovation, which we're now living in. My first experience in the house was actually years prior to Spencer and I being together. I walked in the house and was super excited to go into a Schindler and be able to check it out from the inside. I found myself requesting a tour and really fell in love with all of the detail. The center-cut redwood was so beautiful. The board-formed concrete was one of the first things I noticed, which was a cute little intro to our relationship and how we were able to kind of discuss our mutual love for mid-century architecture. But on a day-to-day basis now living here, I think one of my favorite things about the house is how throughout the day as the light changes, the entire mood changes. You find yourself migrating from room to room depending on what time of day it is. This room that we're in right now in the morning is drenched in really nice golden sunlight coming from behind me. And then as you go into the evening, we have a beautiful sunset this way, which it completely changes the shadows and highlights different aspects of the woodwork, which I find really nice to witness. When we were first meeting, it was great because I walked in, he was DJing this event. We came here afterwards. I was like, oh, it's a Schindler house. I'm so stoked. Gotta meet Spencer. I asked him to give me a little tour. I was like, there's board form concrete. And he looked at me like, who is this lady in my house? And I got a tour and I fell completely in love. That was a few years before we got together. I've seen kind of the changes happen from previously when it was more of that yellow stucco. The redwood was stained a darker color. So now it's really breathed new light into the space. A lot of the changes that have been made, I think it does a lot better of a job highlighting, you know, the really special aspects of this building. Seeing all the new built-ins come into play. The kitchen, for example, a lot of the modern conveniences that we kind of need that weren't previously there in a 1920s home, we now have. The banquette is one of our favorite places to just hang out. That's kind of where we welcome people in and out of the house very often. I mean, there's been many hours and conversations had at that table right there, which we owe a lot of that to the ingenuity and the reverence for the initial structure that came into play creating these new pieces for the home. So the house is a hundred years old, which by any means, you would think that most things are pretty outdated, which the structure of the home still reads as very modern, almost forward thinking, but there's kind of little aspects like the bathrooms, which needed a little bit of a, you know, modernization, the kitchen, which, you know, we use very often hosting and cooking dinners together that needed just a little bit more ergonomic touch to it so that it could be truly livable. The acoustics, we're so lucky that this house was originally meant to be a magical music box, which really ties in so well to our lifestyle because Spencer, he probably won't tell you this himself, but he's a wonderful DJ and he, you know, works with audio so much. He has an audio company, Cometa, and there's a lot of music that we are almost always playing in this house and the acoustics in this room alone just are fabulous. You tie that in with the light that's coming in at different times, not that I would recommend it, but if you are listening to music all the way until the morning, you've got the sunset vibes going into the sunrise vibes and it's just wonderful. I mean, we have such a huge amount of reverence for mid-century architecture in general and this house specifically because it's given so much to us that it's definitely a lifelong duty of stewardship and preservation. We've worked closely with the Mack Center and are looking forward to continuing that in the future. I think it's incredibly important right now, especially considering all the changes that Los Angeles has been through, that we continue to preserve these huge monuments of architectural design that we are so lucky to live around. When I first moved into this house, I automatically felt this life and love. It looked very scary from the outside, but once I was inside, I just felt this, I don't know, this deep heart love. It became what I wanted to do. I lived in this house for about four or five years before I really, really wanted to tackle what the house needed and what I also needed, and what the house needed was lighting. It needed new love and life to the outside of the property, which was a big undertaking because it's on a hillside, so we did a huge landscaping job from my neighbor down the street, Matthew Brown, who did an amazing job. We brought in some new trees, we redid this outside garden. Waking up here is lovely. I get, I'm woken up by the sun and I'm put to sleep by the sunset. This is my favorite room. This is the grand room. This Schindler book that I have over here, it was given to me by my friend who helped me buy this house. There's a chapter about this house called Dr. Howe's Magical Music Box. It was a radical time back then. I mean, even now it's radical, but I can only imagine these interesting socialite parties that were happening here. I mean, I imagine a jazz band up here performing for guests and dancing and, you know, all the things that were happening back then. I mean, it was a lively time, it sounds like. I have an audio company called Cometa and we make hi-fi rotary DJ mixers. That's my baby right there, the Cometa M2. And it's cool because it ties into this whole Dr. Howe's Magical Music Box thing. I feel like I am living with the history of the house. In this architectural community, it's known, but, you know, outside of the academic world, it's just great that he's becoming more recognized and more featured and he is a very innovative architect and I really love that, you know, he has these eras and he always is innovating. And this house being from the 20s, he was using materials that a couple years later were not available because of the Great Depression. Even a couple years later, it's just like, it's different materials and I love that he was able to adapt. I feel really proud to be part of the Schindler community. All the owners that I've met are actively preserving these monuments of this great architect who only really did stuff in Los Angeles and I feel really proud to be from here and to be actively preserving this for the future. I used to drive around in the hills with my dad when I was young and I always wanted to come over this way and go through these hills and we would drive down Silver Ridge sometimes and I'd always look at this house and I, at the time I was young, I always, the only architectural name I knew back then was Frank Lloyd Wright. Little did I know that this was Schindler who worked under Frank Lloyd Wright. You know, for years later to be living in this thing, it's a dream come true.