A wonderful piece of Los Angeles’s architectural history, and a picture-perfect example of midcentury modern style, Case Study House #21 is for sale in the Hollywood Hills. Built in 1958, the Bailey House was designed by architect Pierre Koenig as part of the Case Study House (CSH) program sponsored Arts & Architecture magazine.
The house, says the Los Angeles Conservancy, is "a simple one-story box with a flat roof, built mostly of steel and glass." It was designed to be surrounded by "shallow reflective pools," and the listing indicates those pools are still there, starting as "ponds that circulate to the roof and return as fountains."
Inside, the listing says, the two-bedroom house is laid out with a "central core" of bathrooms and "mechanical rooms."
The kitchen appears to be fully decked out in stainless steel, from cabinets to appliances. If the steel-framed house’s ceilings look like corrugated steel, it’s because they are.
The Case Study House program produced houses in the Los Angeles area from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It sprinkled the city with fantastic examples of how some of the architects that we remember and revere today (Charles Eames, Richard Neutra) imagined affordable, replicable homes for middle-class families in the boom times after World War II.
Below are two photos taken by renowned architecture photographer Julius Schulman when Case Study #21 was built:
It's now listed for $4.5 million.
Photos below are by Elizabeth Daniels from a 2012 art event that took place at the house.
- The Sale of an Icon [Sotheby's International Realty]
- 9038 Wonderland Park Ave,Los Angeles, CA 90046 [Estately]
- Mapped: The Case Study Houses That Made Los Angeles a Modernist Mecca [Curbed LA]
- Bailey House (Case Study House #21) [Curbed LA]
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