It was January 1945 when Arts and Architecture, , one of the most influential American architecture and design magazines of the time, launched the Case Study Houses program, which would help shape California Modern. These houses were single-family residences, scattered throughout the Los Angeles area as a reference for the modernity of lines and spaces, and above all for the ease of using industrial materials. A handbook for the housing of L.A.’s future.
Among the various designers involved were names such as Rafael Soriano and Craig Ellwood; some of the houses became true icons, like Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, suspended on the rocks overlooking the city, or the home-studio of Charles and Ray Eames.
But among the Case Study Houses there is also an example from another highly prestigious catalog: the Californian houses of Richard Neutra, one of the great protagonists of modern architecture. The CSH #20, the Bailey House of 1948, is his – it was meant to be followed by a #21, never built – and now it is once again on the market."
The Bailey House is located in Pacific Palisades, the area severely tested by the great fire of January 2025, which not only claimed lives but also put at risk iconic buildings such as the Eames House itself, recently reopened after a period of restoration.
It is an architecture that reflects Neutra’s poetic line of those years, an evolution of the modernism of his Lovell Health House and the Galka Scheyer House. Glass, slender steel profiles, wood, and a few masonry walls – very few – make it a quintessential Case Study House style. Its location is unique, perched on the cliffs of the Palisades overlooking the ocean.
The two-bedroom house on a more or less level site is, naturally, a problem I have solved or endeavored to solve many times (...) The fear to stay too long with one, however refined, idea or approach did not exist.
Richard Neutra on Arts and Architecture
Today it enters the market as a villa – especially in terms of price – but it was conceived as an “economic” house for the United States of that time, the home of a young couple who wanted a modern domestic unit. The Bailey House was never intended to be a luxury trophy, but rather a model designed to respond to specific needs.
“The two-bedroom house on a more or less level site is, naturally, a problem I have solved or endeavored to solve many times,” Neutra wrote in Arts and Architecture. “Umbrian artists have painted Madonnas over and over again, and Jawlenski, great friend of Klee and Kandinsky, has, on the same size canvas, composed the same abstracted face many dozens of times with ever-refined variations. (…) The fear to stay too long with one, however refined, idea or approach did not exist. It is strange that our age should nourish such fear, often in the best design talents, when now, more than ever, we need many two-bedroom dwellings and many such all-purpose chairs as Charles Eames, for instance, has designed for us.”
But unlike many other cases, they not only preserved it, they enhanced it. The original clients, the Bailey dentists, entrusted to Neutra himself those two subsequent enlargements that were already imagined at the start. Then in the 2000s came Sam Simon, co-creator of The Simpsons, who had the house restored to its original splendor by Marmol Radziner, while commissioning a separate residence for himself next door (rebuilt in 2010 after a fire).
Later, Lorna Jane Clarkson, the owner of a clothing brand, would use the Bailey both as a residence and as a location for events, always however engaging Marmol Radziner for a restoration that preserves the identity of the architecture. Then came a family of entrepreneurs, and now, with 2025, a new chapter begins.
With the Clarksons, this valorization marathon also won an award, the Santa Monica Conservancy Award, recognizing a place that has inspired across decades: for a place that has managed to inspire over the years: first explicitly, in the golden age of the Case Study Houses when the Baileys held events and visits, then indirectly, with the brand’s events. Now that the house is for sale, it is an opportunity not only to live inside a modernist masterpiece, but also to find that inspiration for a different future of living in L.A. after the fires, a question that many have raised in the aftermath of such a crucial watershed in the city’s history.