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This is a rather unconventional piece of news: an iconic site of international modern architecture has just been purchased by a private buyer, but instead of closing its doors, it will be opened to the public. It’s a doubly significant story, not only because it’s a place where Los Angeles’ 20th-century cultural history was written, but because it’s poised to join the flow of the city’s contemporary history again, of a city already marked in 2025 by traumatic events, the devastating Pacific Palisades and Eaton wildfires not being the most recent.
The house, designed in 1935 in the Hollywood Hills by Richard Neutra, the very archetype of the modernist émigré, who moved to California from Austria, recently returned to the market, only to be swiftly purchased. According to LA’s KCRW radio, a German collector bought the property and immediately activated it as a support space for artists impacted by the fires (sculptor Beatriz Cortez is the first resident). Restoration work is beginning in summer 2025, paving the way for the house to function as an artist residency with a public event program.
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This is all possible because this isn't just “any Neutra house”. From the start, it was a unique project: even in the mid-1930s, it was conceived as a hybrid, a house-gallery.
And it’s worth remembering that despite the economic crisis, the 1930s in the U.S. were far from dormant. With Nazism and the rise of war, a wave of intellectuals and artists fled Europe for the American shores. All the shores: the East Coast welcomed the likes of Gropius and Sert, to name but the architecture world, Mies van der Rohe settled on Lake Michigan’s shores, and Neutra claimed the West Coast. But we shouldn't just speak of the architects: it’s also about their clients, their brilliant entourages, who deserve a rightful place in this tableau of cultural avant-garde.
Neutra lived for a time with the Schindlers, for whom he would go on to design another landmark home, much like the one he built for Dr. Lovell in Los Feliz.
Galka Scheyer also lived with the Schindlers for a time. She was a gallerist and collector committed to promoting the “Blaue Vier” (The Blue Four), the collective name for Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexej Jawlensky. Another set of textbook names.
Intent on establishing her life and business in California, Scheyer commissioned Neutra to build a house-gallery where she could showcase her artists, on an undeveloped hillside in the Hollywood Hills. It was a prototype, high-functioning in response to the needs of art, but also a social stage destined for legend. For every exhibition, the large salon would be cleared of furniture and refitted with panels and display structures designed by Neutra, tailored for the open-plan space. The already star-studded guest list could just grow longer: Greta Garbo, John Cage, filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Maya Deren, Josef von Sternberg. All passed through the Scheyer House to see, to celebrate, to create cultural history.
After Galka Scheyer’s death in 1945, her collection passed to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The house was later purchased and expanded with an addition to the second floor designed by Gregory Ain. And now, with its latest acquisition, the home returns – indeed, becomes – public, for the city that shaped its history and whose history it helped to shape.
Opening image: Richard Neutra, Galka Scheyer House, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Crosby Doe Associates
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