Two Neutra Homes Winners! - Page 2

Casale apparently tried more than once to buy the cliffside home between Hollywood's Nichols and Laurel canyons, succeeding in 2007 and commencing with a heroic conservation. The property was listed for sale this year for $3.5 million.

"We started to remove anything that was added after (1936)," says Chris Steele, a colleague of preservation specialist James Rega, who was project lead. "His goal was to restore it to the day it was handed over."

A decade and a half later, the master handed over a pair of houses in Long Beach's exclusive Park Estates neighborhood to General Motors exec Olaf Hafley and wife Aida and portrait painter Bethuel Moore and wife Doris. The Hafleys' was two-story, the Moores' one. They had different design and orientation, but reflected a theory of architecture fostering community.

"The backyards are shared, and still are today, which I think is fabulous," says Kelly Sutherin McLeod, project lead for the Hafley House restoration. "He [Neutra] really designed it as an overall composition…He maintained privacy but was still exploring the idea of community."

The Moore family maintained archives of construction documents, correspondence, conceptual drawings, and field notes by Neutra that McLeod says were "tremendously exciting" for her team.

"All of us were so absorbed into these materials," she marveled. The team included Barbara Lamprecht, a premier Neutra historian and scholar, whom McLeod said is presenting her doctoral thesis on Neutra this month in Great Britain.

"The Hafleys' family album gave us insight into the colors," she cites as one example, specifying in particular New Year's Eve photos depicting bright red kitchen curtains.

Another surprising red—at least to another of the Neutra sons—was one the team found by moving a planter on a second floor deck.

"He was very interested in that color," McLeod describes of Dr. Raymond Neutra's tour of the restored home. "It wasn't typical of his father's color palette.

"We left that there as archival evidence," McLeod says of the hue she termed Carmen red.

Most of all McLeod, principal of a Long Beach firm who started her career with conservation of the Gamble House in Pasadena, was proud of having restored the home for residents who bought it in 2011 and appreciate the inspired design.

"We didn't want to erase history, and that was the challenge," she says of the project, done in three phases to accommodate the residents. "It's the challenge, and it's also the fun."