A once “lost” home by famed Los Angeles architect John Lautner is now available for sale.
Known as the Salkin Residence, the 1948 home is on the market for the first time since it was restored by fashion designer Trina Turk and her late husband, Jonathan Skow, in 2016. It was listed Monday by Brian Linder and Mark Mendez of Compass for $2.35 million.
Located on an Echo Park hillside, the 1,300-square-foot home is an early and rather modest example of Lautner’s designs, which would later become famous for their cinematic flair, swooping lines, geometric shapes and gravity-defying structures. It had somehow been left out of the official Lautner archives and was discovered in the early 2010s, when the owners chose to sell it for the first time in over 60 years.
Turk and Skow purchased the 0.3-acre property for $1.2 million in 2014, outbidding Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and other Lautner enthusiasts, according to the New York Times. At the time, the home was fairly worn and some of its original structure has been obscured by expansions, but Turk and Skow saw its potential.
The couple already owned two architectural homes that they’d restored, including the 1936 Art Deco house known as the “Ship in the Desert” in Palm Springs, and they set about doing the same with the Salkin Residence with the help of architect Barbara Bestor. Turk was not immediately available for comment.
Today, the two-bedroom home showcases Lautner’s early Usonian tendencies as a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple as well as his later penchant for drama and floating roofs. Usonian refers to the more modest, middle-income housing Lloyd Wright designed.
At the Turk house, seven pairs of slanted timber beams form a spine that holds up an upside-down triangular roof, with an outer perimeter of sliding glass walls and redwood siding, according to the listing. One section of the home features clerestory windows that slot between the dipping rooflines and the redwood facade. Another pair of timber beams supports an outdoor roof, creating an attached carport.
A burnished red palette continues throughout, with original red concrete floors, a brick tiled patio with far-reaching views and more wood siding on the interiors.
Lautner designed many residential Los Angeles homes in the middle of the 20th century, the most famous of which have featured in Hollywood films over a period of decades. That includes the Elrod House in Palm Springs, with an iconic sunburst-like round concrete roof, that featured in the 1971 James Bond Film “Diamonds Are Forever”; the saucer-looking Malin House in Hollywood Hills, which floats 60 feet above the ground, and featured in the 1984 film “Body Double”; and the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, which serves as a concrete and glass bachelor pad in 1998’s “The Big Lebowski.”
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The Salkin Residence is named for Jules Salkin, himself a designer, who had to leave the country quickly due to a financial scandal, according to documentation from the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. The home sold in 1949 to Barbara and Howard Maxwell and it remained with the family until 2014.
The Compass agents were not immediately available for comment.