The Living Wasn’t Easy but House Is Worth Saving

In 1921, a young architect came back from a camping trip in the mountains and designed a house on a quiet street in West Hollywood that left its mark on Southern California architecture.

Fitted with sliding canvas doors that opened onto a pair of private gardens, the low, concrete-walled house “transcended anything done by anybody . . . in that he (the architect) had achieved the interpenetration of indoor and outdoor space,” said architectural historian Reyner Banham.

The house, once the scene of Bohemian revels, still stands today, hidden behind a stand of bamboo at 835 N. Kings Road. It is the subject of a restoration effort marking the 100th anniversary of architect R. M. Schindler’s birth on Sept. 10.

The City of West Hollywood has already funded a $50,000 roofing job and another $30,000 has been granted by the state Office of Historical Preservation to shore up seven leaning fireplaces and restore the front garden.

More Funds Needed

However, sponsors say that another half a million dollars could come in handy.

“It’s very creatively designed and very interesting,” said City Council Member John Heilman. “I don’t know if I’d want to live in it, but it needs to be preserved as part of the architectural history of the city.”

Schindler’s 3,410-square-foot house was not really intended to be lived in at all and certainly not by conventional souls, according to Kathryn Smith, chairman of the fund-raising effort and a one-time tenant of Schindler’s widow.

“He had come back from a camping trip to Yosemite and he was deeply enthralled with the out of doors and with the wilderness,” she said of the young Viennese architect and protege of Frank Lloyd Wright who made the house his first independent project.

“He compared the building to a camper’s shelter, with a solid back, which were the concrete panels, and an open front like a tent flap, which were the sliding canvas doors.

“The real rooms of that house are out of doors,” said Smith. “This is the hardest thing to communicate to anybody, including architecture students.”

The sliding doors were the forerunner of the sliding glass doors that open the living rooms of many a home to patios and back yards today, she said.

While similar concepts were used in Japan and traditional Spanish houses, Schindler’s house “was the first time that it was done in a modern building in a modern house in such a real and dramatic way,” Smith said.

“For some reason, a sliding window is different than a hinged door,” Banham said. “A lot of people were thinking in the same direction, but Schindler quite possibly was the first to do it on a modest domestic scale.

“It’s actually a tiny house, four rooms and a kitchen. But it doesn’t feel tiny when you’re in it because of those big chunks of outdoors. Although it depends heavily on Frank Lloyd Wright and some German and Austrian theorists, I don’t know of any house so early in the 20th Century that delivered so much of what modern architecture was supposed to be all about,” he said.

The house also had one of the first flat roofs in the area, unusual open-air sleeping porches on the roof and the walls were made by a new process of using wooden frames to tilt newly poured concrete into place. Straight-line hedges continued the angular lines of the house into the front and back yards.

Other Innovations

The innovations of the Schindler house were not only architectural. It was designed to be shared by two families, with a single kitchen in the middle joining two separate L-shaped wings.

After completing the house on June 22, 1922, Schindler and his wife, Pauline, shared it for three years with her college roommate and the roommate’s husband, who was the general contractor for the five-month house-building project. The house was built at a cost of $12,550, on a 100 by 200-foot lot that cost $2,750.

Free spirits in the Roaring ‘20s, the Schindlers liked to wear loose-fitting, natural-fiber clothes that closed with ties instead of buttons. They threw all-night parties in their isolated enclave, which was then one of three houses on the entire length of Kings Road between Melrose Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

“It was in the desert when it was built,” said Banham. “You can see in the old pictures the chaparral scrub and nothing but a few utility poles in the distance.”

Tenants included Galka Scheyer, the American agent for European painters known as the Blue Four: Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky and Lyonel Feininger. Much of her collection is now in the Norton Simon Museum.

Scheyer complained of the absence of “normal human conditions which any human being would request in a normal house,” including the lack of “circulation which does not necessitate climbing on the roof to open or close a window.”

Celebrated Guests

Guests ranged from novelists Theodore Dreiser and Aldous Huxley to avant-garde composer John Cage and silent movie star Mary MacLaren, who revisited the house shortly before her death in 1985.

According to Bob Sweeney, president of Friends of the Schindler House, MacLaren said she could not recall much about the interior because she spent most of her time in the architect’s open-air sleeping porch.

Evenings at the Schindlers also featured exotic dancing in the back garden, Sweeney said.

He said the impoverished young couple would charge guests 50 cents to see John Bovingdon, a one-time instructor in economics at Harvard University, take his clothes off and prance around a loom set up in the garden. Bovingdon occasionally was joined by a bare-breasted young woman in performances of Balinese folk dances.

Later, the Schindlers shared the house for five years with famed architect Richard Neutra and his wife, but Pauline Schindler moved out in 1927, returning in 1938, the year the couple divorced and split the house between them. She got the kitchen.

Separate Driveways

“One used the driveway and the north entrance and the other used the south path, so they never saw each other,” said Mark Schindler, their son. “The first time my father was in the other part was when I got married in my mother’s section. He hadn’t been there in 10 or 15 years.

“Even though they couldn’t manage to live together, they still had respect for each other,” he said.

Pauline Schindler had her problems with the house from the beginning, when she moved in shortly after giving birth and complained that it was hard to keep a constant temperature in the building, which had neither air conditioning nor heating.

To this day, Mark Schindler said, he feels that he is less sensitive than other people to extremes in temperature. He remembers watering the redwood roof to cool it during summers and huddling around a fireplace to stay warm in the winter.

The house has no cross-ventilation. “He (R. M Schindler) seems to have misjudged the climate,” Sweeney said.

On occasion Pauline Schindler would install cupboards and other conveniences only to have her husband come home at night and rip them out, but eventually she had her way, at least with her half.

Interior Decoration

She installed paneling to cover up her husband’s beloved rough concrete, put down shag carpeting and painted the walls pink, all of which has now been scraped away.

Pauline Schindler remained in the building after the architect’s death in 1953 at age 65. She played an active role in the futile fight against destruction of the neighboring Dodge House, another architectural landmark, before her death at age 84 in 1977.

That stretch of Kings Road, once four blocks of elegant homes on double lots, some architecturally notable, was virtually taken over by condominiums and apartment buildings when it was rezoned by county authorities before West Hollywood became an independent city in 1985.

“I don’t want to pass judgment on what the county did in reference to zoning, but it was done and we have to go on from there,” Council Member Heilman said. “We have to correct or mitigate some of the problems caused by intense development.”

Debbie Potter, the city’s economic development manager, said a recent study identified 117 structures in the city, some of them dating back to the era of the Schindler house, that may be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or a local preservation list.

Too Many Visitors

Mark Schindler said he lived in the house for a few months after his mother’s death but decided to move out when the burden of showing it to visiting tourists proved too heavy.

The house is now owned by the Friends of the Schindler house, which Pauline Schindler founded shortly before her death. The group bought the house in 1980 with a $160,000 state grant. The Schindler family also reduced their asking price by $160,000.

Supervised by Sweeney, workers have stripped paneling and paint, restored the back garden and rebuilt some of the furniture that Schindler designed to fit in with the house’s unique lines.

“It came to us in very bad condition,” Sweeney said last week, ducking to avoid hitting his head on a low redwood beam that the 5-foot-7 architect installed in the spirit of his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was one inch taller.

“That was a little conceit he picked up from Wright,” Sweeney said.

Hoping to gain new contributors on the centennial of Schindler’s birth, the Friends of the Schindler House have scheduled a $200-a-plate fund-raising dinner for Oct. 10. It is to be catered by Wolfgang Puck, owner of Spago restaurant.

The gala will kick off a three-month exhibition of the house as it was originally designed, complete with Schindler’s own furniture. Sweeney said that the building will then be used as an architectural gallery.