KOBLICK RESIDENCE
Designed by Richard Neutra in 1937 for Los Angeles City College art professor Harry Koblick, this modest duplex occupies a steep hillside above the Silver Lake Reservoir, near Neutra’s own VDL House. An unusually early work, the house captures a formative period in Neutra’s practice, as the vocabulary of Southern California Modernism was still being tested and refined.
Manola Studio led an exacting restoration in close collaboration with Eric Lamers, a master carpenter and longtime mentor to the studio’s founder, alongside a broader circle of preservation specialists and craftspeople. Archival drawings, photographs, surviving materials, and close study of Neutra’s contemporaneous work guided a process of interpretation as much as preservation: what should remain, what could be recovered, and where the original architectural intent might responsibly be restored.
Where original elements survived, they were preserved; where they had been lost, period-specific pieces were sourced or carefully reproduced. Millwork was rebuilt to Neutra’s specifications in salvaged old-growth redwood, while architectural glass, hardware, lighting, plumbing fixtures, finishes, and even small components were pursued with the same attention to period and detail. Select elements documented in Neutra’s original drawings but never realized were introduced only where the archival record offered a clear path forward.
The aim was neither to freeze the house in time nor reinterpret it through a contemporary lens, but to recover the clarity, economy, and material intelligence of Neutra’s architecture while allowing the house to live fully in the present.
Year of Completion: 2023
Location: Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California
