Reunion House/Apartment

Reunion House/Apartment

The solid, rectangular form of Reunion House is set into a sloping hill overlooking Silver Lake. Its façade demonstrates careful arrangements of line and form, composed of wood and glass planes. All elements play a role in this careful geometry, including the gutters and the spider leg outriggers which extend the lines of the house beyond its envelope. While spider legs had been used in Richard Neutra’s work previously, at the Reunion House, a new and innovative use for the spider leg was devised for the corner of the master bedroom, where a spider leg extends the roof’s support beam, allowing for a mitered glass corner below and giving the bedroom a more spacious feeling. Visitors enter by traveling up a zigzagging path surrounded by foliage. Lush plantings, coupled with a pool at the top of the stairs, transport the visitor to another environment far from the proximate urban sprawl of Silver Lake Boulevard. Originally called the Earl Street Reunion House, the home was a member of Richard Neutra’s Silver Lake Colony, but it is set apart from other homes in the group by its privacy. Built speculatively for a hypothetical client—grandparents who might host family reunions—the house was arranged to guarantee the privacy of both the primary residents and their visitors. The master bedroom is placed on the northern end of the house while the guest rooms are set on the opposite side, near the kitchen and garage. The patio and yard on either side of the dining room and breakfast nook cast the kitchen as the lookout point from which adults might watch their children as they played outdoors. Unlike the hypothetical clients, the house’s first residents were Walter Johnson, a developer; his wife Kay Koblic, owner of a duplex Neutra had designed nearby; and her two sons. Later, Richard Neutra’s son Dion Neutra, who had served as the project architect for the house, became its long-time owner. In 1966, he remodeled the original structure, and in 1968 he expanded the space to include a one-bedroom apartment over the garage.

Adapted from Neutra – Complete Works by Barbara Lamprecht (Taschen, 2000), p. 222.