The Malin Residence

John Lautner’s Chemosphere, from a hillside no one would build on to an octagon on a single column above the San Fernando Valley, and the six decades that followed

The Malin Residence stands at 7776 Torreyson Drive, on the San Fernando Valley side of the Hollywood Hills just off Mulholland Drive. John Lautner completed it in 1960 for Leonard Malin, a young aerospace engineer, and the house has been known almost from the start by the name of one of its sponsors: the Chemosphere. It is a one-story octagon of roughly 2,200 square feet, raised on a concrete column nearly thirty feet tall above a slope of forty-five degrees that had long been written off as unbuildable (Chemosphere, 2026). The Society of Architectural Historians counts it among Lautner’s most important projects and one of the best-known houses in Los Angeles, a building that captures the optimism of its moment as fully as the talent of its architect. Completed shortly before Silvertop and the Sheats Residence, it marks a turning point in Lautner’s career (Escher, n.d.). This account traces the house from the formation of the architect who conceived it through its design, construction, family life, decline, restoration, and afterlife on screen, with particular attention to the reasoning behind its form.

The Architect Before the House

Lautner was born in Marquette, Michigan, on July 16, 1911. His mother was a painter and his father a professor at Northern State Teachers College, and the household was steeped in German philosophy, American Transcendentalism, and Nordic and Indian mythology. As a teenager he helped his parents design, build, and furnish a log cabin on a rocky peninsula above Lake Superior, working with simple tools because the site was so remote. The family named it Midgaard, an Old Norse word for the realm midway between earth and heaven, and the hands-on method of its construction stayed with him for the rest of his career. He took courses in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, preferred his father’s classes in philosophy and ethics, and graduated in 1933 with a degree in English, the only architecture course available to him having been a history survey (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015).

That same year he and his fiancée, Mary Roberts, joined Frank Lloyd Wright’s new Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where apprentices cooked, farmed, repaired machinery, built stone walls, and fixed the plumbing alongside their work at the drafting table. Lautner stayed until 1939 and supervised construction of several Wright buildings, among them Wingspread in Racine and Deertrack, the house Wright designed for Lautner’s mother-in-law in Marquette. He deliberately avoided copying Wright’s drawings or photographing his buildings. He meant to work from his own philosophy, which he understood to be exactly what Wright asked of his apprentices, and he later counted himself among the very few who managed it (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015).

Los Angeles came as a shock. Lautner arrived in 1938, and in a recording used in the 2009 documentary Infinite Space he recalled finding the city “so damned ugly I was physically sick for about a year” (Lifson, 2011). He stayed for the clients willing to take risks and for the technology that the region’s military and aerospace industries made available. He resisted classification throughout his life and described his aim as the “timeless enjoyment of spaces, which I call Real Architecture” (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015). The John Lautner Foundation preserves the credo he wrote to explain it. It opens with the sentence “The purpose of Architecture is to improve human life,” and goes on to call for free, joyous spaces as sensible as nature, each growing from a single main idea into a finished whole, with the basic needs of the individual and the character of the site and its materials as the true sources of design (John Lautner Foundation, 2011).

By the late 1950s Lautner had spent a decade on the problem the Chemosphere would solve. He had explored mushroom structures as early as 1948, drawn to both their form and their economy, though most of those designs went unbuilt. The one realized precedent was the Sheats Apartments in Westwood, now called L’Horizon, where each unit rests on a central concrete column supporting a thirty-five-foot platform of radiating wood joists held together by a steel tension ring (Escher, n.d.). The National Register documentation for Lautner’s residential work identifies these columns as his first known built mushroom structures and notes that they freed the apartments from bearing walls entirely (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015). The year of the Chemosphere was also a hard one for Lautner personally. In 1960 a fire destroyed his studio and home, and he reestablished his office in the Hollywood Professional Building on Hollywood Boulevard (Crosse, 2009).

The Client

Leonard Malin was born in Ohio on New Year’s Eve in 1931 and raised in Los Angeles by his mother. As a boy he sang with the Robert Mitchell Boys Choir and appeared in several films, including a performance of “Swinging on a Star” with Bing Crosby in Going My Way. His voice won him a scholarship to Loyola University, where he sang with the glee club and studied mechanical engineering, graduating in 1955 and going straight into the aerospace industry that anchored the Southern California economy (McDonnell, 2015). He and his wife, Diane Bishop, had four children: Judith, born in 1955, followed by Donald, Mary Ann, and Robert. The young family lived with Diane’s parents on a wooded hillside in Hollywood facing Burbank, and the Bishops gave the couple the lot next door. Its incline was so steep that the property was considered unbuildable (McDonnell, 2015).

Malin approached the problem with a young engineer’s confidence. He later explained his reasoning to the Los Angeles Times: most people spend their whole lives working toward a dream house, so he decided to build his first and pay for it over the rest of his life. He had $30,000 to spend, a modest but workable budget for a middle-class buyer in the Hollywood Hills during the postwar boom (Timberg, 2011). He knew Lautner’s work firsthand. His father-in-law lived on the street below the site, and Lautner had completed the nearby Harpel House there in 1956 (Escher, n.d.).

There Is No Site

The design came slowly. For weeks, Lautner was seen climbing the hillside and sitting on it, studying the view, and at night only the glow of his cigarette marked where he sat. He produced four schemes. Two were linear arrangements that followed the contours, one carried on a central row of supports and the other pinned to the slope with structural arcs. The other two began lifting portions of the program off the hill onto a mushroom-shaped platform. None satisfied him, and he kept brooding while Malin, who had already instructed him to proceed with one of them, waited impatiently (Escher, n.d.).

According to the account Frank Escher records in SAH Archipedia, Lautner then returned to the site with his project architect, Guy Zebert, stood at the bottom of the hill for some time, shook his head, and declared that “there is no site.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket and sketched the entire scheme in four strokes: a diagonal for the slope, a horizontal for the floor, a vertical joining the two, and a curve roofing over the platform. He handed the sketch to Zebert and told him to finish the drawings (Escher, n.d.). Malin remembered the moment from the client’s side. He had picked one of the four schemes, and a couple of weeks later Lautner arrived and unfolded a drawing of something else entirely. When Malin objected that this was not the design he had chosen, Lautner told him it was the one he was going to build (McDonnell, 2015).

The decision followed directly from the budget. The National Register documentation explains that cost led Lautner to the single column, since grading a flat terrace into the slope or building an extensive steel frame would have required major excavation and retaining walls. The mushroom kept both to a minimum and left the surrounding hillside largely untouched (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015). Lautner also credited the client. He told the Los Angeles Times he was glad Malin was an engineer, because Malin “wasn’t afraid of an original idea,” and said that a banker in his place would have demanded a Colonial house on a bulldozed lot (McDonnell, 2015). The historian Alan Hess has pointed out that Lautner never thought of the building as a flying saucer. He saw it as a sensible solution, and it was one of very few imaginable schemes that could have put the lot to use at all (Timberg, 2011).

A House on a Single Column

The engineering begins underground. A circular concrete pad nineteen feet across and three feet thick is embedded in the bedrock and buried under four feet of compacted soil. From it rises a concrete column five feet in diameter and twenty-nine feet high. Its two-foot hollow core carries the water supply and sewer lines, and the gas and electrical lines were originally meant to run through it as well. The column supports an octagonal platform of steel and wood roughly sixty feet across. Eight steel beams radiate from the center and rest on eight diagonal steel braces, and short steel extensions carry those braces past the floor line to the underside of the windows (Escher, n.d.).

The roof is a separate structure. Eight curved glue-laminated beams spring from the extended braces and meet at a steel compression ring at the center of the house. The same manufacturer produced similar glulam roof structures around that time for Lautner’s Midtown School. The roof joists are saw-cut and set into notches in the glulams, spaced wider near the center where the spans are short and tighter at the perimeter, where they brace the beams through the curve and define the crisp edge of the roof. Because the entire load travels through the braces to the column, none of the interior walls carry any weight (Escher, n.d.). The buried pad has kept the house steady through decades of earthquakes and heavy rains (Chemosphere, 2026; Giroux Glass, 2020).

For students, the lesson lies in how completely the structure answers the site. A conventional hillside house of the period would have cut the slope into terraces and held it back with walls. Lautner reduced the building’s contact with the ground to a single point and let the hill remain a hill. He pursued the idea further after 1960. In the unrealized Alto Capistrano development, he imagined whole forests of these structures rising across the hills while leaving the ground itself untouched. A square variation appeared in an unbuilt house for Morris Misbin and was developed further in the Peters House, where stacked mushrooms reduced the structure to its most elegant minimum. The final version, with platforms assembled from precast coffered slabs, appeared in the last proposed scheme for Alto Capistrano (Escher, n.d.).

Building It

Construction demanded as much invention as design. Malin quit his job to build the house, and he worked it out with Zebert as site engineer and John de la Vaux, a contractor Lautner had relied on since the 1940s, as construction manager (McDonnell, 2015; California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015). Malin rigged a pulley system from telephone poles to haul materials up the slope. Asked more than half a century later what had motivated him, he answered with a joke about his own lack of forethought (McDonnell, 2015). A British trade journal described him in 1962 as the ultimate handyman, an owner who had given up his aerospace job to build the house himself (Crosse, 2009).

Money was the hardest obstacle. Lautner had assured Malin that $30,000 would be enough, and the job came in about four times over budget (McDonnell, 2015). The final cost was $140,000, of which Malin paid $80,000 in cash (Chemosphere, 2026). He covered the difference by bartering with sponsors. The Southern California Gas Company supplied all of the appliances and the heating and cooling units in exchange for the right to use the house in its advertising. The Chem Seal Corporation, a maker of bonding, sealing, and coating compounds for the aerospace industry, supplied the materials applied during construction (Escher, n.d.). The trade magazine Adhesives Age covered the house for its materials in 1960, and in March 1961 the Los Angeles Times reported that Malin had been named plant manager of Chem Seal, noting the attention his “chemically welded” house had attracted (Crosse, 2009). Lautner had wanted to call the house Chapiteau. The sponsor’s name stuck instead (Chemosphere, 2026). Once the house was finished, the family had to wait several months to move in while the corporate sponsors showed it to the public (McDonnell, 2015).

The city noticed the house before it was done. In October 1960 the Los Angeles Times ran a construction photograph and described the innovations in Lautner’s 2,200-square-foot design. A month later, a Times column defined a “chemosphere house” for its readers with a cartoon and compared it to “a large lollypop stuck in a mud pie,” adding directions for anyone who wanted to find the one under construction in the Hollywood Hills (Crosse, 2009).

The Plan

The plan divides the octagon in two. A large living, dining, and open kitchen area takes up roughly half the house and faces north over the valley. The other half faces the hill and originally held the master bedroom, a larger second bedroom that could be divided with a folding partition, a small third bedroom, a laundry room, and two bathrooms (Escher, n.d.). An exposed brick wall with a fireplace runs through the center of the house, with low seating built against it (Chemosphere, 2026). Above the fireplace, a skylight balances the light from the perimeter glass, a device Lautner also used in his other circular spaces, including the Midtown School and the Zimmerman and Hatherall houses (Escher, n.d.). Built-in couches and cabinets were made of ash (Timberg, 2011). John H. Smith, the first African American admitted to the National Society of Interior Designers, handled the original interior decoration (Chemosphere, 2026).

The view is the architecture’s other half. From the living room, the eye travels across the suburbs of the valley and, through the Cahuenga Pass, to the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood Sign, and a glimpse of downtown Los Angeles. Escher describes the house as suspended between wilderness and city. The hillside half stays close to nature, and the valley half opens to the metropolis (Escher, n.d.). Benedikt Taschen, the house’s later owner, described the same duality. The bedroom side is quiet and visited by skunks, bobcats, coyotes, and deer, while the living room window looks out on the homes and towers along the 101 Freeway (Timberg, 2011).

Family Life

The Malins lived in the house for twelve years. Access began with a staircase of 113 steps, and Malin soon added a funicular of his own design. The children ran along the ledge that circled the building, terrifying their mother, and put on shows through the windows for the sightseers who came to stare. Deer grazed outside, owls perched on the ledge, and a blue jay adopted the family. Judith Malin, who later worked as a relationship coach, remembered the hillside as heaven for a child, though living in what she called a glass bubble also brought fame and false friends (McDonnell, 2015). Escher records a morning when Malin walked into his living room to find an entire family of strangers standing on his balcony and peering inside (Escher, n.d.). The house also had its hazards. At Judith’s sixteenth birthday party, the funicular car crashed to the ground, injuring several teenagers (McDonnell, 2015).

Hess has noted the irony in this history. The Chemosphere was built for a couple raising four children, yet whenever it appears in films it plays a decadent bachelor pad. In his reading, one house holds both the reality of Southern California life and its image (Timberg, 2011).

Reception

The house became famous almost immediately, largely through the photographs of Julius Shulman. In 1961 it appeared in the New York Times in April, on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine at the end of that month, in the spring issue of Architectural Digest, and in Life that August. It also ran in Interiors, Popular Science, the Christian Science Monitor, and trade journals in Germany and abroad, including Ameryka, the U.S. government magazine published in Polish. In 1961 the Encyclopædia Britannica called it the most modern home built in the world. Southern California Gas featured it in newspaper advertising, Shulman included it in his 1962 book Photographing Architecture and Interiors, and Lautner exhibitions that year at Gibraltar Savings and Loan in Beverly Hills and at the Building Center on West Third Street showcased it among dozens of photographs and drawings (Crosse, 2009). The Life feature described how curious neighbors had taken the lit-up house at night for something unearthly, and it observed that the saucer-shaped building showed no visible means of support except a slim concrete pedestal (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015).

Critics placed it in a regional lineage. David Gebhard included it in LACMA’s 1965 guide to Southern California architecture, and Reyner Banham used Shulman’s photographs of it in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in 1971 (Crosse, 2009). Hess later ranked the Chemosphere alongside Greene and Greene’s Gamble House, the Eames House, and the best work of Richard Neutra and R. M. Schindler as an expression of Southern California culture. He argued that it was characteristically Los Angeles because “it didn’t have to look like a house.” For Hess, it expressed the period’s faith that technology could solve any problem, the same faith that built the region’s water systems, power grids, and freeways (Timberg, 2011). Escher, looking back, recalled that the Chemosphere was seen as the future of architecture, a statement so powerful that no one could ignore it (McDonnell, 2015).

Sale and Decline

The Malins sold in 1972. The California space program had collapsed, taxes were rising in an increasingly wealthy neighborhood, and Malin wanted to pay for his children’s college educations. His daughter later explained that he chose to downsize so the children could go to college (McDonnell, 2015). The second owner, Dr. Richard Kuhn, was stabbed to death in his bedroom by two intruders during a robbery in 1976, and both men were convicted of first-degree murder the following year (Mejía, 2024).

The house then entered a long decline. It was listed in 1984 for $1.05 million, with the marketing noting its coming appearance in Brian De Palma’s Body Double, and in 1985 the Los Angeles Times covered the continuing sale effort under the headline “Earthbound UFO Up for Sale” (Crosse, 2009). The market had no place for it. The broker who eventually handled the sale recalled that buyers wanted Spanish-style houses and later shabby chic, and that midcentury houses sat unsold while visitors came only for the view. For ten to twelve years the house was rented out and became, in Escher’s words, the ultimate party house. When the Taschens first saw it in 1997, they found disco-era wall-to-wall carpet, an aluminum door, smudged windows, and seven layers of paint on the originally exposed brick wall. The house had been on the market so long, Taschen later said, that it had turned up in an episode of The Simpsons with a for-sale sign (Timberg, 2011).

The Taschen Restoration

Benedikt and Angelika Taschen bought the house in 1997, and Escher GuneWardena Architecture restored and remodeled it from 1998 to 2000 (Escher GuneWardena Architecture, n.d.). Angelika Taschen, an art historian, knew the house from Shulman’s photographs, and Benedikt Taschen described it as love at first sight and said he bought it as fast as he could. At their first meeting, Escher began walking Taschen through which elements were original, which needed replacement, and which deserved restoration. Taschen cut him off within half a minute and told him in German to do what he thought was right (Timberg, 2011).

Escher described the job as a philosophical problem. The hardest part, he said, was developing an intellectual strategy that combined research into history and technology with some understanding of Lautner’s psychology, and he believed a house of this kind required the restorer to be forceful at times. The team stripped the paint from the brick, paneled the walls in the same ash used for the original built-ins, repaired or restored the cabinetry, and replaced the fixed, framed windows with frameless glass. Escher’s stated aim was for every new detail to disappear, and Ravi GuneWardena compared the process to pruning a garden to reveal the clarity of the structure (Timberg, 2011). The partners later singled out two moments as the most significant of the project: removing the extraneous mullions to reveal the curved glulam roof, and installing wood paneling on the living room wall as Lautner had originally intended (AIA Los Angeles, 2018).

The team also tried to finish what Lautner could not. His original drawings called for a floor of random broken slate, but in 1960 the stone could not be cut thin enough to keep its weight from destabilizing the house. The restoration ran the slate pattern inside and out and across the bridge that connects the front door to the funicular (Timberg, 2011). It replaced the tile the gas company had originally supplied (Chemosphere, 2026). The glass alone was a major undertaking. Giroux Glass, engaged in 1999, removed every original pane and its framing and installed a custom butt-glazed system. Each tempered pane was half an inch thick, measured ten feet by nine feet, and weighed close to six hundred pounds. With the funicular rarely working, crews began each day by climbing a wooden staircase up the hill. The crated panes were lifted one at a time by helicopter from Universal City, flown across the 101 Freeway, and lowered onto a temporary ramp, where a crew of ten set each into its channel (Giroux Glass, 2020).

Escher resisted turning the interior into a period piece. The Taschens had first wanted more furniture from the 1960s, but the architects did not want a museum of the decade. The house was furnished sparely with Eames chairs, an Eames coffee table, and an oval Florence Knoll dining table, and Taschen commissioned a hanging lamp of bent Plexiglas strips from the Los Angeles artist Jorge Pardo and a rug from the German painter Albert Oehlen. Escher compared Lautner houses to custom-made clothing that needs the right wearer, and he considered Taschen the ideal one. In the early years the house hosted parties that drew the photographer William Claxton, the model Peggy Moffitt, jazz musicians, and the director Billy Wilder. Taschen later canceled a planned guesthouse at the base of the hill by Rem Koolhaas, fearing it would compete visually with the main house, and he spoke of replacing the birdcage-like funicular with a more open car. Asked about the house’s drawbacks, he pointed to maintenance roughly ten times that of an ordinary building and compared living there to owning a vintage Mercedes (Timberg, 2011). He has also described his role as stewardship on behalf of future generations, saying of the house, “It belongs to mankind” (Giroux Glass, 2020).

The restoration received an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy (Chemosphere, 2026) and the approval of the original owner. Malin said the materials now available had made the place better than when he lived there, and faithful to Lautner’s vision (Timberg, 2011). Escher GuneWardena returned for a second phase of work in 2020 and 2021 (Escher GuneWardena Architecture, n.d.). The house remains a private residence (Escher, n.d.).

The House on Screen

The Chemosphere’s first dramatic role came in “The Duplicate Man,” a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits adapted from a story by Clifford D. Simak. The exteriors were shot on location, and a soundstage set stood in for the interior (Chemosphere, 2026). The set bore no resemblance to the real rooms (Crosse, 2009). Brian De Palma used the house in Body Double (1984) as an observatory for the film’s voyeur, and it directly inspired a house in Charlie’s Angels (2000). In 1996, The Simpsons drew it as the hilltop home of Troy McClure, and it appears in the end credits of Disney’s Tomorrowland (2015) (Chemosphere, 2026).

Recognition and Legacy

The City of Los Angeles designated the Chemosphere Historic-Cultural Monument No. 785 in 2004, and in 2008 a Los Angeles Times survey of experts named it one of the ten best houses ever built in the city (Chemosphere, 2026). The house is listed among the extant examples in the National Register Multiple Property Documentation for Lautner’s Southern California residential work, which the National Park Service accepted in 2016. The Getty Research Institute acquired Lautner’s archive in 2007, and the Hammer Museum’s 2008 retrospective, Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner, organized by Nicholas Olsberg and Frank Escher, took its title from the meaning of Midgaard, the family cabin where Lautner first learned to build (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group, 2015).

Escher has called Lautner the missing link between the classic modernism of the Case Study Houses and the more expressive, sculptural architecture now associated with Los Angeles, and he notes that Frank Gehry regarded Lautner as a god when Gehry was a student (Timberg, 2011). The Chemosphere is the clearest demonstration of that position. It is a house of modest size, built on a limited budget, in which one structural idea resolves the site, the plan, the light, and the view at once. For anyone studying it, the essential lesson is the method behind the form: Lautner sat with an impossible hillside until he understood it, concluded that there was no site to build on, and then designed a house that needed almost none.

References

AIA Los Angeles. (2018, December 6). Escher GuneWardena Architecture: Church of the Epiphany. https://www.aialosangeles.org/news/news-and-blogs/escher-gunewardena-architecture-church-of-the-epiphany/

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, & Historic Resources Group. (2015). Residential architecture of John Lautner in Southern California, 1940–1994 [National Register of Historic Places multiple property documentation form]. National Park Service. https://planning.lacity.gov/odocument/65df4e3f-569a-4010-a2e7-93e1bdd0bdda/ResidentialArchitectureofJohnLautnerinSoCalifornia_1940-1994.pdf

Chemosphere. (2026). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 25, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosphere

Crosse, J. (2009). John Lautner: An annotated bibliography. modern-ISM Press. https://www.usmodernist.org/LautnerBiblio.pdf

Escher, F. (n.d.). Chemosphere House. In G. Esperdy & K. Kingsley (Eds.), SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians; University of Virginia Press. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/CA-01-037-0067

Escher GuneWardena Architecture. (n.d.). Chemosphere restoration/remodel. https://eschergunewardena.com/Chemosphere-Restoration-Remodel

Giroux Glass. (2020, June 10). Chemosphere. https://girouxglass.com/project/chemosphere/

John Lautner Foundation. (2011, May 10). The purpose of architecture. http://www.johnlautner.org/wp/?p=710

Lifson, E. (2011, December 3). Nature and design meet in Lautner’s modern homes. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/12/03/143053176/nature-and-design-meet-in-lautners-modern-homes

McDonnell, E. (2015, May 20). Meet George Jetson. LMU Magazine. https://magazine.lmu.edu/articles/meet-george-jetson/

Mejía, P. (2024, November 8). Murder in the flying saucer: Inside a notorious Calif. home. SFGATE. https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/flying-saucer-building-la-famous-midcentury-modern-19863744.php

Timberg, S. (2011, July 23). Landmark houses: John Lautner’s Chemosphere. Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-landmark-houses-john-lautner-chemosphere,0,2280421.htmlstory