A Santa Monica Home by Master Modernist Pierre Koenig Is Selling for $4.6 M.

An architectural head turner, the last project to be completed during the lifetime of innovative and influential modernist architect Pierre Koenig, the Schwartz House in Santa Monica, California, is on the market at $4.55 million. The listing is held by Brian Linder at Compass.

The not-quite-2,400-square-foot home was commissioned in the early 1990s by Martin Schwartz and his partner, Melrose Cunanan-Schwartz. They asked Koenig, best known for designing two of the most photographed homes in the world—Case Study House #21 (The Bailey House) and Case Study House #22 (The Stahl House), for a two-bedroom house with privacy from the street and good cross ventilation. 

They certainly got that, and much more. Completed in 1994, the experimental design has the home held aloft by four structural steel columns to minimize the structure’s impact on the site. It is rotated 30 degrees on the rectangular parcel to harness southern light and capture ocean breezes for cooling the home on warm days.

In addition to the three-bedroom and two-and-a-half-bath main house, which sits back from the tree-lined street atop a two-car garage, there’s an almost hidden one-bedroom/one-bath guest suite that has its own private entrance. Opaque glass fencing and balcony railings enhance privacy all around the house.

The industrial exterior, a boxy, geometric assemblage of black steel, galvanized wall panels, and aluminum-trimmed windows, belies the light, bright open-plan interiors that feature honey-toned hardwoods and cottony white walls. Finishes are elegantly simple, and vast expanses of glass slide open to a series of triangular balconies. A jolt of color in the otherwise neutral-toned home is provided in the taxicab yellow spiral staircase housed in an opaque glass tower.

Tucked behind the garage, the partially subterranean guest suite’s walls of glass slide open to expose the two-room suite to sunken terraces. The seller, a German-born bicycling entrepreneur, uses the flexible space as a home office and a gym. Behind the house, accessible from a glass slider just off the kitchen, the backyard comprises a small patio of concrete pavers set in pea gravel amid native plantings.

Linder says that “because there have only been two owners, who took the architecture seriously, the home is in original condition, except where removal and replacement were necessary to restore certain finishes to their original condition.” Sensitive and recent updates include refinishing the floors, a new roof, and all new kitchen appliances.