Goldstein Tennis Court

A House That Still Refuses to Stand Still

If you’ve spent any time studying Los Angeles architecture, you already know the Sheats-Goldstein House the way a musician knows a particular chord progression — by feel, before you can even name it. John Lautner designed the original structure in 1963, and it remains one of the most arresting residential buildings in the city: a great triangulated concrete roof sheltering a home that seems to grow directly out of the Benedict Canyon hillside rather than sit on top of it. It’s pure Organic Architecture in the lineage that runs from Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright through Lautner himself — the idea that a building should belong to its site as naturally as the geology beneath it.

Owner James Goldstein has spent decades extending that vision, commissioning Nicholson Architects to develop what has become the Sheats-Goldstein Entertainment Complex — a series of additions that expand the property without compromising the original spirit. That’s a harder architectural brief than it sounds. Working in the shadow of Lautner’s legacy, the team at Nicholson Architects has had to think like Lautner without mimicking him, solving new programmatic problems with the same structural boldness and site-specific clarity that defined the original Goldstein House.

The tennis court is the latest chapter in that story, and it may be the most dramatic one yet.

What Makes This Court Different

Let me be direct: this is not a tennis court that happens to have a nice view. This is a piece of Los Angeles architecture that also functions as a tennis court.

The distinction matters. The court is carried on a cantilevered post-tension concrete slab — a structural system that allows the playing surface to project out over the hillside with no intermediate supports interrupting the view corridor below. Post-tension concrete works by threading high-strength steel cables through a concrete slab before the concrete cures, then hydraulically stressing those cables after the pour. The resulting tension locks the slab into compression, dramatically increasing its spanning capability compared to conventionally reinforced concrete. It’s the same principle used in highway overpasses and long-span parking structures, here deployed in service of a private tennis court perched above one of the great urban panoramas in Southern California.

Standing at the baseline, you look out over Century City — those paired towers catching the afternoon light — and beyond them, on a clear day, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The court surface simply terminates at a low parapet, and the city falls away beneath you. The Hollywood Reporter captured this perfectly when they designated it the “infinity tennis court,” borrowing the language we’ve all used to describe edge-less swimming pools and applying it to sport. It’s an apt description. The horizon becomes your fence.

Watching the Slab Come to Life

I had the opportunity to document the construction sequence, including the post-tension slab pour (video) itself. Watching a post-tension pour is one of those construction experiences that reminds you how much intellectual labor goes into what eventually looks effortless. The formwork is elaborate. The cable placement is precise. The concrete placement and finishing have to happen in a coordinated sequence because once the mix begins to set, your window for correction closes fast.

After the concrete reached sufficient strength, the stressing operation began — each cable tensioned to a calculated load and then locked off at the slab edge. There’s something almost musical about a cable-stressing sequence: the methodical progression from one anchorage to the next, the hydraulic jack cycling, the engineer checking elongation measurements against the design calculations. When it’s done, the slab that looked like ordinary concrete has been fundamentally transformed. It carries load in a completely different way.

Then came the surface work. I edited a time-lapse of the final finishing phase — the application of the acrylic sport surface in that deep, saturated blue-green, the crisp white line marking, and finally the installation of the net and posts. Watching the court resolve from raw concrete to finished playing surface in the compressed time of a time-lapse makes the transformation feel almost instantaneous. In reality, the sequencing of surface prep, base coats, and finish coats stretched across multiple days, with careful attention to temperature and cure times.

Honoring Lautner Without Imitating Him

What Nicholson Architects has achieved with the Goldstein Entertainment Complex — and with this tennis court specifically — is an extension of architectural thinking rather than a continuation of architectural style. Lautner never built a tennis court on a cantilever above a hillside, but he absolutely would have approached the problem this way: find the structural system that lets the architecture respond to the landscape, and let that response become the design statement.

The infinity tennis court at the Sheats-Goldstein House is, in that sense, a genuinely Lautner-esque object. It belongs to its site. It uses structure expressively. And it frames the view of Los Angeles with the same confident clarity that the original Goldstein House brought to Benedict Canyon more than sixty years ago. For students of Los Angeles architecture — or anyone who cares about what buildings can be when ambition and site and structure align — it’s worth the drive up the hill.

ARCHITECTOID