“A hallway that curves, a ceiling that floats, a fire you can see from the bed. Nobody has laid a hand on it in seventy-seven years, and nobody should.”
- Sam O'Connor
780
Laguna Rd
Pasadena
Bedrooms
2
Bathrooms
2
Total Area
1,897 Sq. FT
Lot Size
10,441 Sq. FT
Price
$2,595,000
The Printer's Lautner
John Lautner was thirty-eight in 1949, six years out of Taliesin and a decade into Los Angeles, still working out what to do with what Frank Lloyd Wright had given him. He designed four things that year, one of them the Sunset Boulevard coffee shop that handed the word Googie to an entire style. He also built this, on Laguna Road, for Grant Dahlstrom, the Pasadena printer behind the Castle Press, a man who spent his working life on how a line of type sits on a page. The house has been preserved rather than corrected, which after seventy-seven years is by far the rarer outcome.
Listed by: Rob Moore, Compass
Inside
The entry is wood-clad and deliberately tight, and the hallway curves, so the living room does not arrive until Lautner is ready to hand it over. When it does, a cantilevered steel ceiling floats above walls of glass and a cylindrical concrete fireplace holds the whole room down. Circles keep turning up once you notice the first one: a cylindrical bookshelf set into the corner glazing, a rounded concrete bench that passes straight through the glass without pausing at it. The primary bedroom is semicircular, its wall made by that same curving paneling, and it slides open to the living room so the garden and the fire belong to both. Sight lines carry through to the kitchen and a teak-walled office. There is also, unusually for 1949, real storage.
Outside
The lot runs 10,441 square feet on Laguna Road, in a stretch of the South Arroyo where architectural pedigree is the baseline rather than the exception. Japanese-inspired gardens hold the front, doing the work a wall would do elsewhere and doing it considerably better. A massive stone pine stands over the entrance, older than most of what surrounds it. Every part of the house opens to private outdoor space, which is less a floor plan convenience than the entire thesis: the glass was never meant to frame a view of the garden, it was meant to remove the boundary. Four cars fit, which is more than a house of this pedigree usually bothers to offer.
The O' Factor
Lautner is remembered for spectacle. Chemosphere on its single column, Elrod under its concrete umbrella, Silvertop and its curve, the houses that keep turning up in films because they photograph like an argument. All of that came later, and it can make the early work look like practice. It was not. Everything the famous houses do is already running here at lower volume: the withheld entry, the ceiling that appears to weigh nothing, the refusal to let glass mean a boundary. Lautner said what he wanted was joy and repose at the same time, and repose is the half nobody ever quotes. This is the house where he got both, built for a man who spent his career on the space between letters.
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The Homes we Represent,
Represent Us.
Every home has a soul. Every human has a place they were meant to be. Our instinct is knowing when the two finally meet. We honor architecture, preserve great design and celebrate the match. Welcome to O’Connor Estates. We’ve been waiting for you.
Proof is in the Properties
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“Sold for $1,619 per square foot.”
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“Sold off-market for $1,249 per square foot.”
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“Sold for $1,227 per square foot.”
