Perkins House Designed to Showcase a Life : Architecture: The tiny residence is fairly new by Pasadena standards, but it has been designated a Historic Treasure.

The red-orange stairway leading dramatically to the Constance M. Perkins house makes it clear: This is not your typical historic home.

For one thing, Perkins, its namesake and original owner, still lives there.

For another, the tiny residence in the San Rafael Hills was built in 1955--a decidedly recent vintage by Pasadena standards.

Nevertheless, it holds the city’s highest historic designation, Historic Treasure. And Perkins, 76, has turned it into a showcase for her life and taste.

Designed for her by Los Angeles architect Richard J. Neutra, the Poppy Peak Drive house sits atop a hillside lushly covered with African daisy, ice plant and ivy.

Perkins, now retired after 36 years as a professor of art at Occidental College, said she collaborated with Neutra on every level of the design--down to telling him on which side of the bed she preferred her reading lamp. He had asked for an autobiographical essay that included her daily living habits and her likes and dislikes. She, in turn, had read his books on architecture.

“We worked as a team,” said Perkins, an artist and critic as well as teacher. “I made suggestions; he either incorporated them or made counter-suggestions. I told him that this house had to be warm and had to be me.”

It is both.

It abounds with paintings, sculptures and soft, handcrafted wool rugs created by her former students. Two tiny orange-cheeked waxbills flit inside a tall, brass bird cage placed against a glass wall overlooking mountain and valley views. The birds are Perkins’ companions. “They speak to me every morning,” she said.

At the Perkins house, nature comes indoors. Goldfish swim lazily in a living-room pond. The fishpond and the bed of white gravel alongside it extend indoors from the outside garden, bisected by a wall of glass.

Though one of Neutra’s smallest projects--1,000 square feet of living space--the house’s open floor plan lends a feeling of spaciousness. The large living-dining room extends to an open kitchen and is partially separated from a compact bedroom-den by curtains that act as a wall behind a black leather Neutra-designed sofa.

In front of the sofa is a cocktail table that can be raised for dining. Neutra created the table by placing a walnut door on metal legs.

The house’s unconventional style suits its owner. Born in Denver, she started her career in 1935 as a grade-school teacher in a slum there. “My mother tried desperately to raise me to be a genteel, normal young lady,” Perkins said, “but I knew I had to have a career, and it had to be connected with art and teaching. I’ve never regretted it.”

She spent $17,000 to build the house. But, single and a woman, Perkins had a tough time persuading banks to give her a loan in 1953. It took more than a year, and she moved into the house on New Year’s Eve, 1955.

Her first contact with Neutra, a Vienna-born modernist, had come in 1948, during her first year of teaching architecture at Occidental. “My students felt architecture was cold, so I arranged to bring them to his studio to show them it needn’t be,” she said.

“ ‘How do you define cold?’ he asked them. ‘Cold is nothing more than the unfamiliar.’ Later, when I decided to build, the architect had to be he,” she said.

In 1977, six months before Neutra was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the Perkins House was designated Pasadena Cultural Heritage Landmark No. 15.

It received Historic Treasure status in 1987. The designation prohibits any architecturally significant modification of the building, inside or out, without city approval. Houses of any age or era can be considered for city historic preservation honors.

Perkins has willed the house to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, where she works as a volunteer, so that it can be used as a residence for visiting scholars.

Architecture enthusiasts show up at the Perkins house at a rate of about one or two a month, Perkins said. Earlier this month she was hostess to a dozen visitors from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

“When I planned a house, I had no thought that there would ever be this kind of interest,” she said. “I just did it.”