The Sheats-Goldstein Residence
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| Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Beverly Crest, 1963. Architect: John Lautner. Photo by Joe Fletcher |
The Cave and the Horizon
How the Sheats-Goldstein Residence turns a hillside into a primeval forest, a concrete grotto into a panoramic release — and why the oldest human instinct is the key to Lautner's most complete building.
The property begins before the front door. The long driveway descends from the street toward the motorcourt, where a custom-designed metal gate marks the first threshold — and the pebble-finish concrete beneath your tires is already the same surface you will walk on inside the house. This is a technique Wright wrote about directly: extending the home beyond its walls, connecting it to the earth before you ever step inside. Lautner absorbed that lesson and applied it here with precision. The gate and driveway apron — angled concrete and metal trellis poised above the house as you begin to descend — make the approach architecture, not infrastructure. You are already inside the idea before you park.
From the motorcourt you enter under the carport — open, not a garage; Lautner, like Wright before him, had no patience for rooms built to store junk — then turn left into a hallway that narrows and condenses with each step, a covered passage that takes another turn before revealing the koi pond. You cross over the water to reach the home's entrance. Only then does the space release: the view opens beneath the concrete triangular roof, and the city appears below you like something you earned. The passage from compression to expansion, from cave to horizon, takes several minutes of walking. It is not a sequence that can be photographed. It can only be experienced in the body, one step at a time.
This is the Sheats-Goldstein Residence — John Lautner's most complete building, and the one in which every principle he ever held is visible, working, and alive.
The Philosophy
Cliff Dwellers and Nomads
Lautner did not arrive at architecture through aesthetics. He arrived through a question about human nature — one he asked himself at the very beginning of his career and never stopped asking. What does a human being actually need from a building? Not programmatically, not commercially, but psychologically and physically. What is shelter for?
People haven't changed for 3 or 4 thousand years. I considered that when I first started, I thought about the cliff dwellers and the nomads and what people really are, you know, psychologically and every other way. They want to be free, but they want a little shelter.
— John Lautner, SCI-Arc, 1978This is not metaphor. Lautner meant it literally. Before he drew a single building, he studied the shelters of the earliest human cultures — the cliff dwelling carved into rock, the nomadic tent pitched against wind — and concluded that the fundamental architectural problem had not changed in millennia. A human being wants two contradictory things at once: the security of enclosure and the freedom of the open horizon. The cave and the sky. The fixed shape of the shelter around you and the shifting shape of what lies beyond.
He carried this conviction through sixty years of practice. As a student, he chose architecture precisely because it encompassed everything — including the most fundamental human needs. "Architecture I could see included everything and included basic things like shelter." The word basic was not a diminishment. It was the point. Shelter was where the problem began, and for Lautner, where the architecture began too.
To do real architecture, you're creating a whole environment that's desirable to live in or work in. The shelter incorporates all of your emotional as well as physical needs.
— John Lautner, The Spirit in Architecture, 1990The Sheats-Goldstein Residence is the building where this philosophy is most completely and literally expressed. The house is a cave — concrete emerging from the mountainside, anchored to the rock — but it is a cave that opens to the infinite horizon of the city below. The cliff dweller and the nomad are both served in the same space, at the same moment. Security and freedom are not balanced against each other. They are the same experience.
The Grid
Two Triangles, One Idea
Beneath the Sheats-Goldstein Residence lies a single governing geometry: the triangle. The plan is two overlapping triangles forming an hourglass shape that hugs the curving hillside. Every major wall, every angled glass plane, every coffer in the concrete ceiling derives from this triangular grammar. The geometry is not curved — it is emphatically angular — but the triangular plan follows the natural curve of the site, so the triangular logic reads as organic against the landscape.
Lautner was not rigid about this. Unlike Wright's projects, where the governing grammar disciplines every element with near-absolute consistency, Lautner allowed himself freedom within the triangular system — adjusting, improvising, letting the geometry breathe where the site or the spatial intention demanded it. The triangle is the underlying grammar of the house, the logic from which everything else is derived, but it is not a cage. It is a language, and Lautner spoke it fluently enough to break its rules when the architecture required it.
You try to pull everything together into one idea suitable for the particular situation. Once you have that idea, you put it down and you don't make sketches. By practicing, it's a difficult thing — it's hard work — but I found that over the years, the older I got, the more control I had.
— John Lautner, SCI-Arc, 1991This is what Lautner called the "total concept" — a building governed by a single idea resolved before a single line was drawn. At the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, the triangle is that idea. It is the structural logic that allows the concrete roof to cantilever from the hillside. It is the spatial logic that creates the coffered ceiling overhead. It is the formal logic that generates the angled glass walls dissolving the boundary between interior and canyon. Change the geometry and you have a different building. The triangle is not applied to the house. The triangle is the house.
The Light
A Primeval Forest Cast in Concrete
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| Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Beverly Crest, 1963. Architect: John Lautner. |
Look up inside the Sheats-Goldstein Residence and you are standing beneath a forest canopy. The coffered concrete ceiling — two principal roof planes, each containing 49 coffers with 6 skylights per coffer, 588 points of light in total — filters daylight through the massive concrete structure in a pattern that shifts and moves through the day exactly as sunlight moves through the canopy of a dense forest.
This was not an abstraction for Lautner. It was a memory.
Those little blocks you see in the forming make holes; the idea was to have perforated light in the living room as you have in a primeval forest. I've been in a forest in Northern Michigan and there's nothing more beautiful.
— John Lautner, SCI-Arc, 1991Lautner was born in 1911 in Marquette, Michigan, on the southern shore of Lake Superior — a landscape of dense boreal forest, ancient Precambrian rock, and wide water. That landscape formed his spatial imagination long before Frank Lloyd Wright or Taliesin ever did. When he describes the skylights at Sheats-Goldstein, he reaches back past six decades of practice to a forest in the Upper Peninsula. The childhood memory is literally cast into the concrete.
This is the cave made luminous. The concrete canopy overhead is structurally a cave — massive, compressive, anchored to the mountain. But experientially it is a forest canopy: dappled light shifting through the day, the weight of the material dissolved by the pattern of illumination it permits. The structure does not merely shelter you from the sun. It transforms the sun into something you want to stay inside.
The Section
The Entry Sequence — From Cave to Horizon
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| Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Beverly Crest, 1963. Architect: John Lautner. |
The Sheats-Goldstein Residence contains the most sustained and dramatic cave-to-canopy progression in Lautner's entire body of work. It is not a single moment of release. It is a sequence of spatial conditions that unfolds as you walk through the spaces, each one preparing you for the next.
It begins at the driveway. The surface is pebble-finish concrete — the same material you will find inside the house. The property line is not a threshold between the world and the home; it is the beginning of a continuous ground plane that will carry you from the public road to the edge of the zero-edge pool without changing underfoot. The gate — designed by Duncan Nicholson, who continued Lautner's work on the residence after his death — and the driveway apron hover above the home below. You descend.
At the motorcourt, the carport receives you under a covered structure. The space begins to compress. From here, the hallway entrance narrows — a concrete passage that takes two deliberate turns, each one tightening the volume around you, lowering the ceiling, limiting your sightline. You have entered the property but remain outside, the passage open to the air but sheltered overhead.
Then: the koi pond. Water appears at your feet, and you cross over it to reach the home's entrance. The threshold is not a door. It is a body of water. This is where the cave feeling is most complete: just inside the crossing, one of the concrete roof folds returns to the ground, enclosing the space fully before the building opens. You are inside the mountain.
And then the release. The space opens beneath the concrete triangular roof — the great coffered canopy filtering forest light from above. The city appears beyond the angled glass walls: beyond the zero-edge pool, the concrete deck becomes the horizon line. The concrete tent structure overhead gives you both shelter and the sensation of flying. You are enclosed and exposed at once. The cave and the horizon occupy the same space.
I swept the ceiling on purpose out of your normal eyesight so it disappears into the sky. So when you walk in there, you just walk in the space with no interference whatsoever, and still you're sheltered from the sun.
— John Lautner, SCI-Arc, 1978The release is proportional to the compression that precedes it. This is the principle Lautner understood better than any architect of his generation: the canopy means nothing without the cave. The view has no power unless it has been deliberately withheld. The sensation of freedom requires the memory of enclosure.
I felt at the time that usually there are too many doors, too many rooms all boxed up with doors. One of the ideas there was practically no doors. In a typical two-bedroom house I think sometimes there are thirty or forty doors, and then that doesn't contribute to the freedom of living or space or anything.
— John Lautner, SCI-Arc, 1978The Evolution
The Living Laboratory
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| Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Beverly Crest, 1963. Architect: Jeff Green |
The Sheats-Goldstein Residence was originally built for the Sheats family in 1963. It was a complete building — but it was not yet what it would become. When Jim Goldstein purchased the house in the early 1970s and hired Lautner back to continue working on it, the project entered a second life that would last decades and produce one of the most extraordinary architect-client collaborations in American residential architecture.
Goldstein did not commission a renovation. He committed to an ongoing partnership — a house that would never stop being designed. Lautner returned to refine, to extend, to push the original idea further than the first client's budget or ambition had allowed. The retractable skylights that open the concrete cave to the real sky. The zero-edge pool that raises the water surface to the concrete deck. The integration of the landscape into the architecture and the architecture into the landscape, pursued with the patience that only a decades-long collaboration permits.
Almost everybody who worked for Lautner at one time or another worked on this house. After Lautner's death in 1994, Duncan Nicholson continued the ongoing work, much of it designed with Lautner's input still guiding the process. The tennis court. The James Turrell Skyspace, Above Horizon, which frames the sky with the same precision that Lautner framed the canyon view. The adjacent Club James structure — envisioned in Lautner's original site plan and still being realized — shares the motorcourt and encompasses a tennis court, nightclub, offices, lower terrace, and infinity pool. That work continues today under Conner & Perry Architects, who trained under Duncan and took over the project when he passed away in 2015.
This is not an accident of patronage. It is the fulfillment of a principle. Lautner believed that architecture should be alive — not a finished object to be admired, but a living organism that grows and responds over time. "As long as the space is alive and durable, it's a successful piece of architecture." The Sheats-Goldstein Residence is the proof. Sixty years after its first construction, it remains alive, still evolving, still a laboratory where architecture is being made.
The Threshold
Dissolution of Boundaries
The distinction between inside and outside at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence is not blurred. It is abolished. The pebble-finish concrete floor that begins at the driveway gate is the same surface beneath your feet in the living room, on the terrace, at the pool's edge. One continuous ground plane from the street to the sky. The angled glass walls do not frame the view — they remove the wall entirely, so that the triangulated concrete ceiling appears to float above the canyon with nothing between you and the city below.
In designing a building or solving an architectural problem, the major element is the interior space that you create which is first of all a human space, a free space. From that derives the structure and the detail and the whole thing.
— John Lautner, The Spirit in Architecture, 1990The retractable roof panels complete the argument — but to understand them you have to understand the house in two halves. The great coffered concrete canopy covers the living spaces at the view end of the house. The remainder — extending back toward the other spaces of the house — is covered by a continuous redwood ceiling that flows uninterrupted from inside to outside, punctuated by numerous operable skylights. These skylights are not incidental. They are calibrated: the glass walls on the view side flood the rooms with southern light and city sky, while the skylights bring in diffused light from above, balancing the luminous intensity across the full depth of the house. Over the dining table, a large double skylight opens completely — admitting not just light but air. There is no air conditioning at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. The cross-ventilation between the operable glass walls and the skylights is the system. Lautner trusted the building's geometry and the hillside breeze to do what mechanical equipment typically handles. In sixty years, it has.
This is the paradox Lautner spent his career resolving: how to give a human being both shelter and freedom in the same space, at the same moment. At Sheats-Goldstein, the resolution is total. You are simultaneously in the cave and on the horizon. The cliff dweller looks out from absolute security into absolute openness. The nomad is sheltered without being enclosed.
The Architecture, Decoded
The Principles at Work
The Sheats-Goldstein Residence demonstrates the series' core principles simultaneously, in a building complex enough that each one operates at full depth. This is the building where the philosophy has the most room to work — and the most evidence to examine.
The entire exterior form — the angled concrete planes, the triangulated roofline, the profile against the hillside — is a consequence of the interior spatial sequence. Lautner did not design an exterior and fill it with rooms. He designed the experience of descending from cave to horizon, and the exterior is what that experience looks like from the outside.
Driveway descent on continuous pebble-finish concrete → motorcourt → covered carport → two compressing turns in a narrowing hallway → the koi pond revealed → crossing the water to enter → the panoramic release beneath the concrete canopy. A procession that takes minutes and passes through water. The threshold is not a door. It is an experience.
The carport-to-living-space sequence is the most sustained cave-to-canopy progression in Lautner's entire body of work. Each volume transition is calibrated: the ceiling lowers, then rises; the walls close, then vanish; the view is withheld, then released. The release is proportional to the compression.
Concrete emerges from the mountainside. The two-triangle plan hugs the hillside's natural curve. The house reads the Beverly Glen canyon — its slope, its orientation, its view corridor — rather than clearing or reshaping it. The site is not a platform for the architecture. It is a collaborator in its design.
Angled glass walls, continuous pebble-finish concrete floor plane from driveway through interior to terrace, retractable skylights that open the concrete cave to the sky, and a zero-edge pool whose edge dissolves into the city below. Inside and outside are distinguished by the quality of the experience, not by a wall.
The coffered concrete ceiling is simultaneously structure, light filter, and spatial enclosure — no applied finish, no paint, no veneer. The concrete is what it is. The glass is what it is. The pebble-finish floor is what it is. Every material performs its role honestly and visibly.
588 skylights across two planes of 49 coffers recreate the dappled light of a primeval forest — Lautner's memory of Northern Michigan cast into concrete. Across the redwood ceiling, numerous operable skylights balance the abundant natural light from the view-side glass walls, calibrating luminosity across the full depth of the house. Light is not admitted into this building. It is designed, filtered, and choreographed through the day.
The triangulated concrete roof is visible structure — the tent that gives shelter while making you feel like you are flying. The coffers are not decoration; they are the structural consequence of the triangular geometry. The structure is the architecture. Nothing is hidden.
The triangular grammar governs plan, section, furniture, and coffers. Two overlapping triangles form the hourglass plan. The geometry is the underlying grammar of the house — not a rigid cage but a language Lautner spoke fluently enough to break when the architecture demanded it.
Every element at Sheats-Goldstein performs multiple roles simultaneously. The coffered concrete ceiling is structure, light filter, and spatial enclosure. The entry sequence is procession, compression, and threshold. The pebble-finish concrete is floor, driveway, and terrace — one continuous surface from street to sky. Nothing is added for effect. Everything is what it is, doing exactly what it should.
The Legacy
Why This Building Matters Now
The Sheats-Goldstein Residence has been a film set, a music video backdrop, a magazine feature, and a party venue. It appeared in The Big Lebowski and in fashion spreads and on television tours. For decades, its public identity was defined by spectacle — the house that looked like a Bond villain's lair, the house with the view, the house where the famous people go.
None of this captures what the building actually is. The Sheats-Goldstein Residence is a proof of argument — specifically, Lautner's argument that the oldest human need and the most radical architectural ambition are the same thing. The cliff dweller wanted a cave with a view. The nomad wanted shelter without walls. Lautner gave them both, in the same building, in concrete and glass, on a hillside in Los Angeles.
If the architecture is right, it provides a sense of freedom.
— John LautnerThe house is now donated to LACMA and preserved as a public cultural site — the first time a Lautner building has been given permanent institutional protection. This matters not because the building is a museum piece, but because it is the opposite: it is alive, still demonstrating that organic architecture is not a historical style but an ongoing commitment to asking what a specific human being, in a specific place, actually needs from a space — and following that question wherever it leads.
The message of architecture, Lautner said, is one you cannot escape — because you are not receiving the message, you are inside it. At Sheats-Goldstein, the message is older than architecture itself: you are sheltered, you are free, and the horizon belongs to you.
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