Constance Perkins House

Constance Perkins House

Richard Neutra designed this house for Constance Perkins when he was at the height of his fame. Perkins, his client, was an art historian who taught at Occidental College. While she had traveled throughout the world, she sought to build a house so personal she would “feel homesick for” it. For the project, Neutra had to work around a small budget of $17,000 and a tight lot. The finished design positioned the 1,310-square-foot house atop the steeply inclined site, referred to as “Poppy Peak.”  The white stucco walls are complemented by Douglas fir posts and beams. To the east of the entry, a garden includes a small pool that spans a mitered glass corner, occupying both interior and exterior grounds. Similarly, a lintel beam stretches from the interior wall above the window outward, becoming a spider leg that descends into the pool below in the garden outside. The window wall and a deck above the carport outside of it are sited to embrace the views of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Instead of designing a typical bedroom space, Neutra positioned Perkins’s bed in the L-shaped living room, allowing for a view of the mountains and close proximity to her desk. Fixtures, including a reading light and bookcases with strong horizontal lines and tapered edges, surround the bed. In addition to Neutra’s more typical palette of glass, redwood decking, burnished concrete floors, Masonite, and white plaster, Perkins selected yellow and persimmon tones to embellish some of the doors and walls. In addition, the long kitchen countertop—intended for use during student gatherings—is surfaced in yellow Formica. The house’s location in southwest Pasadena allowed Perkins and Neutra to easily travel to one another along the twenty-minute drive to Silver Lake. Their almost-daily letters over the course of the project, along with letters to project architects Dion Neutra and John Blanton, exemplify the close personal connection Neutra fostered with his clients.

Adapted from Neutra – Complete Works by Barbara Lamprecht (Taschen, 2000), p. 292.