UPDATE: As of October 26th of 2024, the Smith House is sold for its full asking price of $3,295,000.
Congratulations to all involved!
There is a rare purity of design and structure always in full view via the steel architecture of the Smith House (completed in 1958). One of Modernism’s core principles is literally on display: The structure, with extremely thin steel beams and flanges, IS the esthetic. Along with the attempted perfection of the house’s precise detailing. The steel framing of the Smith House promises this kind of geometrical exactness for close to forever.
A Geometrical Purity And Lightness
As long as paint protects the steel members, they should never corrode, sag or warp. The original engineering was accomplished so skillfully that almost nothing appears out of plumb in the Smith House’s horizontal and vertical planes.
All the rooms of the house (and even its structural underpinnings) show off their isometric nature clearly. Blue and black paint highlight each identically proportioned construction module as well as the carports. This visual emphasis foregrounds the “machine esthetic” derived directly from the Bauhaus.
Compared with the bulkier construction typical today for large modern houses, the walls seem as gossamer-light as glass. A floating architecture indeed.
An Almost Classical Symmetry
The house is perfectly symmetrical, around a line drawn from the entrance to the farthest point west. There, an inset wall of wood paneling rebuffs the vista ahead. Instead, the visitor must look towards the Pacific Ocean to the southwest or the distant mountains to the northwest.
Even the two separated single-vehicle carports, with their impossibly slender steel supports, balance perfectly to either side of the entry.
Without ever seeing a floor plan, once inside, we understand perfectly the Smith House’s steel architecture. The house is a T-shaped, one-story overlay of two rectangular prisms perpendicular to each other. All three wings of this T-shape are literally framed by the crisp steel edges that hold the house up and – equally – hold it together.
Both bedroom wings have full walls of glass facing westerly onto wooden decks. These decks nearly match the dimensions of the interior spaces that they effectively double. This is one of those mid-century classic designs where the eye refuses to believe what the ear is told: That the interior space adds up to a mere 1,550 sq. feet.
Abundance by Absence – Karesansui
This economy of means applies, too, to the beautifully restored compact kitchen. Glass extends from floor to ceiling on both sides of this principal living space, which even so somehow appears solidly grounded. Never mind the fact that it literally is suspended in mid-air.
There are few Modernist houses that feel as Japanese in spirit as the Smith House. Not in the materials or in any direct quotation, though, paradoxically (as industrial steel architecture is far indeed from mortise & tenon wood framing). In three dimensions, the Smith House’s steel architecture frames voids just as much as it does its solid rooms. Space is ordered carefully and with the lightest touch conceivable.
Like the carefully raked gravel of a Zen Garden with its handful of objects placed just so, the house tells us: Add nothing unnecessary. Accordingly, no Marie Kondo needed for those who elect to live here. Anything that doesn’t fit in the existing cabinetry and closets (which are generous in the bedrooms) can only be put into storage off-site. Or given away — or is that sent to a landfill?
An Ideal Restoration by an Original Associate Architect
Meticulously restored by Ellwood’s original 1958 collaborator-designer James Tyler, FAIA, before a 2018 sale, the Smith House is a rare mid-century icon. Craig Ellwood himself was never a trained or credentialed architect (though he studied engineering at the UCLA Extension). He relied on licensed architect-associates like Tyler to implement his ideas – and/or theirs?
By all accounts a larger-than-life personality, charming and personable (and despite his undoubted success in garnering the firm commissions for great architecture), Ellwood’s associates grew to resent the media spotlight that Ellwood gloried in alone. Understandably, as the “star system” has until recently been as ubiquitous in architecture as it is in Hollywood. In truth, almost all great buildings are the result of the collaboration of several individuals working as a team.
