Stahl House CSH #22

The Stahl House was completed in 1960 as Case Study House #22, designed by Pierre Koenig for C.H. "Buck" Stahl, a purchasing agent at Hughes Aircraft who later became a graphic designer and sign painter. The former professional football player had purchased the nearly vertical hilltop lot for $13,500 in 1954, spending two years with his wife Carlotta hauling leftover concrete from city construction projects in their Cadillac to shore up the challenging site. After multiple prominent architects declined his vision of a house with "no walls in this wing," Buck found his collaborator in Koenig, who was the only architect to see the precarious site as an advantage rather than an obstacle.

The 2,200-square-foot residence unfolds in an L-shaped plan organized around a 20-by-20-foot structural grid that mirrors the street grid of Hollywood directly below. Steel H-columns support deep I-beams that carry a flat roof deck, allowing the living wing to cantilever ten feet over the hillside while the bedroom wing faces the street with solid walls for privacy. Floor-to-ceiling glass panels, the largest commercially available at the time, wrap three sides of the living space to capture panoramic 270-degree views of the Los Angeles basin, while concrete floors incorporate radiant underfloor heating throughout.