A Rare Look Inside a Restored 1949 John Lautner Masterpiece in Pasadena | House Tour

One thing that Lautner is always trying to achieve is to give you as open a space as possible, a space that connects you to the landscape. And sometimes these are landscapes with incredible views, incredible vistas, and he frames these views, they become part of the house. Sometimes it is a house that is more introverted in a way. He's connecting you to the surrounding garden. And again, he does that to make the habitable space feel larger. My name is Frank Escher. We are today in Pasadena at the Dahlstrom House, built in 1949. The architect of this house is John Lautner. Lautner famously studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. He worked with Wright between 1933 and 1938, had actually an unusually good relationship with Wright. Wright refers to Lautner in letters to clients as my boy. He refers projects to Lautner. According to the photographer Julius Schulman, Frank Lloyd Wright referred to John Lautner as the second best architect in the world. He, of course, was the best. Lautner comes to Los Angeles in 1938 and he immediately starts his career. The first house is his own. He builds a few other things. And during the war, his career sort of stops like everyone else's lives at the time. So he works with Douglas Honhol, does a few projects with him. And just after the war, his career takes off. Lautner, what is really interesting about Lautner's work is that he's always working with very important structural engineers from the beginning on. He's very, very informed, very knowledgeable about engineering, 20th century engineering. And just after the war, he worked with two very important structural engineers. One is at Guardacontini and he does with him a series of houses with prefabricated roof structures, independent roof structures. These are steel or steel and wood structures. The other structural engineer is Richard Bradshaw. And Bradshaw is the structural engineer for this house. Bradshaw became really almost the best known engineer on the West Coast. He only worked with Lautner on a few projects because Bradshaw became very well known. He did some very, very large projects. On this house, Bradshaw developed this really brilliant structural system. And you can see that in the drawings, how the steel posts are embedded several feet into the ground. So they're cantilevering off the ground, which gives the house lateral stability. The roof structure, of course, is used in this kind of brilliant way. And you see that in particular when you approach the house and you see the driveway, you come up to the house at an angle. And to avoid having any structure that would be in the way of you parking, Lautner and Bradshaw came up with this really brilliant idea of extending this steel beam out from the house, across the driveway, and it sits on this one steel post. And of course, you know, that is the sort of iconic form of the house, this sort of steel beam that shuts out from the house. That's simply there for practical reasons so that when you are driving up, you don't have to sort of get around any structure. The second part that is interesting about that is if you approach a house at an angle, it always feels slightly uncomfortable because you're either approaching a corner of the house or you're approaching one side or the other. And Lautner resolves this really brilliantly by introducing this sort of semicircle to the front. So even though you're coming up at an angle, it looks like you're approaching the house frontally. And that's how he starts with this idea that he then sort of carries into the house of these circles and curves. What is really interesting about the clients that John Lautner has just after the war, a lot of them are middle class families. There's teachers, there's people who are starting a family who are starting and you see a lot of these really interesting, very small houses at the beginning of his career. The Dahlstroms had a printing business, a very important printing business actually. So they printed for other architects or anything from blueprints, but they also printed calendars. So first of all, they knew architects because they worked with a lot of architects. And it's really interesting to me that they selected John Lautner because they clearly, they realized this is a very difficult lot and they wanted to have somebody do this sort of brilliant house here. Lautner then works for the Dahlstroms. I am not sure how long the Dahlstroms owned this house, but we always have to think about the clients who commissioned these houses. This would not be possible without the client. Now in the house, here in this living room, there's a few ideas that Lautner uses throughout his career. One is sort of making a distinction between what is your enclosed space, what gets heated, what gets cooled, and what is the space that you have visual access to. And so here you have this enclosure of the glass. Again, the steel structure, the minimal steel structure almost disappears. And the idea is that your space, the space that you experience really ends outside in the garden, in this sort of curved wall on one side that continues to this segment of this curved concrete wall. And it is all about sort of expanding as far as possible the space that is part of your dwelling. Lautner is absolutely brilliant in that respect. We see this in many other projects. But this idea of the circle, of course, then is translated into the house. And rather than entering a small house through a small windowless, lightless hallway, you enter into this really glorious canyon that is made up of these circular forms that repeat the roof on the outside and repeat in plan sort of the larger circle of the garden. What could have been an interesting small hallway becomes this great spatial experience. So you enter, there's a little bit of light that comes in from the side, and then you encounter one sort of drum after the other. The first one was originally a small closet. It has been turned into a shower. And then the second major drum is the master bedroom. And what is so interesting about this is that the room itself is not very large. But by making the center of it deeper, by creating this sort of curve, you make the room feel bigger. And on the outside from the living room, looking at this sort of circle, it does not appear like a volume that is blocking anything. It appears almost as a piece of furniture. And then the space, of course, is connected to the living room with this fantastic curved sliding wall. And what this does is that that space, again, it's not very, very big, but through this sliding door, it opens visually, it opens to the living room, which now becomes part of your space. So the space automatically feels much larger. I studied architecture in Switzerland, where I'm from, and I've lived in Los Angeles now since 1988. And I have a practice with Ravi Gunawardana. Our office is called Escher Gunawardana. And we have a very broad range of projects. We do new things, houses, housing. We do a lot of art-related work, collaborations with artists, exhibition design, galleries, things like that. And then we do a great deal of historic preservation. And this is something that we're very interested in, because historic preservation isn't only about preserving a building, it's about preserving a cultural history. On the various projects that we have been able to work on, there's always a huge amount of research that goes into this and studying either the architects or a period of time or a client that made an unusual contribution to the architectural history of Los Angeles. And those are projects that are always extremely interesting. One thing that led to these sort of Lautner projects is I edited the first book on John Lautner, which came out in 1994. He died around the same time, and I was involved in setting up the John Lautner Foundation. His family then donated the archive to the foundation. I, because I had just spent two and a half years looking at every single drawing, about 12,000 drawings, became the administrator for the archive. And I did that until 2007, when the archive was transferred to the Getty. So the archive is now at the Getty. And we did that because we wanted it to be in a place where it was accessible and available, and of course, a place that would be able to sort of look after this incredibly interesting archive that we have. So we're here in the living room of the Dahlstrom House, and we can see how this language of circles is used really fantastically well. And right, for example, in this corner, there's this really beautiful revolving bookcase. I will call it the revolving bookcase, even though, sadly, it doesn't revolve anymore. But the idea was originally that you had this bookcase, and you could sort of load it with books. And of course, it also hides the steel post, steel post that is in the center, that is carrying the roof, and becomes sort of the access for this bookcase. But you can also see here the really beautiful detailing of the house, the built-in bench with these rounded corners, and how it connects to the outside, and how the glass and the aluminum framing is very beautifully and very carefully sort of formed around the glass. This is all the original glazing. It's in very, very good condition. So this is one of the things that is really special about this house, the great condition of the whole envelope. I understand that the most recent owner has done a lot of restoration work to restore the wood. So this is actually not the original wood. These are different wood panels that she used, but to restore this idea of Lautners, that you have a steel roof, and underneath you have a wood structure. And this combination of materials is something that you see quite often in Lautners' work. He's a master in working in wood, and he always worked with very, very good craftsmen, contractors, cabinet makers who knew their craft. So this here is one of these examples of these really sort of fantastic wood built-ins. The combination of a concrete floor originally with radiant heating, a steel structure for the roof, and the wood elements in between is something that you see very often in Lautners' work. So the first time I saw this house was actually in the early 1990s when I was working on the Lautner book, and it looked very, very differently. And I remember it did not have a huge impact on me, simply because it had been altered so much. Everything was painted white, and it just, you know, it really did not sort of make a lasting impression. And so when I came here about a week ago for the first time, and I saw the house now that it has been very carefully restored, large parts of it have been very carefully restored, I experienced the house the way Lautner wanted it to be experienced. You know, you enter through this sort of canyon of wood, you know, and that changes completely the perception of the house, how you understand the house. It really makes it into this, you know, fantastic experience. And again, if you think about this, this is a very, very small house. If you look at the floor plan, it's not very big. There's so much architecture sort of packed into this, so many different spatial experiences, light situations, materials. And that is one of the things that Lautner, I think, is an absolute genius at. I think one has to understand that these houses, post-war, mid-century houses, there was a time when people were not that interested in them. They didn't want to live in them. They didn't care about preserving them. Thankfully, people now understand that. And they understand that preserving a house properly isn't only about the cultural value, but it is actually about the monetary value. Because a well-preserved, architecturally significant house becomes a collector's item. It becomes very valuable. And I think people have started to understand this. And because of that, thankfully, we're seeing more and more people who acquire these houses because they know what it is. They're interested in them. And they are able to care for these and look after these houses. Yes, one can say that, well, these houses were originally built for people with smaller means, the patrons. And now they have become collector's items. And all of a sudden, they have become almost too expensive or unavailable to the people who commissioned these kinds of houses. I mean, it's a very, very interesting sort of change. But there are many organizations around Los Angeles that have done very important work in getting people to understand the importance of historic preservation.