Frederic Slavin House

Frederic Slavin House

For Frederic Slavin, Richard Neutra designed a long rectangular house that rises up and juts out from its steep hillside lot. The house offers its visitors a unique experience upon their entrance, as a path leads them beneath the house to a front door flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows. Once inside, the visitor proceeds up a set of stairs in order to reach the main living area. By positioning the entrance below the main floor, Neutra was able to run glass windows continuously along the house’s façade while still maintain the family’s privacy. The façade is enlivened by a break that sets the kitchen volume back from the rest, and a spider leg accentuates this shift. To accommodate the Slavins’ many children, Neutra and his team, including architect John Blanton, devised solutions for maintaining neat and quiet public areas such as a glass door mechanism for separating kitchen noises from the living areas. Quietness is also guaranteed by the technologically savvy design that placed all the ballasts for the florescent lighting in the basement to elude the hum of the fixtures.

Adapted from Neutra – Complete Works by Barbara Lamprecht (Taschen, 2000), p. 310.