The New York Times’s T Magazine took a tour of house by renowned Modernist R.M. Schindler in Laurel Canyon, and made a cool video tour of the newly redone dwelling. The 3,500-square-foot residence, built for Richard Lechner and his wife in 1947, is one of Schindler’s largest. Set up like "an Expressionist cliff dwelling for the modern era," the V-shaped house features walls of glass and clerestory windows, and appears to be surrounded by lush vegetation and mature trees.
Unfortunately, in the years following, the house lost much of its original luster to renovations, says T Magazine:
Lechner eventually lost the place in a divorce in the ’50s, and eight owners later, it had gone from majestic to mundane ... The walls and the bold, angular, stainless-steel fireplace were covered in Sheetrock (the brick columns that flanked the hearth had been sheathed in black granite), and Schindler’s purposefully plain, hardware-free windows had been replaced with big-box-store-grade metal ones.
Enter Los Angeles-based designer Pamela Shamshiri of Commune Design, which gave the Ace Hotel in Downtown and Palm Springs their looks. Shamshiri purchased the house in 2008. "It was heartbreaking," Shamshiri told T. "The spirit was gone."
So, she set about resurrecting that spirit, without having a "slavish devotion" to the original Schindler, but incorporating many of his original touches. When she removed the Sheetrock throughout the house, she found the plywood dating back to the house’s earliest days—the wood still had penciled numbers written by Schindler himself.
Read the full story here and take the tour below:
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