Back in October, I heard about an opportunity to visit a "Lost Lautner"—that is, a house designed by architect John Lautner that was missing from the official record of his works.
circa April 2009, via Google Street View
It was the Salkin House, located on Avon Terrace and tucked into the crook of the neck of upper Elysian Park. Completed in 1948, somehow it had disappeared from memory for decades—until it was "discovered" again in 2014, when it hit the market for the first time basically ever, confirming the rumors of its existence to be true.
circa March 2018, via Google Street View
Fashion designer Trina Turk and her (now late) husband Jonathan Skow purchased it for $1.2 million and embarked on a preservation-minded restoration, securing its designation as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2016.
So how does one "lose" a Lautner house? Well, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the famed architect wasn't licensed yet when real estate developer Jules Salkin commissioned him to design it. In order to get the thing built, he had another architect sign the permits. There was no paper trail tying it to Lautner.
Of course, viewing the completed project in the rearview, the Salkin House kind of looks like a Lautner—bearing some similarities to the Ub Iwerks House of the Future (completed 1958), but with a roof that somehow evokes both a butterfly and an outrigger.
(From the back, I think it looks like a ship. With wings. And redwood siding.)
The interior is a bit cattywampus, with diagonal support beams interrupting the linear forms of an open shelving unit. Much of the original design had been covered up for decades—the shelves filled in and enclosed—but was revealed in the restoration, right down to the red-stained concrete slab floor.
The Maxwell family had retained ownership of the house from 1954 to 2014—but had converted it into a rental property, which meant a lot of comings and goings. A circa 1966 bedroom addition obscured the space-age carport out front, and has since been removed.
Newly-added vintage touches, like an O’Keefe & Merritt/Tappan deluxe stove in the kitchen, feel as though they could've been there forever.
The house opened to the public last fall as part of Peter Blake Gallery's Blakehaus program, whose art exhibits take over Mid Century Modern homes—seamlessly integrating furniture, paintings, vessels, and objets d'art into architecturally significant spaces.
Bathed in sunlight from the clerestory windows, each room blended modern with vintage modernism...
...with new designs alongside antique touches like circa 1935 armchairs by Andre Sornay, under a ceiling that slopes in reverse.
There are many aspects of the Salkin House that are, say, architecturally confusing to the contemporary eye. But back then, it was considered downright weird. Someone noted on a County Assessor form that it had "odd construction."
While originally conceived as a low-cost family home (in fact, two families initially lived there), it recently sold for $2.4 million. For some really incredible real estate photos from the listing, click here.
You could blame the million-dollar view, or the fact that the smallish house lives on a lot includes some terraces and outdoor patio areas—which were also used to exhibit art from the Peter Blake Gallery, like "Luminous Earth" by Puerto Rican-American (and LA-based) visual artist Gisela Colón.
It's a site-specific art installation of one of Colón's "luminous" large-scale sculptures made from optical acrylics—totemic structures she calls "parabolic monoliths," which seem to both absorb the sun and reflect the sky.
"With its aerodynamic contours," the official description of the work explains, "the singular form suggests both projectile and mountain, spacecraft and obelisk, evoking dualities of force and endurance, presence and memory."
It's a fitting companion to an architectural design that both thinks to the future and embraces the nature that surrounds it—that persisted long enough to reclaim a new remembering.
The Salkin House is private property located on a residential street. It is not open for tours, so please don't disturb the owners or the neighbors.
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