One of Neutra’s first realized residential designs in Los Angeles was a studio and research facility as well as a home for his family on the east side of the Silver Lake Reservoir. It was partially funded by the Dutch industrialist and philanthropist C.H. Van Der Leeuw, whom Neutra met in 1931 while lecturing in Basel. Recognizing Neutra’s exceptional talent, Van Der Leeuw gave him the seed money needed to build a home and office that would also serve as a research site and laboratory for emerging architects.

Much of what happened at the VDL Research House was indeed an experimental venture. To supplement his loan, the newest and most cutting-edge materials of the time were bartered in exchange for the publicity that Neutra was certain the house would generate, like cork flooring, pressed fiber boards, and linoleum tiles. Steel was prohibitively expensive, so he used conventional 2x4 and 4x4 framing, which necessitated thick mullions and precluded the possibility of a fully uninterrupted view. Still, he set floor heights and built-in furniture to control the views with uniform sills to create an edge condition. Each surface was treated as part of a continuous flat planar structure, considered in such a way as to create a seamless experience, with each room doubling as another, prioritizing elasticity of use over square footage. His material palette was spare, and his ideals represented a certain formal rigidity, one that was decidedly anti-monumental and intended to be simple.

What makes this house extraordinary is far more than any one moment or material. Its mastery was somewhat premature, but it defined a specifically Californian modernism for decades to come, remarkable in both its irreducibility and its replicability—two things that usually exist in tension with one another. It is the profound livability of the space, the way the lowest datum line frames the view of the reservoir and the next provides privacy and a view of the mountains, how the sun hits at a sharp angle at one point and at another blurs you in an enveloping warmth as the day is ending. It is also the spirit of curiosity fostered by a house built as a form of research and a repository of knowledge in a city that the writer Norman Klein has described as having “a history of forgetting,” continually recreating its own mythology and writing over its past.

It is worth noting in a discussion about the erasure of memory that the house caught fire in 1963. It was rebuilt in the mid-1960s with his son Dion, maintaining many of the design elements and principles that, in a broad sense, bookended Neutra’s career in California. A model of the original structure sits on the ground floor as you enter the house as a token of all it has represented—a material fragility met with an ideological endurance that far outlasted Neutra’s life and continues to influence the practice and understanding of architecture and design today.

It was with these elements in mind that we designed our Spring collection. A confluence of the young Hollywood actors of the '60s that adorn our concept boards and today's tastemakers informs the same casual irreverence that's become synonymous with California. It's the same defiance of convention in favor of utility and paring back to the essentials that Neutra helped pioneer that, upon closer inspection, delivers equal parts style and substance.