Case Study House #22

Jessica surprised me with a visit to Case Study House #22. It was one of the best surprise gifts ever given to me.

The 3 readers of this blog will recognize man of my own personal design ascetics in this house. A lot of my personal taste was derived from the Case Study Houses.

 The Case Study Houses were a series of houses that were designed in the 50's to the late 60's. They became the embodiment of Mid Century Modern in the Los Angeles Area. The houses were designed to be 1. easily replicable 2. built with 'off the shelf' materials 3. affordable. Measured by those 3 criteria, the Case Study Houses were failures (CSH #22 was 3 times the cost of the average house when it was built), none of these houses became replicated on any scale.

Case Study House #22 became famous through a series of photographs by Julius Shulman. In fact, CSH #22 became the most iconic house of Mid Century Los Angeles. Here are the pictures from our tour:

Thoughts:
These images don't do justice to the house. It really is a special and unique house. The family room (the image with Jessica sitting on the couch) is completely surrounded by glass and it over hangs a fairly steep cliff. The views are panoramic from every room in the house. At 1,500 sq feet, the house is not that large, but it feels much larger due to the glass walls (there is only one solid wall, the wall facing the street, otherwise the thing is all glass).

We spoke with one of the Stahls during the tour, he was mentioning all the repairs that he is going to do to the house in the up coming weeks (replacing the carpet, fixing the glass sliders, fixing the ambient heating element). It seems that the house needs a lot of attention. Also, Stahl said that the sun light chews apart the furniture and carpet. My place gets a ton of sunlight, I'm considering getting UV filter film to put on the windows just because of that.

As thanks to Jessica for the great trip, I took her to dinner at Musso and Franks in Hollywood.