This delightful book is really a love story about a house. The property is at 1635 Woods Drive, Los Angeles, 90069 (if you put this address into Bing Maps, you'll see an aerial shot) and the principal characters are Buck and Carlotta Stahl who, in 1959, purchased a lot in the Hollywood Hills to build a house. Another principal was Pierre Koenig, a thirty-four-year-old architect who saw the potential of a house that overlooked most of Los Angeles. Other characters include photographer Jules Shurman, who had shot most of the modern houses in California and John Entenza, the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, who created the influential Case Study Houses program (the Stahl House was 22 of the 36 houses).
Koenig's brilliant design was to create an L-shaped house around an outdoor pool. The steel frame had one wall facing the street; the rest of the house was floor-to-ceiling glass, with a seven-foot overhang on the poolside to protect the interior from the sun. The book describes the problems of getting a mortgage on a flat-roofed property, the construction and the Stahl's family living in a famous property, this was primarily because of Shulman's well-known nighttime photo (on the cover) of two ladies sitting in one corner of the living room, with the lights of LA stretching to the horizon.
The book is well illustrated and printed with a 175 screen on good matt-art paper but I have given it four stars because there are virtually no captions for the many illustrations. Some of the photos show the construction and interior rooms and they really should have some explanation for the reader.
US
