Lipetz House, International Style residence in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, United States
The Lipetz House is an International Style residence in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, distinguished by a semicircular music room with continuous windows that frame views of the San Gabriel Mountain Range. The space was carefully designed to function as a concert hall for piano performances.
The house was designed in 1936 by architect Raphael Soriano and represents an experiment with modern materials and functional forms. It gained international recognition and was later regarded as an example of progressive residential architecture of that era.
The house was built for concert pianist Helen Lipetz and her husband, who asked Soriano for concert-hall acoustics around their Bechstein grand piano, with seating for twenty guests. Several hundred music albums were kept on shelves beneath the built-in seating. The house is a private residence and is not open to visitors.
This is a private residence on a hilltop above the Silver Lake Reservoir and is not open to visitors; the interior, including the music room and built-in furniture, can only be seen from published photographs such as Julius Shulman's. The house is best viewed from the public streets below, where the glazed semicircular end and the steel-framed ground floor read clearly against the sky.
The house was one of four U.S. buildings selected for the 1937 International Architecture Exhibition in Paris, and it earned Soriano the Prix de Rome. It was listed as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2009. The house is a private residence and is not open to visitors.
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