Today, Architectural Digest travels to the wooded canyons of Los Angeles to tour Stebel House. Built in 1961 by Harry Gesner, one of Southern California’s most prolific architects, it comprises three A-frame structures that combine to create an enchanting triangular form that looks straight out of a storybook. Surrounded by woodland, it is hard to believe this charming design is just a stone's throw from the city's hustle and bustle.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 When you open the front door of this house,
00:09 you really have the sense that you're walking
00:11 into something special.
00:13 It's almost like being a kid in a playhouse,
00:15 where everywhere you turn, there's something unexpected
00:19 and something new.
00:21 That is really a touchstone of my father's design,
00:25 is making a livable space exciting for the people
00:29 who live there.
00:29 My name's Zen Gessner.
00:38 I'm the son of Harry Gessner, the architect of the Stiebel
00:41 house.
00:43 Sidney Stiebel, Sid, he was a really great writer.
00:46 And his wife, Jan, was a painter.
00:49 My father met them in the most organic of ways.
00:52 It was back in the late '50s.
00:55 He had just finished a house called the Cole House.
00:57 And Jan and Sid Stiebel started driving around.
01:01 And they spotted the house from Sunset Boulevard.
01:05 They looked up, and they saw this huge A-frame roof.
01:08 And Fred Cole, the owner, wasn't there.
01:12 So they just left a note tacked to his front door saying,
01:17 hey, we love your house.
01:19 Can you please call us with the name of the architect?
01:22 This is how they did it back in the old days,
01:24 before texts and emails and all that.
01:26 My father loved the fact that he was a novelist,
01:29 that Jan Stiebel was an artist.
01:31 And he loved the fact that they didn't have a lot of money.
01:34 He saw that as a really great challenge,
01:36 to try to create something that was like the Cole House, which
01:39 is pretty grand, in a smaller scale on a very difficult lot.
01:44 And in my father's normal tradition,
01:47 when he was hired to do any home anywhere,
01:50 he would find a way to spend as much time initially
01:54 on the site to kind of get a feeling of how the wind was,
01:58 where it came from, where the sun rose, where it set,
02:02 the light during the day.
02:03 All of these factors, including the trees, the rocks,
02:07 he liked the idea of really fitting something
02:11 into a natural area and not impose upon that area,
02:15 but actually create out of it organically.
02:24 He came up here with his machete.
02:26 And if you can imagine, it was probably
02:28 full of weeds and full of bushes.
02:30 But he cleared it out and then camped up here
02:32 for about six days while he took his sketch pad
02:36 and made renderings of what he would present to the Stiebels
02:40 as their home.
02:41 He came up with the idea of making perpendicular A-frames.
02:46 And this is a really good vantage to see this.
02:49 You can see this gable on this side is one A-frame.
02:53 And that is the second A-frame on the second floor.
02:57 Both of these A-frames afford different views.
03:00 So from the bedroom, you have this view
03:03 of this mountainside here.
03:05 And this A-frame on this side projects down Mandeville Canyon
03:10 and you really get this incredible treetop view.
03:14 It is almost like you are away in some mountain
03:23 in this area, like Lake Arrowhead.
03:26 And my father had spent a lot of time in Switzerland.
03:31 He was an avid mountain climber and a skier.
03:34 And he spent a lot of time around the Swiss chalets.
03:38 So that influenced a lot of the design as well.
03:40 My father took inspiration from a lot of things.
03:46 I'd say the primary thing was nature
03:48 and the environment in which he lived.
03:50 The inspiration he also took from was life experiences.
03:55 He fought in World War II.
03:59 He was a scout.
04:00 They went fighting from town to town
04:02 across France and Germany.
04:04 And he was constantly sketching churches.
04:07 His sketches that he took from that really inspired,
04:11 I think, a lot of the Gothic shapes
04:13 and some of the A-frame shapes that we see a lot.
04:17 So I think, you know, when I see my father's architecture,
04:20 I see a lot of his history in it,
04:22 as well as his love of nature.
04:24 A lot of European influences.
04:27 I see a lot of Native American influences.
04:29 So this is a very classic example
04:39 of a mid-century sunken living room.
04:42 But my father always puts his own little twist on everything.
04:46 So it's almost like there's a zen garden that goes around
04:50 that's indoor and outdoor.
04:52 And these windows are sculpted in such a way
04:55 that you really don't even see the difference
04:58 between indoor and outdoor.
05:00 It's a sunken living room.
05:02 You're really sitting in nature.
05:04 And I think that's a stamp of my father's design.
05:08 When you walk in this room,
05:09 there's something that strikes you
05:10 immediately right off the bat,
05:12 and that's these enormous ceilings
05:14 and how they all come to a point at the end of that beam.
05:19 The high ceilings really kind of opens your mind
05:21 subconsciously.
05:22 This bar is so cool
05:27 because it is absolutely sculpted
05:30 into the center of the house.
05:32 And what's really cool is in the renderings,
05:35 my father actually did have these speakers
05:37 embedded in the walls.
05:39 What's awesome is that the current owner
05:42 has rewired and reconfigured everything.
05:45 So these things work and they work great.
05:48 Another very cool thing about this bar
05:50 is the back wall is curved
05:52 and it happens to be right at the center
05:55 of the join between this A-frame and that A-frame,
05:59 right in the middle.
06:01 This is the soul of the house.
06:02 (gentle music)
06:05 My father loved small homes.
06:17 This Diebelhaus really kind of redirected his focus
06:22 on the fact that people don't need all that space.
06:28 You can do so much with so much less.
06:31 It was beautiful to him to see how things fit together
06:34 and to have that exposed and not covered up
06:36 with stucco or something over it.
06:39 And it really gives people an idea
06:40 of how everything fits together.
06:43 He loved using reclaimed materials in a lot of his houses.
06:46 The fireplace over here, for instance,
06:49 my father always believed that a brick
06:51 coming from something else had a life before it, a soul.
06:56 And you're bringing all of that life into a new existence.
07:01 The walkway from the parking area through to the front door,
07:06 it's concrete, which also uses inlaid stone
07:11 using natural elements of the site
07:14 and creating something that incorporated them
07:18 into this design.
07:19 My father was mischievous.
07:23 He would leave things for the owners to discover over time.
07:28 And my father has planted things throughout the house
07:32 that are very cool, but you have to discover them.
07:36 For instance, the stained glass,
07:38 there's one that's in the dining area.
07:40 It is a beautiful piece of art.
07:43 And if you look out of that, if you look through it,
07:46 it's actually in the exact spot the sun rises.
07:50 Every morning, it shines through that window
07:52 and it casts its light and its color through the whole room.
07:57 (gentle music)
07:59 Downstairs, the bar hides this staircase.
08:03 And in the spirit of discovery,
08:05 for anybody who's visiting,
08:07 it really kind of appears out of nowhere.
08:10 We are now in another A-frame
08:12 with another 20-foot high ceiling
08:15 pointed towards this wooded area
08:17 with this amazing framing of window.
08:20 Now, this may look like just a piece of art on its own,
08:26 but I guarantee my father
08:28 chose every one of these frames for a reason.
08:31 It's like you're looking at these little framed pictures
08:35 all blended together in a patchwork.
08:38 Each one of these frames shows a different picture.
08:41 This is like one of those artistic elements
08:43 that my dad was so good at,
08:45 that just, it's not shouting itself out there.
08:48 It's actually something you have to discover.
08:51 There's other whimsical things in this place
08:54 that are so much in my father's spirit.
08:57 This is an original chair hanging here
09:00 in this really cool little reading nook.
09:03 This bookcase was constructed by a friend of Sid Stiebel
09:08 who owned a paperback bookshop.
09:13 And so the space between the shelves
09:16 is meant for paperback books.
09:18 So you'd have paperback books fitting perfectly,
09:21 and then you'd have an entire row of hardcovers
09:24 that are slanted at a certain angle.
09:26 And this entire bookshelf was just filled
09:29 with books in every which way.
09:32 And out this door is the breakfast deck.
09:39 Very few of my father's houses
09:41 actually had railings on the decks.
09:43 I think he just didn't like the sight line.
09:45 But, you know, as long as you don't have really young kids
09:49 and you've got some sense of balance,
09:51 this is really a comfortable place to be.
09:54 In 2009, when my father was doing his book,
09:57 "Houses of the Sundown Sea,"
09:59 he had an enormous amount of fun
10:02 seeing a lot of the houses that he had built
10:05 back in the '50s and '60s,
10:08 pretty much for the first time
10:09 since the point that they were built.
10:12 And he mentioned that coming up to this one,
10:15 the trees had grown so much.
10:16 It was almost like he was discovering a time capsule
10:20 because the house was so well-preserved.
10:23 So these trees, they keep it a bit like a time capsule.
10:26 Off the bedroom, this is the true sanctuary.
10:36 This is where Stiebel's desk was.
10:38 And you can see the skylight,
10:40 which gave light to his typewriter.
10:43 And my father asked if he could bring this skylight down
10:48 so that Sid could have a view from where he was working.
10:52 And Sid was so dedicated to his writing
10:56 that he wanted no distraction.
10:58 And this skylight, only purpose was to feed light down.
11:02 Down here was the art studio
11:05 where Jan would do her paintings.
11:07 And once again, you see this incredible framing of window,
11:11 each one with a picture of its own.
11:14 Because this studio space faces north,
11:18 you have a much more consistent light.
11:21 You have this diffused light.
11:23 You don't have to deal with shadows
11:24 and differences in light.
11:26 For an artist, that's perfect conditions.
11:29 The house actually looks like it was some sort of creature
11:38 that's rooted into this hillside.
11:41 It's actually the design and my father's architecture
11:46 rooting this to the foundation of the house
11:51 and finding a way to do it,
11:53 which supports the integrity of the design
11:56 and the safety elements,
11:59 but also gives a unique way to play with light
12:03 and the indoor/outdoor aspects.
12:05 (gentle music)
12:08 My father felt the Stiebel House
12:12 was one of the best accomplishments of his career
12:14 because this house was a perfect example
12:18 of him downsizing a design and making it work perfectly
12:23 for the people living in it.
12:25 Blending it with the environment, of course,
12:28 the difficult landscape that this originally was, it fits.
12:35 So he just had a way of doing that.
12:37 And I think he built his reputation
12:39 of building hillside homes throughout Southern California
12:44 in a way that felt right.
12:48 The roofline goes straight down to the concrete foundation.
12:53 This house is about as solid as you could ever get.
12:57 If you're on the inside of the skeleton,
13:00 you feel protected.
13:02 You feel safe.
13:03 Once again, it's a subconscious thing,
13:06 but I think that design really pulls that together.
13:09 (gentle music)
13:12 You always hear of somebody being an original, okay?
13:16 Some of the greatest artists are originals.
13:19 They think outside the box of convention.
13:22 My father was an original in the world of architecture.
13:25 And if you take the Stiebel House here,
13:29 which is modeled, if you blur your eyes a little bit,
13:32 you see a Swiss chalet.
13:34 But he found a way to take that conventional design
13:38 in Europe and bring it into a mid-century new twist.
13:43 In every one of his houses,
13:45 you really feel a sense that it connects
13:48 with something deeper, something primal.
13:52 And I think it takes a true artist to really recognize that
13:55 and be able to harness that feeling
13:58 and put it into something like a house that we live in.
14:02 A perfect habitat for a novelist and an artist.
14:06 (gentle music)
14:09 (birds chirping)
14:11 (gentle music)
14:14 (birds chirping)
14:17 (gentle music)
14:20 (music)