There are roughly 20 houses left in greater Los Angeles that were built under Arts & Architecture's Case Study House program, which ran from the late-1940s to the mid-1960s and made Southern California the epicenter of Modernist residential architecture, with its aim of creating middle-class, single-family houses using "new materials and new techniques." Most of the survivors are still private residences and we don't often get a look inside, but today Case Study House #25, aka the Frank House, designed by Killingsworth, Brady, Smith and Associate and built in 1961, has come up for sale with a full gallery of photos.
CSH #25 sits on Rivo Alto Canal in the Naples section of Long Beach; it's "approached by a pathway of steppingstones over a reflecting pool and is entered through a dramatic 17 foot high front door that reveals a two-story interior courtyard with views into the adjacent living room and dining room downstairs, and master bedroom and study upstairs," as its listing describes it. Its A&A feature from 1962 says that "while unique in many ways," the architecture still had to grapple with a site "very typical of the usual mundane urban condition," and it compensates for a small lot by "turn[ing] in upon itself, creating its own singular quiet and seclusion."
The man who commissioned the house was a bachelor, but asked for a family house that could provide both privacy and lots of entertaining space, and he wanted the living room and master bedroom both to take advantage of the canal views.
Unfortunately, someone has seen fit to add a lot of marble and carpeting to the house over the years, but the bones seem to still be in place. Today it has three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a 40-foot private boat dock. It doesn't appear to have sold in at least a couple decades, and it's here today for sale at $2.549 million.
· The Frank House [SoCal Modern]
· Arts & Architecture's Case Study House No. 25 by Killingsworth, Brady, Smith and Associate, Architects [A&A]
· The Case Study House Map of Los Angeles [Curbed LA]
· Glassy Box on LB Water by Killingsworth, Brady & Smith [Curbed LA]