Inside an Enchanting L.A. Home That Looks Straight Out of a Storybook
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)