Thoroughly Modernist Living

In a south Glendale neighborhood where the distant buzz of traffic and the clacking of railroad trains are never completely gone, palm trees line streets defined by sturdy bungalows and small postwar homes. It is a place where, despite differences of language and ethnicity, people come to stay and become friends. It is also a place where expectations for high-end design aren’t normally a part of the picture, and, as a result, a jumble of zoning ordinances long ago allowed for some unusual juxtapositions.

Amidst the sameness of the residences here, a plain-Jane Seventh-day Adventist church attended mostly by Russian immigrants is neighbor to a produce warehouse. There’s also a commercial structure that nearly two decades ago became the studio and loft-like apartment of artists Linda Burnham and her husband, Robert Overby, who since has died. The biggest change to the setting came about a year ago, when Burnham moved into a striking new Modernist home designed by Stan Allen, a New York architect best known for designing urban art galleries and work spaces. Dubbed the LB House and completed last summer, it is defined by a mix of light gray stucco, corrugated aluminum and fiberglass exterior surfaces, and it neatly fills the once-empty western half of her studio’s plot. Standing next to the church at the end of a long street, the LB House punctuates a vista north toward the hills like a dot on an i.

Burnham, 51, is known for her abstract paintings and as Distinguished Professor in the painting department at Otis College of Art and Design, where she recently stepped down from an eight-year post as chair of the School of Fine Arts. She has a warm, friendly personality that eschews flashiness. She is a lover of good design--evident not only in the house, but in every object in it--but her taste is underlined with a desire for the practical. Nothing is just for show--what she has, she uses.

After Overby died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1993, Burnham made a decision to take her living quarters as seriously as she had long taken her careers as teacher and painter (she shows her work regularly at Fredericks Freiser Gallery in New York). She thought first about buying something, and her taste for California Modernism led her to look at existing homes by Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler. She found, however, that her strong attachment to the neighborhood around her studio was a good enough reason to build something new, and she liked the idea of being an architectural patron.

Burnham and Allen first met in 1996, when Allen, then a professor at Columbia, was in Los Angeles for a ceremony honoring Rafael Moneo, architect of L.A.’s new downtown cathedral and in whose office in Spain Allen had once worked. Introduced by a mutual artist friend, Allen visited Burnham in her studio, and the two hit it off immediately.

“Our sensibilities were perfectly in line,” Allen says. “I remember on the table were Eileen Gray books, as well as Mies van der Rohe and Rem Koolhaas books. I thought this is the kind of thing I’m interested in. We were right on the same wavelength.” Theirs was the kind of personal chemistry essential for the architect-client collaboration on a residential project. Still, for Burnham, signing on with Allen was a leap of faith; she had seen and says she “loved” the art gallery spaces he had created in New York and was willing to proceed on that basis, even though hers was to be Allen’s first design for a home. (As it turned out, his second residential design, for a house in upstate New York, was completed before Burnham’s.)

The ordinariness of Burnham’s neighborhood, Allen says, was part of the appeal of the project: “It is a weird, complex mix of stuff that is not conventionally beautiful, but just the mix adds up to something interesting.” In response, Allen has created a Modernist structure whose design accommodates the neighbors without overwhelming. With 1,800 square feet of living space, a 400-square-foot garage and a lap pool and garden at the back, the house is classical in its simple Modernist clean lines, which mesh with the now-common use of industrial materials. It also graciously adds a new generation of architecture to the area, a sign of stability in a place that could have had the potential for decay.

The house Allen created feels both compact and expansive. Sized to accommodate a single person’s lifestyle, with room to entertain, the living-dining room extends into an open kitchen with the interruption only of a workspace for cooking and storage. A wall of windows gives the home a rich indoor-outdoor feel with a view of the pool and small desert garden area, landscaped by Pam Burton.

A small guest room and downstairs bath are the only other elements on the first floor; a semi-enclosed spiral staircase leads to the upstairs master bedroom, bath and balcony office. The grandness of the master bathroom, in particular, which has some of the best views of the hills, stands out for its extravagance.

“It’s the only room that I find myself explaining why it exists,” Burnham says. “I lived [in my studio] for so many years, with a little commercial tiny bathroom with no windows, and a little commercial shower. I remember saying to Stan, ‘I want a guest room, I want a lot of light, and I want a nice bathroom.’ And I got all of that. I got a nice bathroom.”

Allen, whose firm is called Field Operations, is an established theorist, teacher and practitioner, and he conveys a determined, ambitious yet friendly presence. Not as well known on the West Coast as on the East, his record is nevertheless notable--this spring, he was named chairman of Princeton University’s highly respected architecture department. His influences range from the work of Moneo and New York Modernist Richard Meier, whose office he also worked in, to the French father of Modernism, Le Corbusier.

Sitting in the two-story living room of the LB House, which is filled with Burnham’s distinctive contemporary furniture and colorful art collection (all of the work is by other artists; she prefers not to display her own paintings), it’s clear that Allen and Burnham have become friends as they worked together. They finish one another’s sentences as they speak of their satisfaction with the result of a process that along the way was somewhat arduous. Getting the plan approved was the biggest challenge, because Burnham’s land had been zoned commercial.

“We could have built a chemical factory right up to the property line and gone down and got a permit in two weeks,” Allen says with a laugh. “But to build a house, it took us two years to get a permit.” Burnham found the neighbors to be supportive of the project and says they petitioned the city to allow her to build the house.

The plan had to be configured to meet strict housing codes. A carport, for one, was nixed in favor of an enclosed garage, and some features were put in place to avoid unsightly views, such as of the church parking lot next door. Each exterior facade is very different, yet all are integral to the others. With bright white walls throughout, polished concrete floors on the ground level and bamboo floors upstairs, the house is low-maintenance, and the attention paid to small details and flow create a feeling of quality and spaciousness.

“The wonderful thing with houses for architects is the house has everything,” says Allen, moving into his sartorial mode. “It has public space, private space, tectonic issues, as well as issues of light and materials. For architects, the house is a kind of laboratory, where ideas are tested. Historically, many of the breakthrough moments were houses, particularly in the Modernist period.”

“There’s a lot of complexity in this house,” he continues, “but it doesn’t register as extravagant formal complexity. It’s really more internalized. For example, the curve of this wall has everything to do with coming in a door and being able to look out that window.

“Every move,” he says, “has a reason for being the way it is.”