It doesn’t get much more pantheonic than that.Despite similarities like the use of large windows and flat roofs, these styles differ in significant ways. The house was even a guest star on The Simpsons. “It just felt all encompassing there.” Modernism came back in style and the Stahl House, owned by the Stahl family to this day and open to hundreds of visitors on guided tours every year, became one of the most photographed buildings in the world. “Here we were in a house that overlooked all of L.A., thinking of the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas,” she said, referring to the group’s pop-royalty parentage. For Carnie Wilson, one of the singers, the experience was the apotheosis of all things Los Angeles. In 1990, the vocal trio Wilson Phillips filmed the video for their hit “Release Me” there, with director Julien Temple evoking Shulman’s famous photograph. And then, more and more, real productions began beating a path up to the real Stahl House: movies, television, Vogue shoots. But in 1989 it was rebuilt, in replica, as the star attraction of the “Blueprints for Modern Living” show at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a surreal experience for the Stahls, who strolled through a parallel-universe version of their family home that had been styled as if for a Hollywood production. Like the prototypical postwar suburban family, the Stahls made do and got by.Įventually, the Stahl House, like all midcentury houses, fell out of fashion. Buck was the kind of dad who built the children’s nightstands himself the Stahls’ decor was no high-end fantasia of Eames, Knoll, and Nelson.

Adolf Loos’s dictum “ornament is crime” may have animated Koenig’s minimalist design, but she went to town on a tucked-away powder room: floral wallpaper, shag carpet, framed embroidery, and plastic daisies.

Carlotta, for her part, made delicious treats in a kitchen outfitted with pink GE appliances. Shari once rode her tricycle into it, and Bruce developed into a champion swimmer who broke the world record for the 50-meter freestyle. Buck would shout for the kids to “aim for the drain,” meaning the deep end, and they would take flight, the turquoise water rushing toward them and sky all around. Jumping off the dramatic, oversailing roof into the swimming pool was an important rite, one eventually passed down to the Stahls’ grandchildren. The towheaded Stahl kids liked to roller-skate across the concrete floors and got up to the usual youthful japery-setting Barbies afire and the like. For the Stahls, it became the blank screen on which they projected their dreams of a life together, a place to build a future, a family, and a house like no other.Īs the Stahls tell it, the house may have been a modernist glass bubble, but the glass had smudgy handprints all over it. Locals called it Pecker Point, presumably because it was a prime makeout venue. “This lot was in pure view-every morning, every night,” Carlotta Stahl recalled. It was as conspicuous as it was forbidding, visible from the couple’s house on nearby Hillside Avenue. Back home in L.A., as the newlyweds pondered their future, they became preoccupied with a promontory of land jutting out like the prow of a ship from Woods Drive in the Hollywood Hills, about 125 feet above Sunset Boulevard. They each worked in aviation (Buck in sales, Carlotta as a receptionist), had previous marriages, and were strapping, tall, and extremely good looking-California Apollonians out of central casting. In March 1954, Clarence “Buck” Stahl and Carlotta May Gates drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and got married in a chapel.

Modern architecture homes