As part of the John Lautner one hundredth birthday celebrations, the Lautner Foundation and the MAK Center opened up four of Lautner's houses for a tour this past weekend. Yesterday we visited the Sheats-Goldstein House and today we head east to the Harpel House in the Hollywood Hills.
Photos by Elizabeth Daniels We were asked not to photograph inside the Harpel House and while we'd love to show you the hexagonal living room and the elaborate master bathroom situation, you're not getting too raw a deal--the Harpel's roof extends well beyond its walls, so the property has a lot of exterior. The house was built in 1956 for radio announcer Willis Harpel, who worked on the house himself and also happened to live just below Leonard Malin, the man who would later commission the spaceshippy Chemosphere (Malin met Lautner at the Harpel).
According to the Lautner Foundation, owners after Harpel "wreaked havoc" on the place, expanding the ground floor and adding a partial second floor. Current owner Mark Haddawy, known for buying and selling Pierre Koenig's Case Study House 21 near Laurel Canyon, spent two years on a "painstaking and careful" restoration. Back before Harpel sold the house, he had commissioned a "smaller and circular house...for the slope beneath his main residence" that was never built, but Haddawy is adding a circular, modular guest house on the slope above the Harpel. It's really going to tie the neighborhood together.
· Inside John Lautner's Dangerous Sheats-Goldstein House [Curbed LA]
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