Set among the winding hillside streets overlooking West Hollywood‘s Sunset Strip is the Wolff Residence, a striking home designed in 1961 by the great mid-century architect John Lautner. Named after interior designer Marco Wolff, the home’s original owner, it was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2006 and has now been listed for $6.5 by George Salazar and Tilsia Acosta of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties. “This is a jewel,” said Salazar. “Anyone who comes to see it is blown away.”
The manner in which the Wolff Residence is dramatically sited against a near-vertical slope is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, Lautner’s first mentor when he arrived in Los Angeles. With less than a quarter-acre of land to call its own, the primarily stone-and-glass home divides 1,664 square feet across three floors, while leaving plenty of room for the architect’s signature flourishes.
A dining room, updated kitchen and an airy living room with 16-foot-tall windows make up the home’s top floor, which includes a stone fireplace, a fully-grown eucalyptus tree within an interior courtyard, and plenty of built-in copper seating areas that extend to an outdoor terrace. From this floor, a medievalesque staircase leads to the master bedroom suite, which is nearly divided in half between interior space and an outdoor terrace with panoramic views. On the bottom floor is a sun deck and a swimming pool that cantilevers over the street to extend beyond the home’s roofline. In 1970, the client hired Lautner architect a second time to build a guest home on the West side of the property, effectively turning the one-bedroom bachelor pad into a four-bedroom family home.
Though the architect’s similarly-designed Foster House was recently purchased after sitting on the market for less than half a year, the inflated price tag and unusual spatial layout of the Wolff Residence may prove to be a difficult sell.
