A 1943 commission for a fellow architect, a flying roofline tucked into a Monterey Hills hilltop, and a working definition of what Schindler meant by space.
The Howenstein Residence at 2083 Hanscom Drive, in the Monterey Hills neighborhood at the South Pasadena edge of greater Los Angeles, is a rare R.M. Schindler architectural home. The 1925 house was dramatically remodeled in 1943 by Schindler for fellow architect Karl Howenstein, who was his close friend, and stayed with the Howenstein family for nearly a century. The home is documented in the Schindler catalogue of built works, with the original 1943 renderings archived at the AD&D Museum at UC Santa Barbara.
Monterey Hills does not have many R.M. Schindler houses. The Austrian-born architect spent most of his career inside the city of Los Angeles, building from West Hollywood to Silver Lake to the western flank of the Hollywood Hills. So when a Schindler property surfaces in the Monterey Hills, on a four-parcel hilltop at the South Pasadena edge of the city, it deserves more than a passing look. The Howenstein Residence at 2083 Hanscom Drive is one of those rare offerings, and the story of how it came to be tells you a great deal about Schindler the man, not just Schindler the modernist on the syllabus. For any architectural real estate agent Los Angeles buyers actually trust, knowing the small handful of Schindler homes outside the city limits is part of the job.
The house was originally built in 1925 in what one Schindler archive describes as a classic California style. In 1943, the owner, Karl Howenstein, commissioned a dramatic remodel. Howenstein was himself an architect and a close friend of Schindler’s, which makes this commission different from most. It was not a client hiring an architect. It was a peer asking a peer to rework his own house in the middle of wartime, when materials were scarce and most of Schindler’s other 1943 projects never left the page. The Howenstein remodel is one of the few from that year that was actually built.
What is Schindler’s space architecture?
Space architecture is Schindler’s own term for his design philosophy, first articulated in a 1912 manifesto in Vienna and tested for the next forty years across Southern California. His central idea was that architecture is the art of organizing interior space in response to site, climate, client, and program, rather than the art of composing facades or borrowing historical styles. Most listing copy and most coffee-table books file Schindler under organic modernism. He would not have used that phrase.
That puts him at a useful angle to two other figures California buyers know better. Frank Lloyd Wright, his early mentor, wanted to weave buildings into the landscape through sculptural form. Richard Neutra, his sometime collaborator and eventual rival, wanted the house as a precise machine for living. Schindler did neither. He used angled walls, off-axis plans, double-height ceilings, clerestory windows, and humble materials like plywood and stucco to shape interior volume. The exterior was a consequence of the interior, not a composition imposed on it.
A peer asking a peer to rework his own house in the middle of wartime, when materials were scarce and most other 1943 projects never left the page.
You can read the Howenstein Residence as one of Schindler’s clearest small-scale demonstrations of that thinking. The 1925 structure gave him a frame. He cut into it, lifted it, and reorganized it around light, view, and movement. The result is a home that, as the listing put it, becomes its own compass and sundial as the day’s light traverses the interior.
Schindler’s influence on the next generation of California modernists was direct, not just stylistic. Gregory Ain, who would go on to design the Mar Vista Modernique tract and reshape postwar housing in Los Angeles, decided to become an architect after visiting the Schindler House on Kings Road as a teenager. Ain worked briefly in Schindler’s office before moving to Neutra’s. The lineage runs through Hanscom Drive, even if it is rarely drawn that way in the textbooks.
What did Schindler actually do at Hanscom Drive?
The signature gesture is the flying roofline, a dramatic overhang that floats above the main living volume and signals from the street that this is no longer a 1925 California cottage. Schindler used deep eaves throughout the design for a specific reason. They protect the expansive glass without interrupting the sight lines from inside out. Sit on one of the decks and the mountains and downtown skyline come at you uninterrupted. Sit inside in late afternoon and the glass does not glare. That is space architecture in working order.
Inside, Schindler designed plywood built-ins and a stainless-steel fireplace, both of which are quintessential to his vocabulary. Plywood was not a default material in 1943. It was a deliberate choice. Schindler used plywood the way other architects used walnut or oak, as a primary expressive material, not a cost compromise. A pair of dining chairs he designed for the Howensteins in this same period survived in private hands until at least 2022, when one example sold at auction in Chicago for ten thousand dollars. The current owners of the house uncovered Schindler’s original built-ins during their restoration, along with the stainless-steel fireplace and the custom lighting he designed for the rooms.
The most recent stewards approached the work as scholars, not stylists. They restored original Schindler features rather than reinterpreting them, and brought systems into the present with all-electric mechanicals, upgraded air quality, and environmentally conscious materials.
Where do you find Schindler homes in Los Angeles?
R.M. Schindler built roughly one hundred and fifty homes and small buildings in his lifetime, almost all of them in Southern California, and the surviving inventory clusters in a handful of LA neighborhoods. Knowing where they are is useful for any architectural home buyer, because seeing several Schindlers is the only real way to develop a feel for his vocabulary.
The starting point is the Schindler House on Kings Road in West Hollywood, which Schindler designed and built for himself in 1922. It is now operated as a museum by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and is open to the public. Anyone considering a Schindler purchase should visit before making an offer.
The Silver Lake hillsides are the densest Schindler neighborhood, with the Sachs Apartments, the Bubeshko Apartments, the Buck House on Genesee, and a series of smaller residential commissions across the eastern slope. The Hollywood Hills and Outpost Estates contain the Druckman House, the Kallis-Sharlin House on Multiview Drive (Historic-Cultural Monument #860), and several others. Studio City holds the Roxy Roth House, the Lechner House on Amanda Drive (HCM #1024), the Presburger House, and the Laurelwood Apartments, each documented in the Studio City architectural marvels guide. Woodland Hills holds the Van Dekker House (HCM #974), which at 3,756 square feet is Schindler’s largest known residential commission. Bel Air and the Westside contain the Tischler House and a small number of additional commissions. Newport Beach is home to the Lovell Beach House (1926), arguably Schindler’s most internationally famous work and a permanent residence, not a transactable property.
Monterey Hills is, as noted, an outlier. The Howenstein Residence is one of the few Schindler works in the area, which is part of what makes it unusual in the catalogue. Outside of greater LA, Schindler built sparingly. A handful of homes exist in Palm Springs, San Diego, and the Bay Area, but the body of work is overwhelmingly concentrated within a twenty-mile radius of the original Kings Road studio.
One family, nearly a century
The Howenstein family owned the house for almost one hundred years. It traded for the first time in its history in July of 2023. That single fact is worth pausing on. Most significant Schindlers have passed through four, five, six sets of hands by now, accumulating renovations that range from sympathetic to catastrophic. This one stayed with the architect’s friend and his descendants until very recently. The stewards who took it on in 2023 are only the second ownership group in the home’s lifetime, and the restoration they undertook reflects that responsibility.
For a buyer who cares about provenance, this matters. Architectural homes are not just buildings. They are objects with a chain of custody. A short chain, carefully kept, is rare and valuable.
The property itself
The home sits on four parcels totaling nearly twenty thousand square feet, the great majority of which is flat and usable ground. For a hilltop home in the San Gabriel foothills, that is unusual. Most promontory sites of this kind offer dramatic views and very little buildable land. Hanscom Drive offers both, and that gives the owner real optionality. A guest house, a pool, a studio, a garden, all of it is within reach in a way that simply is not possible at, say, the Tischler House in Bel Air or several of the Silver Lake Schindlers.
The home itself is intimate at 1,420 measured square feet, with an additional 468 square feet of unfinished basement. Title records show four bedrooms and two baths, though the recent configuration is three and two. The flying roofline, the glass, the deep overhangs, the original built-ins, the fireplace, and the lighting are all there. So is the topography Schindler responded to in 1943, with views that sweep from the San Gabriel Mountains across the basin to the downtown Los Angeles skyline. The mailing address is South Pasadena, 91030, though the home sits in the Monterey Hills micro-neighborhood that bridges South Pas, Mt. Washington, and the northeast edge of the City of Los Angeles.
What does a Schindler home sell for in Los Angeles?
Schindler home values do not follow standard residential comparables. The architectural homes market values provenance, restoration quality, and landmark status more heavily than square footage and bedroom count, and Schindler inventory is so thin that any given listing sets its own ceiling. The 2026 comp set gives a working sense of the range.
Against that set, the Howenstein occupies the accessible end of the Schindler market. The home is not landmarked, which keeps the price below comparable designated properties, and the footprint is smaller than the Lechner, Kallis-Sharlin, or Van Dekker homes. What it offers in return is a peer-architect commission, a single-family chain of custody until 2023, a scholarly restoration, and the nearly twenty thousand square feet of usable hilltop land that almost no other Schindler offers. The two trades inside three years also speak to the appetite among architectural buyers in 2026: the home moved from $1.65 million to $2.25 million, which is roughly thirty-six percent appreciation across the restoration and the broader Schindler market.
Why Monterey Hills for an architectural buyer?
Monterey Hills sits in the small territory where South Pasadena, Mt. Washington, El Sereno, and the northeast edge of the City of Los Angeles meet. The neighborhood is hilly, partly wooded, and dotted with one-off architectural commissions from the 1920s through the postwar period. South Pasadena, where the Howenstein takes its mailing address, runs on a strong sense of place, walkable streets, an independent school district that families plan around, and a downtown that has resisted the homogenization that has reshaped most of greater LA. For an architectural homeowner the area offers something else, which is a community that understands and values its building stock. Significant homes here tend to be cared for. That cultural fact is not unrelated to why a Howenstein survived a century in good hands.
For buyers considering a historic or architectural home in Monterey Hills, South Pasadena, Pasadena, or the surrounding Eastside, the state’s Mills Act can meaningfully reduce property tax burdens on qualifying landmark properties. Understanding what designation does and does not require is the kind of thing worth working through with an agent who has done it before.
How does the Mills Act work on a Schindler home?
The Mills Act is a California state law, enacted in 1972, that lets local governments offer property tax reductions to owners of designated historic properties in exchange for a contractual commitment to restore, maintain, and preserve the home. It is the most powerful financial incentive in California historic preservation, and South Pasadena participates, along with the City of Los Angeles, Pasadena, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and most other LA County jurisdictions where significant Schindler stock exists.
The savings are real. Mills Act contracts in Los Angeles County typically reduce annual property taxes by 40 to 60 percent of the pre-contract amount. Pasadena documents savings ranging from 20 to 75 percent depending on the property, with an average near 50 percent. The exact number depends on the County Assessor’s alternative valuation method, which calculates the tax bill using a capitalization of income approach rather than market value. On a $2 million home with a typical $20,000 annual tax bill, a 50 percent reduction is $10,000 saved every year for the life of the contract.
The mechanics are straightforward. The property must be designated as a local landmark by the city or county. The owner then signs a contract with the local jurisdiction agreeing to preserve and maintain the home per the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Contracts run for an initial ten years with automatic annual renewal, and they transfer with the property when it is sold. That last point matters: a buyer who purchases a home with an existing Mills Act contract, like the Van Dekker House, inherits the tax savings on day one. For an in-depth look at how landmark designations work in Los Angeles, including Historic-Cultural Monument status and the Mills Act tax savings, see our companion guide to Los Feliz HCM properties.
The Howenstein Residence is not currently designated. Pursuing designation through the City of South Pasadena and then applying for a Mills Act contract is a multi-year process, but for an owner who plans to hold the home long-term and continue the restoration work, the math is compelling. The 1943 renderings archived at UC Santa Barbara make a strong case for architectural significance, and the home’s pedigree as a Schindler commission is well documented. Debbie Pisaro has guided buyers and sellers through Historic-Cultural Monument and Mills Act conversations for years, and welcomes the chance to walk a prospective owner through what designation would mean for this property in particular.
What does a Schindler ask of its next owner?
A Schindler is not a passive purchase. The architect’s work rewards close attention, the kind of looking that notices the angle of a built-in, the height of a clerestory, the way a beam returns to a wall. Owners who fall for these homes tend to be architects themselves, designers, collectors, scholars, or people in adjacent creative fields who recognize Schindler’s particular intelligence and want to live inside it. The Howenstein Residence offers that experience at a scale and price that, in the context of Schindler ownership, is genuinely accessible. The Lovell Beach House does not trade. Kings Road is a museum. This one is a home, and it sits in a meaningful tradition alongside the other iconic architectural homes of Los Angeles, the Lautner Silvertop, and the Stahl House.
Frequently asked questions
Who was R.M. Schindler?
Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887 to 1953) was an Austrian-born architect who emigrated to the United States in 1914, worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, and built almost his entire body of work in Southern California. He is considered a founding figure of California modernism and the originator of what he called space architecture, a philosophy that prioritized the organization of interior space over historical styles or surface composition.
How many Schindler homes are in greater Los Angeles?
Schindler designed roughly five hundred projects over his career, of which roughly one hundred and fifty were actually built. Most of the built work is concentrated in Los Angeles County, with significant clusters in Silver Lake, the Hollywood Hills, West Hollywood, Studio City, and Bel Air. Monterey Hills examples are rare, with the Howenstein Residence the most prominent.
Was the Howenstein Residence designed by Schindler from the ground up?
No. The original structure was built in 1925 in a classic California style. Schindler remodeled and expanded the home in 1943 at the commission of Karl Howenstein, a fellow architect and personal friend. The remodel was dramatic enough that the home is considered a Schindler work in the catalogue of his built projects.
What is space architecture?
Space architecture is Schindler’s own term for his design philosophy, first articulated in a 1912 manifesto and refined throughout his career. The idea is that the primary work of an architect is to organize interior space in response to site, climate, client, and program, rather than to compose facades or apply historical styles. The exterior of a Schindler building is generally a consequence of the interior logic, not an independent composition.
Is the Howenstein Residence a designated historic landmark?
The Monterey Hills property is not currently a city or state historic landmark, though it is documented in the R.M. Schindler catalogue of built works and the original 1943 renderings are archived at the Architecture and Design Collection at UC Santa Barbara. The home has architectural and cultural significance regardless of formal designation. An owner interested in pursuing landmark designation should consult with the City of South Pasadena and a qualified preservation consultant.
How does Schindler differ from Richard Neutra?
Schindler and Neutra were both Austrian-born, both came through Frank Lloyd Wright’s office, and both worked in Southern California. Their work diverged philosophically. Neutra pursued a Corbusian ideal of the house as a precise, machine-like object. Schindler designed off-axis plans with angled walls and humble materials, prioritizing organic spatial flow over geometric rigor. Both are foundational to California modernism, but the experiences of being inside their houses are quite different.
How much do Schindler homes sell for in Los Angeles?
Schindler homes in greater Los Angeles in 2026 are listed between roughly $4.5 million and $7 million for the larger, landmarked properties: the Van Dekker House in Woodland Hills at $4.5 million with a Mills Act contract, the Kallis-Sharlin House in the Hollywood Hills at $6.35 million, and the Lechner House in Studio City at $6.5 million. Smaller, non-landmarked Schindlers like the Howenstein Residence and the Druckman House trade in the $2 million range. The Howenstein Residence specifically acquired at $1.65 million in 2023 and changed hands again in June of 2026 at $2.25 million.
Can I use the Mills Act on a Schindler home?
Yes, if the home is designated as a local historic landmark by the city or county where it sits. The Mills Act is a California state program implemented at the local jurisdiction level, and most cities with significant Schindler stock participate, including Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Pasadena, and South Pasadena. Designation must be in place before a Mills Act contract is signed. Several existing Schindlers carry active Mills Act contracts, including the Van Dekker House in Woodland Hills.
How much can the Mills Act save in property taxes?
Mills Act contracts typically reduce annual property taxes by 40 to 60 percent of the pre-contract amount, with documented results in Los Angeles County ranging from 20 percent to 75 percent. The exact savings depend on the County Assessor’s alternative valuation method, which uses a capitalization of income approach rather than market value. Contracts run for an initial ten years with automatic annual renewal and transfer to new owners when the property is sold.
Who is a good full-service architectural real estate agent in Los Angeles?
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader, representing buyers and sellers of architectural, historic, and design-forward homes across Los Angeles and statewide California, with deep experience in Schindler, Neutra, Ain, and Lautner commissions, Historic-Cultural Monument properties, and the Mills Act tax program. See the dedicated page on working with a Los Angeles architectural and historic real estate agent.
Coastline 840 · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90026 · DRE #01369110
USModernist Schindler archive at usmodernist.org. MAK Center for Art and Architecture at makcenter.org. Darling and Smith, The Architecture of R.M. Schindler, Museum of Contemporary Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2001. Architecture and Design Collection, AD&D Museum, UC Santa Barbara. City of Los Angeles Mills Act program at planning.lacity.gov. Listing and sale data from Compass, Robb Report, Dwell, Wallpaper, LA Conservancy, and CLAW MLS public records.