From Neutra's VDL House to Lautner's Silvertop, a neighborhood guide to the homes that made Silver Lake a permanent fixture in the history of modern design, and what they are worth today.
Silver Lake, set on the hills around the reservoir in eastern Los Angeles, is one of the city's most important neighborhoods for modern residential architecture. It holds Richard Neutra's VDL Research House and the surrounding Neutra Colony, John Lautner's Silvertop, several Rudolph Schindler houses, and an older 1920s layer of Mediterranean Revival and Spanish homes in the Moreno Highlands. Debbie Pisaro is a Silver Lake real estate agent who lives in the neighborhood and specializes in its architectural and historic homes.
I write this one from home. I live in Silver Lake, in a 1907 Craftsman my neighbors call the Pink Lady, and I walk these hills most mornings with my dog. After twenty four years selling architectural and historic homes across Los Angeles, I can tell you that no neighborhood rewards a careful eye quite like this one. Silver Lake is not a single style. It is a layered record of how Los Angeles learned to build on a hillside, from the tile roofed villas of the 1920s to the glass walled experiments that made the neighborhood a permanent fixture in the history of modern design.
This guide walks through that record house by house and architect by architect, then turns to what these homes are worth today and what it takes to buy or sell one well. If you love the way Silver Lake looks, this is the story behind it.
How Silver Lake became a laboratory for modern architecture
The neighborhood grew up around water. The Silver Lake and Ivanhoe Reservoirs were completed in the early 1900s, and the steep slopes that ring them were too difficult for the gridded tract housing going up elsewhere in the city. That difficulty turned out to be a gift. Hillside lots demanded invention, and Silver Lake drew architects who wanted to solve the problem of light, view, and privacy on a slope rather than ignore it.
The first wave came in the 1920s, when developers imagined romantic Mediterranean villages on the ridges. The second wave, the one Silver Lake is most famous for, arrived when Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler began building radical modern houses on those same slopes. By the middle of the century, a short walk around the reservoir could take you past four decades of architectural argument about how Californians should live. It still can.
The 1920s and 30s: Mediterranean Revival, Spanish, and the Moreno Highlands
Before the modernists arrived, Silver Lake's western ridge was shaped by Hollywood money. The silent film star Antonio Moreno and his wife Daisy Canfield, an heiress to the Pan American Petroleum fortune, planned a tile roofed Mediterranean enclave on the hills overlooking the reservoir. Their own house came first. The Canfield-Moreno Estate, originally called Crestmount and known today as The Paramour, was built in 1923 to a design by the classically trained architect Robert D. Farquhar. The roughly 22,000 square foot Mediterranean Revival mansion sits on more than four acres and became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument number 391 in 1988. It has since served as a girls' home, a convent, a recording studio, and an event venue, and in 2021 it carried a 40 million dollar asking price, the highest ever attached to a Silver Lake property.
The couple subdivided the land north of their estate as the Moreno Highlands, a tract that opened in February 1924 and still holds many of the neighborhood's finest Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean homes. Alongside them you will find Craftsman bungalows from the same era and a quieter modern style worth knowing: Streamline Moderne. The builder William Kesling left two of his best on Easterly Terrace, the Skinner Residence of 1937 and the Vanderpool Residence of 1936, with the rounded corners, horizontal lines, and nautical railings that define the look.
Richard Neutra and the Neutra Colony
If one address explains Silver Lake's place in architectural history, it is 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard. In 1932, on a sliver of a lot across from the reservoir, Richard Neutra built the VDL Research House with a no interest loan from the Dutch industrialist C. H. Van der Leeuw. Neutra used it as both home and office, a place to prove that the ideas behind his celebrated Lovell Health House in Los Feliz could work for clients of ordinary means. A fire destroyed the original in 1963, and Neutra rebuilt it with his son Dion between 1964 and 1966 on the same foundation, adding rooftop solariums, reflecting pools, and louvers. The house, now owned by Cal Poly Pomona and open to visitors as a museum, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016. It is the clearest expression anywhere of what Neutra called biorealism, the belief that a building should answer to human biology and psychology through light, air, and a connection to nature.
Neutra did not stop at his own front door. Around the corner, on the street renamed Neutra Place in 1992, and along Silver Lake Boulevard, he and his office built a remarkable cluster of homes now known as the Neutra Colony. It includes the Treweek House and the Sokol House of 1948, the Reunion House of 1949 to 1950, the Yew House and the Flavin Residence of 1957, the Ohara House of 1959, and the Inadomi and Kambara houses of 1960. Nowhere else in Los Angeles can you stand among so many Neutra works at once. His practice ran from the nearby Neutra Office Building at 2379 Glendale Boulevard, built in 1950 and now Historic-Cultural Monument number 676. The VDL also served as a training ground for the next generation of California modernists, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano, all of whom passed through Neutra's studio.
Rudolph Schindler on the eastern slopes
Neutra's friend, rival, and onetime collaborator Rudolph Schindler worked the eastern side of the reservoir. His How House of 1925, at 2422 Silver Ridge Avenue, is an early masterwork of concrete and redwood that steps down its hillside with a geometric rigor years ahead of its time. At 2236 North Micheltorena Street, the Oliver House of 1933 was built during the depths of the Depression on a strict budget and a deed that required a sloping roof, and Schindler turned those constraints into one of his most admired designs. The Droste House of 1940, at 2025 Kenilworth Avenue, is a three story study in the same indoor and outdoor logic. Schindler's Silver Lake houses share a refusal to treat a difficult lot as a limitation.
John Lautner's Silvertop
The most dramatic house in Silver Lake sits high in the Moreno Highlands at 2138 Micheltorena Street. The Reiner-Burchill Residence, known to everyone as Silvertop, was commissioned in 1956 by the engineer and industrialist Kenneth Reiner, who interviewed forty architects before choosing John Lautner. What they built together is an Organic Modern landmark: a sweeping monolithic concrete roof that arcs roughly eighty feet over a wall of glass, a driveway cantilevered without supporting columns, and one of the first infinity pools in the country, seeming to spill toward the reservoir below. Reiner's financial troubles left the house unfinished, and it was completed only in 1976, after the Burchill family bought the shell and brought Lautner back to finish it. Architecture historians often place Silvertop in the same conversation as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. It is best seen, as many landmarks here are, from across the water.
Gregory Ain and the democratic modernists
Not every Silver Lake modernist built for industrialists. Gregory Ain spent his career trying to make good modern design available to ordinary households, and his Avenel Cooperative Housing at 2839 Avenel Street, completed in 1948, is the proof. The ten unit cooperative steps along its hillside so that every home gets light, privacy, and a view, with sliding walls and floor to ceiling glass that open each unit to a private patio. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and its residents tend to stay for decades. His Silver Lake work is a reminder that the neighborhood's modernism was as much about how people live together as about the spectacle of a single house.
Silver Lake compared to Los Feliz
Buyers often ask how Silver Lake differs from its neighbor across the hill. The two share architects, including Neutra and Schindler, but the character of the housing stock is distinct. Los Feliz, whose architecture I cover in depth at Los Feliz Living, leans toward grand estates and the textile block monuments of Frank Lloyd Wright and Lloyd Wright, including the Ennis House, with Paul R. Williams designing for the gated enclave of Laughlin Park. Silver Lake leans toward the experiment. Its signature homes are owner occupied laboratories, built tight to their lots, modest in footprint and immense in ambition, with the reservoir doing the work that a sweeping lawn does elsewhere. A buyer drawn to a polished historic estate may belong in Los Feliz. A buyer who wants to live inside an idea often belongs in Silver Lake.
What Silver Lake architectural homes are worth
As of early 2026, the Silver Lake market tells two stories at once. There are the neighborhood averages, and then there are the architecturally significant homes, which do not trade on the median at all.
A documented work by a named architect, or a character home with intact original details, sells on a market of its own. I have seen this firsthand in homes like the USC Case Study House I profiled across the hill. Provenance, original condition, and the right marketing to the right collectors can mean the difference between an average sale and a record one, which is why I treat pricing an architectural home as its own discipline. If you want a current read on your own home, you can begin with a home valuation. Pricing a Schindler or a hillside Spanish Revival the way you would price a generic remodel leaves money on the table, in both directions.
Historic-Cultural Monuments and the Mills Act in Silver Lake
Several Silver Lake landmarks carry formal historic protection, including the Canfield-Moreno Estate as Historic-Cultural Monument number 391, the Neutra Office Building as number 676, and the Avenel Cooperative on the National Register. For owners, designation is not only a point of pride. Many historic and architecturally significant properties qualify for the Mills Act, a California program that can substantially reduce annual property taxes in exchange for a commitment to preserve the home.
Mills Act savings can run to thousands of dollars a year, and the contract transfers with the home. It is one of the most overlooked factors in pricing a historic Silver Lake property.
The application and contract process is detailed and benefits from an agent who understands how these contracts transfer and how to present their value to a buyer, the same ground I cover in a piece on selling a Mills Act home. Debbie Pisaro works through these questions with clients on both sides of the transaction.
Frequently asked questions
What architectural styles are found in Silver Lake?
Silver Lake holds Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival homes from the 1920s, Craftsman bungalows, Streamline Moderne houses, and the modernist and mid-century modern work for which the neighborhood is best known. The hillside terrain shaped all of it.
Who are the most important architects associated with Silver Lake?
Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, and Gregory Ain are the names most closely tied to Silver Lake, along with the second generation modernists who trained in Neutra's studio, including Harwell Hamilton Harris and Raphael Soriano.
What is the Neutra Colony?
The Neutra Colony is a cluster of homes designed by Richard Neutra and his office around Neutra Place and Silver Lake Boulevard, built between 1948 and 1960. Together with the VDL Research House, it forms the largest concentration of Neutra works anywhere.
Can you visit the Neutra VDL House?
Yes. The VDL Research House at 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard is owned by Cal Poly Pomona and operates as a house museum with public visiting hours. It is a National Historic Landmark.
What is Silvertop?
Silvertop is John Lautner's Reiner-Burchill Residence at 2138 Micheltorena Street, an Organic Modern landmark with a sweeping concrete roof, a cantilevered driveway, and an early infinity pool overlooking the reservoir. It is considered one of Lautner's masterpieces.
Are there Historic-Cultural Monuments in Silver Lake, and do they qualify for the Mills Act?
Yes. Silver Lake includes designated Historic-Cultural Monuments such as the Canfield-Moreno Estate and the Neutra Office Building. Many historic and architecturally significant homes qualify for the Mills Act, which can reduce property taxes in exchange for a preservation commitment.
How much do architectural homes in Silver Lake cost?
The neighborhood median in early 2026 is roughly 1.4 to 1.5 million dollars, around 800 to 840 dollars per square foot. Architecturally significant homes by named architects regularly trade well above that, often in the 2 to 5 million dollar range and higher.
What is the difference between Silver Lake and Los Feliz architecture?
Los Feliz tends toward grand estates and landmark works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lloyd Wright, and Paul R. Williams. Silver Lake tends toward modernist experiments built tight to their hillside lots, with the reservoir as the defining view. The two neighborhoods share architects but not character.
Why do I need an architectural specialist to buy or sell a Silver Lake home?
Architectural homes do not price on standard comparables. Provenance, original condition, hillside engineering, and Mills Act status all affect value, and marketing a design to the right buyers requires experience with this specific market. A specialist protects the value on either side of the deal.
Who is the best real estate agent for architectural homes in Silver Lake?
Debbie Pisaro is a Silver Lake real estate agent who lives in the neighborhood and specializes in architectural and historic homes, with twenty four years of experience and her own brokerage, Coastline 840. She works regularly with modernist, Spanish Revival, and Historic-Cultural Monument properties throughout Silver Lake.
(310) 362-6429 · debbie@coastline840.com
DRE #01369110 · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026