Stahl patina
A few years ago, I visited the Stahl House in Los Angeles. You’ve probably seen it before: it’s the Case Study MCM masterpiece perched at the top of a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, a sheet of corrugated steel on top of mostly glass, perfectly-grammable LA skyline glittering in front of it, small pool to the side. Google it and you’ll be like oh, yeah, that. There exists a photo of me in shades in The Spot where That Photo was taken, sitting on a green suede Eames lounge, looking appropriately smug. Fine.
The Stahl family bought the house, kept the house, still owns the house, no longer lives in the house, and now gives tours of the house, which is on the National Register, etc. A family friend led the tour the day I was there.
The Eames lounge I sat in wasn’t there when the Stahl family lived there. In fact, almost none of the furniture was. The whole Stahl house was turned into a set piece by Design Within Reach, who provided everything for free.
I got to wondering what the Stahl family actually lived with. I’m guessing it wasn’t a green suede Eames lounge. Fortunately, pictures of the period are abundant. The lighting, fireplace, walls, and kitchen island are authentic. I think the shelving on the east wall with some vases was there all along.
And that’s it! That’s the entirety of OG furniture still in the Stahl house. When you go to visit – and you should, since it’s cheap, and doable with a little advance planning – know that you are seeing something that isn’t a museum piece. But you can find the bits that are.
In the kitchen is a few slabs of wood, cut on a bias and screwed into a center post on a ~30º angle, that form a rudimentary homemade wine rack. The wood isn’t finished to the same degree as you’d come to expect from a midcentury modern piece. It was probably sourced from a hardware store in the seventies. It doesn’t hang on a perfect angle. The screws are exposed. It was not furnished by Design Within Reach.
I was more fascinated by the wine rack than any other part of this house. It was definitely a real part of how this family lived. They built this place, raised their kids here, kept it for decades, and died here. Hopefully a lot of wine sat on that rack. While everybody else in our group was taking selfies with That View on The Spot, and talking about all the stuff that was filmed there over the years, I was thinking about how a real group of people devoted their lives to this place, how the ghosts of them remain, how they bought their own furniture and used the hell out of it, and how weird it is to be shown through the space by someone still connected to it.
There’s an important lesson for modernism within this. The goal is to use the thing. Don’t just own an Eames lounge for the interior pics. Sit on it, often. Don’t sanitize your space for the sake of grammability. The hunk of steel & glass you now own needs to feel warm & lived-in. That is a challenge. Are you here for it?