People in Glass Apartments

A box condo on the beach in Santa Monica with an earthquake crack that ran diagonally across the floor.

A gated two-story stucco palace in the heart of Rampart that looked like a giant pink aquarium castle, where the Polynesian ex-showgirl landlord spent her disability checks on limos every night out to the casinos in Gardena.

A Craftsman cottage up in Laurel Canyon, only 600 yards off the Sunset Strip, where it was so quiet at night that any sound at all was met by a furtive panic that the Manson family had returned.

For the last too many years, I've been in one of those endless '60s-era tract apartments on what might kindly be referred to as the Beachwood Flats. "Below the gates" — the stone arches of Mack Sennett's original Hollywoodland real estate development, for which the Hollywood sign was a mere billboard, and which served as our own private class division — it was the kind of place where, had the Black Dahlia lived, she might have drunk away the last fading years of her pathetic existence.

Such is the writer's life.

Which is why it surprises no one more than me that, for a confluence of reasons I still can't quite successfully diagram on paper, I recently had the opportunity to move to a Neutra apartment. And not just any Neutra apartment, but one of three built by Dion Neutra to append the Reunion House, Richard Neutra's consensus masterpiece on the shores of the Silver Lake reservoir.

Richard Neutra is arguably the definitive purveyor of regional architecture in Southern California. When he arrived in 1923, it was an environment where sudden and emphatic money gave rise to the instant realization of lifelong dreams. This paradigm is best set down in Nathanael West's DayoftheLocust— where "only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon[s]," where "plaster and paper know no law, not even that of gravity" and where the "houses were comic" but one "didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and so guileless." Figures like Neutra, his one-time friend Rudolf Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright offered a stabilizing influence on this fecund aesthetic, even as their high ceilings, open spaces and abundant natural light maximized the area's bounteous natural resources.

The Reunion House anchors a complex of four houses, just off Silver Lake Boulevard, which in the early '90s inspired the city to rechristen the cul-de-sac on which they're located Neutra Place. The home was commissioned in 1950 by a Chicago builder named Arthur Johnson looking to construct a spec house from a pedigreed design. He initially approached Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin, who told him he didn't supervise buildings in the winter. Neutra, then in his late 50s, accepted the commission, autobiographically envisioning it as a home for a retirement-age couple with a bedroom suite at one end and guest rooms for visiting children at the other — hence the name.

"These were to be far enough from the oldsters so they wouldn't bother them," says Dion Neutra, Richard Neutra's son and business partner, who presided over the inspection process his first year out of USC architecture school, and ultimately returned to occupy the house for the last 40 years. In 1963, when a fire destroyed the nearby Research House, the family home since 1932, a realtor noticed that the Reunion House was back on the market. Richard Neutra lived there for two years and then sold it to Dion, just then entering his second marriage. (Richard Neutra died in 1970.)