Inside the Restored Jules Salkin Residence: A 2026 Look at Lautner’s Echo Park Usonian
The Jules Salkin Residence
From Lost Lautner to Protected Masterpiece — A Story in Three Ownerships
Study model, Jules Salkin Residence · John Lautner, 1948 · Echo Park, Los Angeles
I. A Simple House With a Big Idea
In 1948, John Lautner designed a small house on a hillside in Echo Park for a man he had known since the Taliesin Fellowship. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a footprint that could fit in the lobby of some of the buildings he would later become famous for. It was not a showpiece. It was an idea worked out in wood and glass and concrete — an argument, in built form, that organic architecture did not require a wealthy client or a spectacular site to be worth doing right.
That argument very nearly disappeared entirely. The Jules Salkin Residence spent the better part of six decades as a rental property, accumulating decades of incompatible repairs and additions until even Lautner scholars were uncertain it had ever been built. When it finally surfaced on the open market in 2014, it arrived in the condition that such neglect reliably produces: foundation compromised, glass replaced with sliding doors from a home improvement warehouse, an unauthorized addition eating into the original carport. I wrote about it then as a plea — I hope this home finds a rightful and caring owner.
It did. What follows is the full story.
- Architect
- John Lautner (drawings); Edgardo Contini, structural engineer
- Client
- Jules Salkin — violist, contractor, developer, attorney
- Year Built
- 1948, Echo Park (Elysian Heights), Los Angeles
- Address
- 1430 W. Avon Terrace, Los Angeles CA 90026
- Program
- 2 bedroom, 1 bath single-family residence · 1,361 sf · ⅓+ acre
- Structure
- Seven pairs of triangular Douglas Fir bents at 8′ intervals; inverted truss roof floating free of glass perimeter
- HCM Status
- Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1111 (designated 2021)
- Preservation
- LA Conservancy protective easement granted early 2026
- Archives
- Lautner drawings, plans & model · Getty Research Institute
The Structural Idea
II. Seven Pairs of Triangular Bents
Study model · the triangular bent system clearly visible at the perimeter
Original floor plan by John Lautner · Getty Research Institute archives
The structural system of the Salkin Residence is the post. Everything else follows from it. Lautner — working with structural engineer Edgardo Contini, his collaborator on the nearby Crestwood Hills project simultaneously underway — arranged seven pairs of triangular Douglas Fir timbers as a structural spine running the length of the house. These wing-shaped bents, set at eight-foot intervals, carry the load of an inverted truss roof through their apex. The key consequence: the perimeter walls carry nothing. They are free to be glass.
This is a fundamentally Wrightian move — the load-bearing interior core liberating the exterior membrane — but Lautner expresses it with his own structural candor. Where Wright in the Usonian houses tends to anchor the roof to a masonry hearth core and let the wood structure read as texture, Lautner makes the bents the building. They are the architecture. The roof floats, the glass meets the landscape directly, and the Cherokee-red concrete floor ties the whole composition to the ground. Compression at the hallway spine, release at the glass walls. It is Wright's spatial principle made legible in one small house.
Original elevation drawing · the butterfly roof profile and glazed perimeter
Section drawing · the inverted truss profile and column pairs that free the glass walls
There is one footnote worth knowing about the drawings themselves: Lautner had not yet received his architect's license when he submitted the plans. He would not be licensed until 1952. Another architect signed the permit documents, which may partly explain why the house slipped out of the historical record so efficiently. Lautner's name appears nowhere on the original building permit. His drawings, plans, and study model are held at the Getty Research Institute — a paper trail that ultimately made the 2014 rediscovery possible.
The object was not to make a small house that looked like a large one. It was to make a small house that was fully itself.
— The Usonian Premise, Wright → Lautner
Jules Salkin himself was a remarkable figure: concert violist, contractor, developer, architect, and attorney — and one of the four studio musicians who co-founded the Crestwood Hills community in Brentwood, a cooperative housing development in which Lautner was also a designer. The Avon Terrace house was a speculative project, built in parallel with that larger work. Salkin sold it in 1949 to the Maxwell family, who held it for decades and eventually converted it into a rental. The house entered its long obscurity.
The 2014 Condition
III. What Sixty-Five Years of Neglect Does to a Lautner
Exterior, 1949 · the house as built · butt-glazed glass, correct proportions, undisturbed carport
The 1949 exterior photograph shows a house in full possession of its idea. The butt-glazed glass panels meet the landscape cleanly, their proportions calibrated precisely to the structural bays established by the timber bents. The carport reads as an open extension of the roof plane. The board-and-batten redwood siding anchors the horizontality that Wright taught Lautner to prize. It is a composed, confident building.
2014 · the sloped glass junction — poorly sealed, allowing water infiltration and foundation deterioration
By 2014, the house had accumulated decades of interventions that each, individually, seemed like reasonable maintenance decisions and, collectively, had nearly erased what the building was. Poorly sealed glass junctions had allowed rainwater to work its way in steadily, and the entire structure rested on a compromised foundation. The glass itself — that essential consequence of the structural idea — had been replaced at some point with standard-dimension sliding doors. The kind you can pick up at any home improvement warehouse. They fit the rough opening but not the bay. The proportional relationship between structure and enclosure, which is the whole argument of the building, was severed.
2014 · an unauthorized addition had extended into the original carport bay, disrupting the roof plane
2014 · standard sliding glass doors — dimensionally wrong, proportionally destructive
2014 · interiors showing decades of accumulated wear — the structural bones intact beneath
The interiors told the same story. Worn through, layered over, improvised upon. And yet — and this is what made the 2014 listing so charged with possibility — the structural bents were still there. The Cherokee-red concrete floor was still there. The bones of Lautner's idea had survived the decades of improvisation. The house was not lost. It was buried.
The Restoration
IV. Trina Turk, Jonathan Skow & Barbara Bestor
Shortly after the 2014 listing, the Salkin Residence found the owners I had hoped for. Fashion designer Trina Turk and her late husband Jonathan Skow acquired the property with a clear intention: restore it to Lautner's original vision. They enlisted Barbara Bestor, FAIA — whose practice has deep roots in the preservation and contemporary interpretation of Los Angeles Modernism — to lead the work.
What they undertook was anything but a cosmetic renovation. The foundation had to be stabilized before anything else could happen. The unauthorized addition into the carport was removed entirely, recovering the roof plane. The mismatched sliding doors were replaced with custom butt-glazed clerestory glass that re-establishes Lautner's original bay proportions. The Douglas Fir bents were stripped and revived. The fireplace and chimney details were corrected. The Cherokee-red concrete floor — which had survived everything — was left to its original but worn character. Black phenolic resin countertops and handmade ceramic tile in the kitchen completed a set of new interventions introduced, as the listing put it, compatibly.
The restoration earned a 2018 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy and, in 2021, the city designated the Salkin Residence Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1111. A Lautner that had been invisible to scholars for decades now carried one of the most consequential protections the city of Los Angeles extends to its built heritage.
The House in 2026
V. Firsthand — Open House, Early 2026
I visited the house during an open house earlier this year as it came back to market, listed at $2,395,000. The contrast to the 2014 condition is not subtle. Seeing the original glazing proportions restored — glass running cleanly to the landscape, the bents reading as the architecture they always were — makes clear just how much was lost in those earlier decades of improvised maintenance, and how much has been recovered.
2026 · restored exterior · the original glazing proportions reinstated, additions removed
2026 · the butterfly roof profile in correct relationship to the hillside site
2026 · interiors after restoration · the Cherokee-red concrete floor and Douglas Fir bents revived
2026 · glass in direct conversation with the hillside landscape · Lautner's original intention recovered
2026 · panoramic canyon views toward the ocean · more than a third of an acre on the Elysian Heights promontory
The Final Chapter — For Now
VI. The LA Conservancy Easement, Early 2026
Before the sale closed, Trina Turk did something that elevates this story above the ordinary arc of architectural rescue and resale. She contacted the Los Angeles Conservancy and secured a protective easement on the property — a legal instrument that runs with the land in perpetuity, binding every future owner to the preservation of what she and Jonathan Skow had spent years recovering.
The restoration of the Salkin House was a labor of love for Jonathan, and I wanted to make sure the restoration, and Lautner's original vision, would be protected to document the architectural history of Los Angeles for generations to come.
— Trina Turk, quoted by the LA Conservancy, 2026
The easement was granted in early 2026. Shortly after, the house sold in its third ownership transfer — the first time in its history that the transaction was accompanied by a legal guarantee of its future. The Salkin Residence is now a protected masterpiece. Whatever its next owners do, they cannot undo what Turk and Skow, Bestor and Lautner's original drawings made whole again.
A small house with a big idea — now protected for every generation that follows.
In 2014, I wrote that I hoped this home would find a rightful and caring owner. It found two. And before leaving, one of them made sure the architecture was protected not just for the next owner, but for all of them. That is stewardship at its highest. That is what the Usonian premise always asked of the people who lived in these buildings — not just to inhabit them, but to understand what they were for and to pass them on intact.
The Jules Salkin Residence now belongs to Los Angeles, permanently, in a way it never quite did before. Lautner's license may not have appeared on the original permit. His name is on the building now.
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