Archinect - News

Richard Neutra-designed Oregon home hits the market at $3,750,000

2022-05-23T14:26:00-04:00

A Portland house with a provenance like no other is for sale. The revolutionary dwelling was designed 82 years ago by modernist architect Richard Neutra for lily hybridizer Jan de Graaff and his wife, Peggy, heir to the Macy’s department store owner who died on the Titanic.

The home, originally constructed in 1941, is located at 1901 South Comus Street. It was listed on Thursday, May 19th through Oregon-based real estate company The Hasson Company with an asking price of $3,750,000.

The three-level residence is celebrated for its embodiment of Neutra’s International style with its floor-to-ceiling windows and custom wood built-ins. It is one of only two Oregon homes designed by Neutra, who was commissioned by the de Graaffs to design a house for their modern furniture and art collection.

The house spans 6,887 square feet and sits on a 0.85-acre lot, offering unobstructed mountain, city, and river views. It features five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms.

Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House still for sale

2020-12-29T13:50:00-05:00

If you're shopping for a modernist architectural landmark to kick off the new year, you might be in luck: the Richard Neutra-designed Lovell Health House in the Los Feliz hills of Los Angeles is still available after hitting the market back in February.

Featured in several Hollywood movies, the expansive 4,807-square-foot home was completed in 1929 and quickly became an icon of the International Style.

Previously on Archinect: Neutra's Lovell Health House is heading for sale. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user MichaelJLocke.

"Without question, this house together with Schindler’s Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach are the greatest monuments of the International Style in Southern California," wrote historians David Gebhard and Robert Winter. "The Lovell House…firmly established Neutra’s world reputation."

In late January, Archinect reported on the current owner's intention to list the property.

The current asking price for the expansive five-bedroom, four-bathroom property is...

Neutra's Lovell Health House is heading for sale

2020-01-28T15:50:00-05:00

Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House in the hills above Los Angeles is reportedly going up for sale.

According to a recent report in The Real Deal, the current owner of the 4,807-square-foot cliffside, International Style home is currently working to build buzz around the house in advance of a potential sale.

The owner, Ken Topper, grew up in the home, which was owned previously by his parents Betty and Morton Topper. Morton, who purchased the house back in 1960 for $60,000, passed away in 1971, while Betty continued to live in the home until last August when she herself passed away.

An as-built drawing of the home created for the Historic American Building Survey. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Now, the aging home is in need of a slate of repairs, including structural upgrades, though it is largely intact. The Mortons purchased the home from the original owners, Morris and Leah Lovell. The home features off-the-shelf factory windows that wrap around the exterior walls...

Architect and preservationist Dion Neutra has passed away

2019-11-26T18:20:00-05:00

Dion Neutra, the son of the 20th century architect Richard Neutra and a practitioner in his own right who also waged a decades-long war to save his father’s iconic buildings from the ravages of time, remodeling and demolition, has died at his home on Neutra Place in Silver Lake, a neighborhood studded with Neutra architecture. Neutra, who was 93, died Sunday in his sleep, said his brother, Raymond Neutra.

The Los Angeles Times highlights the life and career of Dion Neutra, the son and collaborator of Richard Neutra, the famed Los Angeles architect behind many of the city's sleek Modernist-era structures. Dion worked alongside his father on some of the firm's most creative works, including the VDL II Research House.

View of the downstairs interiors of the VDL II Research House. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user DavidHartwell.

In his later years, as his father's works increasingly fell to the wrecking ball, Dion became an ardent preservationist. In 2004, he told The Los Angeles Times, "There should be a national will to save these buildings,” adding, “It shouldn’t have to be a one-man crusade.”

The approach is one he lived through and through. "My wife gives me hell because I’ve kept the original 1950s Case toilet that doesn’t flush right,” Dion explained to The Los Angeles Times, "'Listen,' I tell her. 'This is the toilet that Richard Neutra sat on — I’m not getting rid of it.'"

...

The Neutra VDL House Celebrates its National Historic Landmark Status

2017-04-26T13:13:00-04:00

Built in 1932, the VDL Research House designed by Richard Neutra is one of Southern California’s modernist gems. Now it has been named a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior following the tireless work of its owners, the Cal Poly Pomona Foundation and, in particular, the VDL House director and chair of the architecture department at Cal Poly, Sarah Lorenzen. The effort was assisted by Los Angeles Congressman Adam Schiff, who helped celebrate the designation last Sunday.

Neutra’s third building in the United States, and his own private home, the House is said to encapsulate his ideas. For the famed Austrian-American architect, the role of contemporary architecture was to shape life in the modern world, marked by new technologies and new lifestyles. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the House is “the only property where one can see the progression of his style over a period of years and is among the key properties to understanding the nation...

Check out the newly-restored Neutra-designed Oasis Building in the Petrified National Forest

2017-04-14T12:21:00-04:00

Back in the early ‘60s, the National Park Service had a program dubbed Mission 66, dedicated to bringing modern facilities to the national parks. One of the earliest examples of this, the Painted Desert Community Complex designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander, has just been restored in a joint effort between the Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

A 22-acre self-contained park community, the Complex is the last surviving Neutral-Designed structure in the Park Service system. It’s design was inspired by Puebloan Native American buildings as well as the dramatic landscape of its site, the Petrified Forest National Park. Comprising 36 steel, glass and masonry buildings with flat roofs, low silhouettes, primary colors and native plantings.

The buildings have been in a state of depredation for some time, ravaged by neglect, a lack of maintenance funding and the harsh desert climate. The restoration mainly focused on the glass Oasis Building storefront, m...

Ain't No Party Like an Archinect Party: Treatise Launch at the VDL House

2015-05-06T16:20:00-04:00

The Cognoscenti Coffee cocktails were flowing (and frothing) at the Neutra VDL House on Saturday May 2nd, as Archinect, the VDL House and the Graham Foundation hosted the book launch of Treatise, a series of publications wherein 14 relatively new design offices explored the question "Why Write Alone?" Featuring work from emerging talents such as Andrew Kovacs, Point Supreme, and SOFTLab, the project is part of a larger mandate to explore creative approaches to architecture, and was initially part of an exhibition featuring over 200 models, images, drawings, and multi-media installations curated by Jimenez Lai in Chicago in January.

Photo by Diana Koenigsberg

Several hours into the party, the stylishly-dressed Lai mounted the gravel strewn median above the courtyard to toast the Graham Foundation for providing the grant that made Treatise possible. He also thanked Archinect's Paul Petrunia for hosting the event, to which over 250 attendees affirmatively R.S.V.P.-ed.

Photo by Diana Koe...

Architect Dion Neutra To Take His Famous Father's Work To Raleigh, NC

2012-10-30T19:19:00-04:00

Triangle Modernist Houses continues the 2012 TalkModern Lecture Series.

October 30, 2012 (Raleigh, NC) – In 1949, Time magazine named modern master Richard Neutra (1892-1970) the second most important architect in America, second only to Frank Lloyd Wright. On Tuesday, November 13, at 7 p.m., the master’s son, architect Dion Neutra, AIA, will discuss his father’s celebrated work and philosophy when he presents “Neutra Architecture: The View From Inside” at the AIA North Carolina Center for Architecture and Design in downtown Raleigh.

Dion’s lecture is the second half of Triangle Modernist Houses’ 2012 TalkModern Lecture Series this fall entitled “A Fistful of Neutras.” His brother Raymond spoke in October.

A partner in his father’s firm, Dion will share his personal and professional views of the sensitivity to the relationship of man and nature that he and his father called bio-realism.

“The Neutras sounded the environmental alarm in the 1950s many years before ecology, ...

'nother Neutra slated to be demo'd

2011-07-25T14:55:17-04:00

The [Kronish House]... has been "terribly neglected, but the bones are still there," said Dion Neutra, an architect who teamed up with his late father, Richard, on the project. "The new owner thinks it would be more valuable to tear it down and have empty land."

Cal Poly Pomona Archives on California Modernism and International Style

2011-04-19T14:33:46-04:00

I recently got acquainted with Cal Poly Pomona's archives of Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Donald Wexler, Garrett Eckbo, Craig Ellwood and others. These archives contain never published before original drawings, photographs, blueprints, and stories. They were given to the College of Environmental Design and they are in care of Dr. Lauren Weiss Bricker. The archives are open to public with an appointment. I have arranged a permission to do an Archinect Feature on them including an interview with Dr. Bricker and others who have many stories about this precious collection. Coming soon...

Neutra on a roll

2011-04-09T23:21:57-04:00

The 1941 Maxwell house by Richard Neutra, one of Southern California's most celebrated residential architects, is being moved in pieces from Brentwood to a vacant lot in Angelino Heights, the neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles best known for its restored Victorians. Photographer Brian Thomas Jones was on the scene as the first part of the 1,700-square-foot wooden structure made the journey down Sunset Boulevard to its new home.

The LA Times covers the moving of Neutra's Maxwell house.