Stahl House for sale for first time since case | Real Estate news

For a long time, the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills has been a rarity — a globally recognized icon of Midcentury Modernism and Los Angeles glamour, still in the palms of the household who commissioned it in 1960. But now it’s for sale.

The asking price is $25 million, which could appear a startling determine for a two-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot home on a comfortable lot. But that determine may not shock lovers of modernist structure who comprehend it as Case Study House #22.

It was designed for the Stahl household by architect Pierre Koenig, captured on black-and-white movie by photographer Julius Shulman and has been admired worldwide ever since.

The Architect’s Newspaper called it “one of the world’s most famous buildings.” Los Angeles magazine called Shulman’s image “perhaps the most famous picture ever taken of Los Angeles.”

“There are no comps for the Stahl house. It’s incomparable,” said William Baker, structure director for the real estate firm the Agency Beverly Hills. The home was included in the company’s fall catalog Nov. 12.

By Friday afternoon, Baker said, he had acquired a whole lot of inquiring calls. In contemplating provides, Baker said, the household is open to people or establishments — “someone who’s going to understand it, honor the house and the story about it.”

The Stahls bought the lot in 1954 for $13,500 and enlisted Koenig to design the home after other architects had been daunted by the slope of the lot. Koenig’s answer was a cantilevered L-shaped construction with partitions of metal and glass, a pool and a free-standing stone-faced fire between the residing and eating areas.

The second bed room can only be accessed through the first bed room — “an efficient use of space” for a household of 5, Baker said. The Stahl household has said the home price $37,500 to construct.

Shortly after the home’s completion, photographer Julius Shulman made a black-and-white {photograph} that turned emblematic of the period. It exhibits the home at evening, with two younger ladies sitting inside in a cantilevered nook, its floor-to-ceiling home windows revealing the lights of the L.A. Basin glittering in the background.

To convey up the lights, Shulman later told Los Angeles magazine, he used a seven-minute publicity. The ensuing image, along with others Shulman made of the home, is now owned by the Getty Research Institute.

In years since, the home has served as a filming location for many TV and movie productions, including the 1968 pilot episode of “Columbo” and the films “Galaxy Quest” (1999) and “Nurse Betty” (2000).

“This home has been the center of our lives for decades, but as we’ve gotten older, it has become increasingly challenging to care for it with the attention and energy it so richly deserves,” the Stahl household announced on its web site. Bruce and Shari Stahl, the surviving youngsters of authentic homeowners Buck and Carlotta Stahl, added, “[O]ur tour program will continue unchanged for the time being, and we will provide ample notice before any adjustments are made.”

For the last 17 years, the home has been open for tours, most not too long ago on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, beginning at $60 per grownup during the day, $90 in the night, with advance reserving required and tight limits on images. However, the Stahl web site signifies all tours are bought out through the end of February.

The real estate itemizing notes that the home is “a protected landmark and the only Case Study House with original family ownership.”

In nominating it for the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, Amanda Stewart of the Los Angeles Conservancy called it “perhaps the most iconic house constructed in the Case Study House Program.” That program, sponsored by John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture magazine from 1945 to 1966, yielded 25 accomplished properties, today thought of top exemplars of Midcentury home design.

“There’s not a lot of these Case Study houses left. I think there are 19 now,” Baker said. (Baker also said he had not too long ago dealt with the sale of Case Study House #10 in Pasadena to a purchaser who misplaced a home in January’s Pacific Palisades fire.)

The Stahl home stands on Woods Drive just north of West Hollywood’s metropolis restrict, about a quarter of a mile from Chateau Marmont.

Many architecturally important Southern California Modern properties have landed in the palms of establishments, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (1921), owned by the town of Los Angeles; the Schindler House (1922), owned by the Friends of the Schindler House and operated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Eames House (1949), owned by the nonprofit Eames Foundation. The Sheats-Goldstein Residence, designed by John Lautner in 1961-63 and renovated by Lautner in the Nineteen Nineties, has been promised by proprietor James Goldstein to the L.A. County Museum of Art.