The history of Rudolph Schindler’s 1922 house is a quintessential Los Angeles story: a story of new ideas that are rapidly devised and rapidly dismissed, only to reemerge years later as pioneering and influential.
Built on an empty lot at 835 N. Kings Road in West Hollywood, then a scrubby unincorporated suburb of L.A., the Schindler House was indoor-outdoor and open plan decades before these were a thing — an intersecting sequence of multipurpose “studiorooms” that spilled into courtyards via sliding doors. The very DIY affair consisted of tilt-up concrete panels that two men could put into place with rope and a hoist. In fact, Schindler and his friend, engineer Clyde Chace, did some of the work themselves. Then, they and their wives, Pauline Gibling Schindler and Marian Chace, respectively, moved in.
The home’s innovative attributes — its rough-hewn aesthetic and attention to space — earned Schindler the admiration of fellow architects and a clutch of adventurous patrons, but it was generally ignored by the U.S. architectural establishment. For decades, the house was more cult hit than fan favorite. “Schindler is an architect’s architect,” Los Angeles critic Esther McCoy wrote in 1945.
For a time, it seemed he was destined to remain just that. When Schindler died in 1953, his (very brief) obituary in The Times made mention of the mechanical-looking beach house he’d built for wellness guru Philip Lovell in Newport Beach — but not the avant-garde home he had designed for himself.
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