Sixteen Schindler houses, still standing in Los Angeles

May 18. Wallpaper* published a mapped tour of sixteen houses designed by Rudolph Schindler, the Vienna-born architect who built a specific version of California modernism between 1922 and his death in 1953. The piece, written by curator and historian Adam Štěch, walks the reader through standing residential projects across Los Angeles, most still privately held.

Schindler's work sits in the gap between the International Style and the later midcentury-modern canon. His houses lean toward flat roofs, open plans, and indoor-outdoor thresholds, but the materials skew rougher than what came after: concrete slab, redwood frame, corrugated metal. The 1922 Kings Road House, his own residence and studio, remains the clearest statement of the vocabulary. Štěch calls it "a manifesto in built form." The house is open to the public by appointment through the MAK Center.

The tour includes the Lovell Beach House (1926), the first five-level frame house in the United States, and the Mackey Apartments (1939), a four-unit courtyard complex in Silver Lake that still reads as a workable housing model. Most of the sixteen are single-family residences on hillside lots, preserved by private owners who occasionally open for architecture-circuit tours.

Schindler died in 1953, three years before his peer Richard Neutra's career peaked with the Kaufmann Desert House. By then, Schindler's style had been absorbed into the larger Southern California vernacular. The houses that survive now function as proof of the line's durability: flat roofs still flat, slab floors still level, redwood still standing.

The full list, with addresses and access notes, is live on Wallpaper*'s site. Most are viewable from the street. A handful take appointments.