The Stahl House | Shari Stahl Gronwald and Bruce Stahl
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Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Hi, my name is Shari Stahl Gronwald. I am the co-owner of the Stahl House and we recently put out a book called The Stahl House: Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon.
Bruce Stahl: Hi, I'm Bruce Stahl and I'm her brother.
Suzy Chase: In August 2019, News Week declared The Stahl House one of the greatest architectural wonders of Los Angeles. And the greatest example of mid-century modern architecture in Southern California. Start at the very beginning of this journey, of this improbable dream with a newlywed Buck and Carlotta Stahl in their one-bedroom flat they rented in the Hollywood Hills looking up a hill.
Bruce Stahl: My mother and father, Buck and Carlotta, had just wedded. My father had had this flat up off of Hillside Avenue. And that's where they first resided just after they were married.
Bruce Stahl: The story got started there and the dream got started there because they used to step out on their patio and they could see these lots in the horizon being cut. And they fell in love with this one lot that sat on the very point. That's how the dream started.
Suzy Chase: Two months after they were married, they drove up that hill to take a closer look. And the owner, George Beha, is that how you pronounce his name?
Bruce Stahl: George Beha.
Suzy Chase: Beha?
Bruce Stahl: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Happened to be driving by. Can you talk a little bit about the deal that your dad and George struck that day?
Shari Stahl Gronwald: They decided to hey, what the heck? Let's go take a drive and look at our lot. They'd already started calling it, our lot. They'd been admiring it for months. And they were pretty enamored with that particular lot that sits on the point overlooking Los Angeles. So they decided to take a drive and drive through the windy roads of the Hollywood Hills which, if you've driven them, can be pretty scary.
Bruce Stahl: And challenging.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Yes, challenging. They made it to the lot and they must have been in awe. That's the only thing I can think of is that they must have been in awe to actually step on the land on this particular lot that they have admired for so long. And they were talking and looking at it and all of a sudden, George Beha pulled up in his car and he turns out to be the owner of that lot and the lot next to it. So he introduced himself to Buck and Carlotta and Buck started talking to him. And George Beha wanted him to possibly buy both lots at the same time but my parents couldn't afford that. So they ended up deciding to purchase the one lot that they've admired for so long at $13,500. And they did a handshake on it. That's how you used to do deals back then. A handshake was as good as a lung document.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: So what I find interesting is that they just drove up to take a look at their lot. Then they drive away buying the lot. They had no intention of doing so. But it just so happens that one of the stars aligned that George Beha showed up and he was there and offered it to them and they agreed on a price and a handshake and George decided to carry the loan for them. And I think they must have probably stepped away and were driving back home excited, but also, uh oh, what did we get ourselves into? You know, you're like, wow, we just did it. And all it was was a drive to look at it. That's all it was.
Bruce Stahl: Mind you, at that time, they bought the lot for $13,500. But at the time, they could have bought a three-bedroom, two-bath house, and the property on the flatlands for the same price. So the rest of the family thought they were absolutely lost their marbles because they bought a chunk of dirt but not a house.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: They couldn't understand the vision that our mother and father had. And Buck coming from St. Louis and Carlotta came from Southern California. But people were not actively building in the hills at that point yet. It wasn't prime real estate like it is today. And so they did think they were a little bit crazy with spending that money just for dirt and there's not even a house on it.
Bruce Stahl: It's also the reason why people weren't building in the hills too much is banks considered hill-dwellers, as they were called, as a risk because the engineering and technology of today didn't exist back then. So there were horror stories of swimming pools cracking and flooding the neighbor down below and stuff like that. So they took a chance, in all respects.
Bruce Stahl: My dad's father from St. Louis came out to look at this vacant lot and he goes, "Ah, you'll never see your money out of this." So he kind of ... Yeah, they're all kind of turning in their grave right now. We don't actually know what the house could go for but the price has ranged all over the park from a little to a huge amount and to a realtor saying, name your price. But we've never entertained it, at least, not yet.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Let me add in, while Buck and Carlotta were aging, they've had offers and they would never sell. And it got to the point where both of them had passed away. I took care of them when they were in their elder years, their final years. And when they both passed away, Bruce and Mark and I, we just thought, let's just keep up with the tradition of opening the house to tours. Mark's idea was, let's do it so we have tours that we offer every week and we can schedule those and have people come instead of just randomly coming up and trying to get in the house. And so we're trying to keep with Buck and Carlotta's idea of opening the house to students, the public, architects, anybody that wanted to see it, Carlotta would love to show them the house. So we're just doing that now. And we will continue to do so as long as we can.
Suzy Chase: So going back to after they bought this lot, the dirt. Could you go into what it took to build this after quite a few architects said this house couldn't be done?
Bruce Stahl: The gentleman that cut the lots up there, his name was Dick Larkin. Brilliant man. He bought the hilltop for pennies on the dollar and then at the same time, LAX was expanding their runways. So we got the city to grade the properties and haul dirt away for free. This gentleman also gave my dad some tips on how to maximize the lot size. The corners of the lot were rounded so Dick Larkin showed him how to shore up the corners to increase the buildable lot. And he increased the size of the lot by six feet all the way around. So he spent the next two and a half, three years, collecting broken concrete from construction sites, hauling it up in the back of his Cadillac trunk and dumping it on the lot. And then he spent weekends just dry-laying this broken concrete all the way around the perimeter of the lot. And also in the meantime, they were slowly paying this property off. A novel concept that decided to pay the property off before they started building.
Bruce Stahl: It also gave them time to imagine what kind of house they wanted there. They were having a tough time. Where are we going to put the walls to support the house? So they both agreed that we don't want to block any of this view so they were making a glass house. So my dad was an artistic person. He was a graphic designer. He decided to build a scale model of the house to what he wanted. This way, he could shop it to these different architects. So he wouldn't have to explain what he wanted, he could show them. And Pierre Koenig was, I believe, the third architect that came along and the two before him said, "This is an unbuildable lot and I can't build what you want." I describe my dad as a renegade and Pierre was of the same suit. They didn't know what no meant. No meant just find a different way and that's what they did. They found a different way.
Suzy Chase: So one interesting thing about Pierre Koenig was his site-specific decision was to orient the Stahl House to the grid pattern of Los Angeles. I would love to hear about that.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Based on Buck's model, the model is exactly the way the house is today. I think that both Buck and Pierre agreed that lining it up perfectly with the grid of Los Angeles was extremely important. That's how that came to be was both of them are just no, the house needs to go this way. Pierre thought if you line it up with the streets, it's just even more impressive.
Bruce Stahl: My father's model was slightly different. It had a butterfly roof. The house was going to be curved along with the road to maximize the lot. But also, economically, it made more sense because creating a butterfly roof and bending steel was very costly. And it wouldn't have fit in the case study program. So Pierre basically straightened and flattened everything.
Suzy Chase: So even though this may very well be the most famous house in the world, this was also someone's home. This was your home. We're all versed on the outside of the home but I'd love to hear about the inside. How many square feet was this house? And how many bedrooms were there? And could you please talk a little bit about the interior design?
Shari Stahl Gronwald: The square footage is 2300 square feet inside. There is a living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. That's all we had. The largest bedroom was the master bedroom, of course. The back bedroom was large as well. It had Jack and Jill sinks on both sides with the shared shower and toilet area. That was designed to hold the children. There was only two of us at the time. Dad designed a partition wall that went down the middle that had an accordion door so we'd go into each other's room or also we could close it for privacy. Both side had a bunk bed in case we wanted to have any friends come over. The bunk beds were part of the partition wall which was really kind of interesting and very cool. So when we had friends come over, you would just unlatch it and bring down the wooden partition and then we'd add a mattress so the friends would be able to spend the night.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Then our younger brother came along and the bunk bed became his permanent bed on Bruce's side. It was quite interesting. We had three kids in that one bedroom in a two-bedroom home. It made us quite cozy, quite interesting and quite close. It was fun. We had the pool just outside of the sliding door. There were sliding doors throughout the house. Each bedroom opened up into the pool area and the deck area. When we were younger, before we were able to learn how to swim, we were told that as soon as we got up, we had to put our life vests on before we even left our bedroom.
Bruce Stahl: As kids growing up in this house, if you've seen or thumbed through the pictures of the book, we were all toe-heads. We had absolutely white hair because we lived in the pool. There were days where we wouldn't even get out of the pool to eat lunch so mom would bring it to the edge of the pool so we could eat our lunch while still staying in the pool. And then when we got to be old enough, then our father showed us how to jump off the roof into the pool which was an added level of excitement when it came to this pool.
Suzy Chase: I was just going to ask about the roof.
Bruce Stahl: I brag because we're on our fourth generation of roof jumpers. My father was the first and Shari and I and Mark were the second generation. My kids and Shari's child are the third generation. Now we have great-grandkids jumping.
Suzy Chase: So 1635 Woods Drive, Los Angeles, California was known as Case Study House #22.
Bruce Stahl: It was an idea that was thought of by John Entenza who was the editor of Arts and Architecture Magazine back in the early 40s. And he realized that World War II is winding down and there was going to be a housing shortage because all these servicemen were going to be coming home and they were going to need places to live. So his idea was to bring the best and the brightest architects together and create this case study program to try to come up with new innovative ideas for building with off the shelf materials. That was the criteria. To be able to just go in, purchase the raw materials, put it together with not a lot of fabrication. Because fabrication always increased the cost of things. That was the brain child of it.
Bruce Stahl: The case study program didn't really succeed like John Entenza wanted it to where these homes would be thought up and mass produced in order for the GIs to buy homes. They never were mass produced. And I believe the reason why houses like ours did not get mass produced is because contractors did not really like working with steel. It was a harder material, knowledge was needed to construct. Where working with wood and wood beams was like cutting through butter so they could build at a faster rate.
Bruce Stahl: Today, I'm glad that they didn't get mass produced because having a bunch of Stahl houses all around the country, it makes for our house being special. And I think the case study program also gave everybody great ideas with the floor to ceiling glass, the overhangs, the expansive living spaces. They're just building them at a bigger size now instead of the 2300 square foot pavilion type house that we have. They're building little mega mansions with some of these elements that we incorporated into our house.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: I think having steel as the construction material used was a blessing because during earthquakes that hit Southern California, which I've been in the house when those have hit, some pretty good ones. And the house just sways perfectly. The glass doesn't break. The steel will flex and bend. But there's no damage. I'm so happy that the house was built in steel because it's still standing 60 plus years later.
Suzy Chase: There was a line in the book where your dad said, "I want to stand in one place and see the whole view just by turning my head."
Bruce Stahl: I believe when he was interviewing architects, tell me if I'm wrong, Shari. But he would stand on this empty lot and he would describe to these architects what he wanted. And he said, "I want to stand in one spot. I want to be able to turn my head to the left, see the mountains. And I want to turn my head to the right and see the ocean. But the one thing I don't want to do is walk from one side of my house to the other. I just want to turn my head."
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Yeah, that's correct. He wanted to stand in one place and be able to see the whole view just by turning his head.
Suzy Chase: I think the image that has us all enamored and it's on the cover of the book is the Julius Shulman photograph from 1960 where we could see two women casually chatting at night. Shulman said, "What good is a dream house if you haven't got a dream?" So who's in this iconic photo?
Shari Stahl Gronwald: One is Ann Lightbody and the other one is Cynthia Murfee. Pierre Koenig had some guys come up to the house to help him stage the house for this Julius Shulman shoot. The picture is referred to as Two Ladies. So these guys came up and Julius had also instructed, bring your girlfriends and have them dress for a party.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: And so Julius was really big on putting people in all of his images. He was the one who really started that. And adding warmth and humanizing photos by adding people to his images. And so the two girls were actually there with their boyfriends. And these two girls decided to go sit in the corner and just chat while the guys were staging the house and doing everything. And while Julius was taking pictures inside, he decided to walk outside to just take a break, take it all in. I think he had some water out there. He wanted a drink of water. And he turned around and he looked and he saw that image from outside. And he said, "That's it." He goes, "I want you to move all the equipment around. I need you to put the tripod here. I need you to bring foliage here. This is our shot."
Shari Stahl Gronwald: And once they got it all set up, I think the city exposure, correct me if I'm wrong, Bruce, was six minutes. And once they had the night imaging grained in the negative, then what he did is he pressed something that flashed the flashlights to capture the inside of the house and close the lens very quickly. So what happened is, you have this beautiful image that is famous and that's how it all came to be.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: And what's interesting is Mary Melton with Los Angeles Magazine decided, "Gosh, it'd be fun to go find those two girls and bring them back and we can do a reunion with Pierre Koenig, Julius Shulman." The two girls, Julius' assistant, and this time, we'll have Buck and Carlotta there because Buck and Carlotta were not there for that original photograph. The house wasn't completed. They couldn't come in until the house was done and the tours were done. So this reunion was quite something. They actually staged a retake of that same image which is also in the book. And I find that very interesting. And Buck and Carlotta were just so excited to finally meet everyone in that famous Julius Shulman photo.
Suzy Chase: Shulman made that look so effortless. And he said it was a picture of a mood. I thought that was really cool.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Right. Once he put people in it, in his photos, not all of them had people in them because it was interesting, our Arts and Architecture Magazine did not want anybody in the images when it got printed in the Arts and Architecture Magazine. So that original famous photo never made it into the Arts and Architecture Magazine when they were talking about the house and showing the construction and the final building of the house, that photo was not included because it had those two women in it.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: But once he put people in his images, it did create a mood. It was the mood he was trying to convey, the feeling that he felt at that time when he saw it.
Suzy Chase: What kind of influence did Case Study House #22 have on your lives?
Bruce Stahl: For me, really frankly until I got into high school, didn't even realize what I was living in. It really didn't start hitting home until I would bring friends up and they would just go, "Oh my God, look at this place." And when the photo shoots and film crews started coming in and I'd go, "Okay, this place is special."
Bruce Stahl: But over the years, the momentum has just been building and building and the house, as far as its fame, has gotten bigger than I thought it would ever get. And mom and dad didn't set out to build a famous house. They just set out to build their dream house. And they created magic. And something that hopefully, will last for many more generations.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: For me, growing up in that house has made me appreciate everything water because we just lived in that pool. It became babysitter for my mother when she was at home and for my dad. I longed to be by water whether it's a lake, whether it's a river, whether it's the ocean. I'm just drawn to it.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: One of the other things that has really affected me by living in a glass house is that I have trouble going into houses that don't have a lot of windows. It feels very closed in and almost claustrophobic for me. And so when I go to look for a house or decide I'm going to move and find a new house, it has to have lots of windows in it or I'm just not comfortable. So I believe growing up in a glass house had that effect on me where now windows are a necessity for me, lots of windows.
Bruce Stahl: Yeah. The pool for me was ... I mean I grew up swimming in that pool. I learned how to swim. I took my swimming to a different level. Now, I'm still hanging around pools. I clean them and repair them today. Listen, my whole life has revolved around swimming pools.
Suzy Chase: What's happening with the Stahl House in 2022?
Bruce Stahl: Well, we've just completed this brand new book and it's basically an autobiography of the house. And only one house, it doesn't go into multiple different case study houses which there's plenty of books out there, already out for that.
Bruce Stahl: But we wanted to tell the side of the story at this house that no one knew. The family that had it built, the family that grew up in it. We wanted to walk you through our life in this house and we're also in the process of doing a documentary which will give everybody a nice visual look of the story of the house in our family.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Right. A lot of questions we get from tour attendees or tour guests that came up on tours is they've seen the house in books, advertising campaigns and films and photo shoots. But we get asked a lot who lived here? What was the family like? Who were they? So we decided that we wanted to tell the world who we were. And we really wanted people to know Buck and Carlotta Stahl. And maybe a little bit more about Julius they might have known and Pierre that maybe they didn't know. But the main reason was, we wanted to tell the family story of the Stahl House but also make it a little bit of an architecture book as well but making it more about family.
Suzy Chase: That's what I love about this book because as a fan looking from the outside, literally, I had envisioned a very wealthy, powerful family inside the glass walls of this home. But you were just a regular American family who happened to live in this fantastic house. And your story's just incredible.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: That's what we are. We're just your average Joe. We are the middle income family that was never rich and we're not rich today. Our experience with the house and growing up there and having Buck and Carlotta as our parents, we are very rich in having such a wonderful childhood and family to call ours.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find The Stahl House on the web and social media?
Shari Stahl Gronwald: You can find the book at any bookseller. You can also go to stahlhouse.com and the link is on our homepage where you can go and buy the book. Stahl House on Facebook but Amazon has it, Chronicle Books has it. All your major booksellers.
Suzy Chase: To purchase The Stahl House Book, you can also head on over to decoratingbythebook.com and thank you so much Shari and Bruce for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast. This has been so fun for me.
Shari Stahl Gronwald: Yes, Suzy. Thank you for having us and you're just adorable.
Bruce Stahl: Thank you.
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