A Rare R.M. Schindler House Hits the Market in L.A. for $6.5 Million

Austrian-born architect R.M. Schindler, one of the undisputed mavericks of the early to mid-twentieth century, spent a decade working for Frank Lloyd Wright before he landed in Los Angeles, where he merged the rigorous geometries of early European modernism with California’s relaxed lifestyle.

In the mid-1940s, Dr. Richard Lechner and his wife commissioned the innovative architect to build a home in a wooded glade in the foothills of L.A.’s Studio City. All but hidden behind a zigzagging wall draped with bougainvillea and hugging its sloped site, the house is now lauded as one of the modernist mandarin’s last masterpieces and reflects his experimental chutzpah and his long-standing commitment to unassuming materials, spatial rhythms, and integration with natural surroundings.

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According to the U.S. Modernist, architect Paul Sterling Hoag added a two-story addition with a guest room and bath in the mid-1980s. It was subsequently sold several times, in 1992, 1999, 2004, and again in 2008, at which point it was acquired by acclaimed designer Pamela Shamshiri of Studio Shamshiri and her then-husband, film editor Haines Hall.

Shamshiri spearheaded a comprehensive two-year update and overhaul that is described on her firm’s website as less a restoration than an “excavation” and undoing of myriad bad renovations that left the original structure unrecognizable. Sheetrock was removed to reveal Schindler’s plywood-paneled walls and the angular stainless-steel fireplace. Throughout, key elements were restored or reconstructed, while a purposeful evolution prepared the home for the 21^stcentury. The firm’s website says the house “is decidedly a Schindler; it’s just not your grandmother’s Schindler.”

Tax records show Shamshiri sold the home in 2019 for $4.88 million to its current owners, German multidisciplinary artist Albert Oehlen and his wife, Esther Fruend Oehlen, who oversaw an exterior restoration by the architecture studio Escher GuneWardena along with a refresh of the grounds by Terremoto Landscape and the rehabilitation of the original pool.

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Today, the 4,000-square-foot home still known as the Lechner House sprawls out over two floors with large windows that fill the house with dappled light filtered through the surrounding trees. Schindler’s built-in sofas, now covered in marigold velvet, flank the revived fireplace in the living room, and a wall of glass opens the dining area to a large, tree-shaded deck above the pool. The long, narrow galley kitchen is bookended by a breakfast nook and a family room. Four bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus a powder room, include a lower-level primary suite with a plywood bathroom that opens to a flagstone terrace that meanders over to the pool.

The home, which sits on more than one-third of an acre, was designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2013 and falls under the Mills Act, which trades strict preservation restrictions for substantially lower property tax. Stefani 

Stefani Schmacker at Sotheby’s Int’l Realty and George Penner of Compass share the $6.5 million listing.

Click here for more photos of the historic Los Angeles residence.