Mid-Century California Icon

A mid-century architecture icon is on the market for sale. Richard Neutra’s Chuey House is back on the market. The gem, designed by the Austrian, Los-Angeles-based modernist in 1956 for poet Josephine Ain Chuey, is situated on a spectacular land on Sunset Plaza Drive. ‘You are an alchemist who has transmuted earth, house, and sky into a single enchantment,’ the poet wrote to Neutra when first moved into the house. Both her and her husband, painter Robert Chuey perceived the house as a source of creative energies, in the words of Sylvia Lavin (authored Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture). Last time it came on the market, two years ago, it was marketed as a ‘tear down,’ and was immediately landmarked. The Chuey House has everything for which Neutra made his name as California’s leading modernist of the mid-century years. The indoor-outdoor connection with enormous glass walls and terrace that blends with interior living spaces, the open floor-plan, and the modernist sensibility, associated with the International Style. The B&W photos were taken by Julius Shulman (via Getty’s); the colored photos courtesy Compass.