An internationally known icon of Californian glamour is for sale as the family of the original owners seek a new “steward” for the fabled Stahl House.
The Stahl house, an icon of Los Angeles Mid-Century Modern design, is up for sale for the first time in its storied 65-year history, reports the Guardian. Perched on a rocky hillside, the cantilevered home sits at the juncture of mountain, ocean and city, its floor-to-ceiling glass walls and open floorplan granting unparalleled views.
Constructed for “a mere US$37,000” – roughly three times the average cost of a new home in 1960 – the famous Hollywood Hills house where “nobody famous ever lived” is listed at US$25 million.
“This home has been the centre of our lives for decades,” Bruce and Shari Stahl, the children of the original owners, wrote in a statement, “but as we’ve gotten older, it has become increasingly challenging to care for it with the attention and energy it so richly deserves.”
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CH ‘Buck’ Stahl and his wife Carlotta bought the site in 1954, the hilly patch of land in the then-undeveloped Hollywood Hills far from an ideal location. On the weekends, the pair brought in concrete from city construction projects to shore up the precarious hillside, but architects were still wary of building there. Then they found architect Pierre Koenig, who agreed in November 1957 to turn Buck’s original design into a real home.
The Stahls received subsidies to hire Koenig from the Case Study, an Arts & Architecture-sponsored modernist programme envisioned as a creative response to the inevitable post-WWII housing boom.
Case Study constructions explored “using new materials and building in places that maybe previously the technology didn’t really allow,” Adrian Scott Fine, the president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Conservancy, told the Guardian. All characteristics were perfectly captured in the Stahl house’s avant-garde, modern style and “unthinkable” location.
A black-and-white photograph taken for the magazine soon after construction was finished immortalised the Stahl house in the popular imagination. Architectural photographer Julius Shulman perfectly captured the surreality of the design, two women sitting in conversation in a glass-enclosed living room that appears to float over the glittering Los Angeles skyline.
The Stahl family hopes the new “steward” of the house will be “someone who not only appreciates its architectural significance but also understands its place in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles and beyond.”
