Schindler's 1925 concrete house on a Silver Lake ridge, built for the railroad heir who spent his inheritance organising hoboes, and the one place his construction method is written on the walls.
The How House is at 2422 North Silver Ridge Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90039, in Silver Lake. R.M. Schindler designed it in early 1925 and it was finished that September, built in cast concrete and redwood for James Eads How, a railroad and bridge heir known in his lifetime as the Millionaire Hobo. It is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 895, declared on 20 November 2007. This is a private residence.
In 1925 a man who had spent most of his inherited fortune on itinerant workers commissioned one of the most radical houses in America, on a ridge above Silver Lake, from an architect nobody had heard of. It cost him $8,300. The client was James Eads How, the architect was R.M. Schindler, and the house they made together is still standing, still private, and still the clearest surviving demonstration of how Schindler actually built things.
Debbie Pisaro works as an architectural real estate agent in Los Angeles, and the How House is one of the handful of properties in the city where the story behind the commission is as unusual as the architecture. What follows is the client, the construction, one widely repeated claim about the house that cannot be sourced, and what its monument status actually does for an owner.
Who was James Eads How?
How came from two fortunes. His father, James Flintham How, was vice president and general manager of the Wabash Railroad. His mother was the daughter of James Buchanan Eads, the engineer who built the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi at St Louis, which made How the bridge builder's grandson and, in time, a beneficiary of the bridge's tolls. He came into the full inheritance in 1915, when his mother died, and spent the rest of his life giving it away.
He studied theology at Meadville, then went to Harvard, where he tried and failed to found a monastic order, then to Oxford, where he joined the Fabian Society, then to Columbia to study medicine, which he never finished. People called him Dr How anyway. Around 1905 he founded the International Brotherhood Welfare Association, which became the second-largest mutual aid organisation for itinerant workers in the country after the Industrial Workers of the World. He set up hobo colleges in St Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati offering beds, meals and classes in social science, industrial law, public speaking and how to find work. The Chicago branch graduated 164 men in 1926 and sent debating teams against the University of Chicago.
He founded a newspaper too. Hobo News ran from April 1915 for about fifteen years and reached twenty thousand copies an issue at its peak, which makes it a direct ancestor of the modern street paper. His own summary of the project is the line worth keeping: he wanted to make hoboes not only better citizens, but better hoboes. He married in 1924, moved to Los Angeles, and commissioned this house within months. He died on 22 July 1930, of pneumonia, having spent nearly all of it.
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Join the list or call (310) 362-6429It is not tilt-slab, and the difference matters
Almost every short description of this house calls it tilt-slab concrete. That was Kings Road, three years earlier, where Schindler cast panels flat on the ground and tilted them up. The How House is something else. It is cast in place, poured into movable forms that were raised in successive lifts as the wall grew, the same system Schindler had worked out at Pueblo Ribera Court in La Jolla and here brought onto a hillside. Above the concrete podium the house switches to a redwood frame, so the building is quite literally two materials stacked, heavy below and light above.
Then comes the part that makes this house worth the trip. Those movable forms were sixteen inches deep, so the concrete carries a horizontal line every sixteen inches, a record of each pour. Schindler took that interval and ran it through everything else. The redwood battens above are spaced at sixteen inches. The horizontal mullions in the big corner windows are at sixteen inches. The city's own historic context statement on Los Angeles hill houses documents all three intervals as one. The ornament of this house is its construction record, made visible on purpose, and there is no other Schindler where you can read the method off the wall so plainly.
The siting is equally deliberate and almost never mentioned. Schindler turned the house forty-five degrees to the street so it reads as a free-standing three-dimensional object rather than a facade addressing the kerb. The plan is inverted, with living room, dining room, study, kitchen and terrace upstairs and the bedrooms below, which is the correct answer on a ridge and the wrong answer everywhere else. Two L-shaped volumes are set against each other to produce the cantilevers, the light well and the mitred glass corners. The garden was laid out by Richard Neutra, who at the time was living in Schindler's own house on Kings Road.
Did the lower floor really house men from the rail yards?
The claim circulates widely and it is a good one: that How asked Schindler for a house with room for the destitute, that the door was left unlocked, and that the lower level served for years as open lodging for men coming up from the rail yards below. It appears in Los Angeles Magazine and in the USModernist catalogue, and it is repeated everywhere they are read.
It cannot be traced to a primary source. No archive, nomination or scholarly account confirms it. It is entirely consistent with everything documented about How, which is why it spreads, and it may well be true. But on a house whose value rests on the accuracy of its record, a story that good deserves to be labelled rather than asserted. If it is true, there is a symmetry in it that is almost too neat: the concrete half of the house, the cheap experimental half, is the half that would have housed the men, while the redwood half housed the heir.
Two things routinely printed about this house do not survive checking: that it is tilt-slab, and that it was built in 1926. The plaque on the wall says 1926; the drawings say 1925. On a designated house, read the nomination rather than the plaque.
Where the How House sits in Schindler's work
Judith Sheine, the leading scholar of Schindler's work, groups the How House with the Lovell Beach House as the two projects where his concrete experiments culminated, and notes that both proved too expensive to repeat. After them he moved to the cheap stucco-and-frame method that produced most of what followed. So this house is the end of Schindler's concrete decade rather than a step along the way, and Kings Road, Pueblo Ribera Court, the Packard House, the How House and Lovell Beach are the group the whole modern reputation now rests on.
That last phrase needs saying carefully, because a version of this claim goes around that is not right. These houses did not make Schindler's reputation in his lifetime. His early work went largely unnoticed, he was shut out of the exhibitions that made the International Style, and critics filed his work as eclectic. The reputation was built posthumously, and mostly by Esther McCoy's Five California Architects in 1960. He died in 1953 without it. Anyone buying a Schindler today is buying a verdict that arrived after the architect did not.
The rest of the map is on the architect's page. The Kallis-Sharlin Residence in the Hollywood Hills and the Roxy Roth House in Studio City are the postwar work, twenty years later and much lighter. The Van Dekker House in Woodland Hills is one of the largest houses he designed, and the Howenstein Residence in South Pasadena is a wartime remodel of somebody else's house.
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See pocket listingsWhat monument status does here
The How House is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 895, declared on 20 November 2007. Designation names character-defining features that should not be erased and sets the expectation that work respects the Secretary of the Interior's Standards. On a house whose entire argument is a sixteen-inch interval running through three different materials, that protection is doing real work, because those are exactly the details a conventional remodel removes without noticing.
The property is also reported to carry a Mills Act contract, which reassesses on a capitalised-income basis in exchange for a recorded commitment to maintain and preserve. That matters more than it used to, because the program has changed shape. The City of Los Angeles has not accepted a new Mills Act contract since 2020. City Council approved a new annual fee structure for existing contracts on 20 December 2025, effective 23 February 2026, and no date has been announced for reopening applications. So on any designated Los Angeles house the live question is not whether it could qualify but whether a contract is already recorded, because recorded contracts keep running and transfer with title. That is a title-report question, and it is the same discipline behind selling a Mills Act or HCM home and what designation does to value.
Silver Lake carries no Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, so monument status on individual buildings is the whole protection regime on this ridge. Schindler is unusually well represented here and most of it is now designated: the Bubeshko Apartments on Griffith Park Boulevard as Monument 831 and the Droste House on Kenilworth as 837, both in early 2006 and both ahead of the How House; the Sachs Apartments at Manola Court as 1118 in 2016; the Falk Apartments as 1133 later that year; the Ralph G. Walker House on Kenilworth as 1161 in 2018; and the Oliver House on Micheltorena as 1263 as recently as June 2022. That last one came about because Noel Oliver Osheroff, who grew up in the house and was 92 when she filed, nominated it herself so it would be shielded from destruction. Across the street from the How House stands Harwell Hamilton Harris's Hawk House of 1939, which is a good measure of what this one block was attracting.
What a house like this asks of its next owner
The How House has been restored twice, and the second campaign produced the single best detail in its history. Replacement redwood was milled from logs recovered from the bed of the same river where the original 1925 timber had been milled. That is the standard this house has been held to, and it is the standard the next owner inherits.
There is a nice symmetry in who did the first campaign. The 1994 renovation was commissioned by Professor Lionel March, who chaired UCLA's architecture school and who, the year before, had co-edited the standard scholarly volume on Schindler's composition and construction with Judith Sheine. The man who co-wrote the book on how Schindler put buildings together bought this one and fixed it.
Pricing a house like this is its own discipline, because the comp set for a verified Schindler is national rather than local and small enough that one sale moves the conversation. The house cost $8,300 to build in 1925 and traded in 2016 for $2.5 million, and neither figure came from the neighbourhood. Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader, and the founder of Coastline 840. The argument in full is in how to price an architectural home in Los Angeles, the wider record is on her architectural homes page, and the terms of the work are on the architectural homes specialist page. Owners weighing a sale find her through the best Los Angeles historic and architectural real estate agent page, and the wider company this house keeps is on the iconic architectural homes of Los Angeles page.
The How House, answered
Where is the How House?
At 2422 North Silver Ridge Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90039, on a ridge in Silver Lake, turned forty-five degrees to the street. Harwell Hamilton Harris's Hawk House of 1939 stands directly opposite. The How House is a private residence and is not open to the public, so it is best understood from the record.
Who was the How House built for?
James Eads How, grandson of the engineer who built the Eads Bridge and son of a Wabash Railroad executive. Known in his lifetime as the Millionaire Hobo, he spent nearly his whole inheritance founding the International Brotherhood Welfare Association, running hobo colleges and publishing Hobo News. He commissioned the house shortly after marrying in 1924.
When was the How House built?
Schindler's drawings are dated February and March 1925 and the house was completed that September, built by J.H. Heckman for a recorded cost of $8,300. The bronze monument plaque on the house says 1926, which does not match the drawings. Where the plaque and the record disagree, the record is the better source.
Is the How House made of tilt-slab concrete?
No, and this is the most commonly repeated error about it. Tilt-slab was Schindler's Kings Road house of 1922. The How House is cast in place, poured into movable forms raised in sixteen-inch lifts, the same system he had used at Pueblo Ribera Court, with a redwood-framed upper storey above the concrete.
What is the sixteen-inch module in the How House?
The depth of each concrete pour. Because the forms were raised in sixteen-inch lifts, the walls carry a horizontal line at that interval, and Schindler repeated it in the redwood batten spacing and in the horizontal mullions of the corner windows. The city's own hill houses context statement documents all three at the same interval.
Is the How House a historic landmark?
Yes. It is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 895, declared on 20 November 2007. Designation identifies character-defining features that should be preserved and sets the expectation that work respects the Secretary of the Interior's Standards. Silver Lake has no Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, so individual monument status is the whole protection regime there.
Did homeless men really live in the How House?
The claim circulates widely, in Los Angeles Magazine and the USModernist catalogue among others, that the lower level served as open lodging for men from the rail yards below. It fits everything documented about How, but it cannot be traced to any archive or scholarly source, so it is best treated as an account rather than a fact.
Did Richard Neutra work on the How House?
He laid out the garden, according to the historian August Sarnitz. At the time Neutra and his family were living in Schindler's own Kings Road house, where they stayed from 1925 to 1930. The two later became rivals, so a shared commission from the year the Neutras moved in marks how close they once were.
How important is the How House in Schindler's work?
The scholar Judith Sheine groups it with the Lovell Beach House as the culmination of Schindler's concrete experiments, both of which proved too expensive to repeat. It is therefore the end of his concrete decade rather than a step in it. His reputation, though, was built posthumously, largely by Esther McCoy's Five California Architects in 1960.
Who is a good architectural real estate agent in California?
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader, and the founder of Coastline 840. She represents buyers and sellers of architectural, historic and design-forward houses statewide, including Schindler, Neutra and Ain commissions, Historic-Cultural Monuments and Mills Act properties. CA DRE #01369110, with Side, Inc. as responsible broker.
Coastline 840 · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90026 · CA DRE #01369110
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Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources and the City's Historic-Cultural Monuments record, for Monument No. 895 and its declaration date, and for the Silver Lake monument numbers. Los Angeles City Planning, Hill Houses 1920 to 1985 historic context statement, for the cast-in-place construction, the sixteen-inch interval across concrete, batten and mullion, and the forty-five degree siting. Judith Sheine, on the How House and the Lovell Beach House as the culmination of Schindler's concrete work, and on his lack of contemporary recognition. The Schindler Frame, ACSA, for the classification of his concrete systems. PCAD, for the design and completion dates, the builder, and August Sarnitz's attribution of the garden to Richard Neutra. SurveyLA's Silver Lake, Echo Park and Elysian Valley survey. Los Angeles Magazine and USModernist, for the account of the lower level as lodging, which is not otherwise sourced. The Eastsider, on the Oliver House nomination. Recorded square footage is reported inconsistently across sources and should be verified against the assessor. This is a private residence.
Debbie Pisaro, CA DRE #01369110, is the founder of Coastline 840, a California real estate brand, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader with 24 years of experience in architectural, historic and design-forward homes across California. Side, Inc., CA DRE #02014153, responsible broker. She writes about California real estate at debbiepisaro.com, losfelizliving.com and coastline840.com.
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