The Bailey House has come up for sale once again. The entry in the Case Study program—number 21—has already hit the market in the past few years; it surfaced in late 2016 with an asking price of $4.5 million. Now it’s back with an asking price of $3.6 million; its current owner paid $3.2 million for it about ten year ago.
The Bailey is considered one of the preeminent expressions of the residential architectural series: thoughtfully designed, constructed using easily obtainable and reasonably priced materials, and ebulliently optimistic. Case Study #21 and its younger sibling—Case Study #22, the Stahl house—are the work of architect Pierre Koenig, who took on Arts and Architecture magazine’s challenge to find elegant affordable solutions to the postwar housing crisis—hopefully easily duplicated—and came up with one of the most enduring designs. But it is at heart a model of a brilliantly utilitarian solution, one that neatly reconciles extraordinary burgeoning fundamental need and an elevated living style, and it needs a buyer with an eye for historicity and an abstract turn of mind.
The house is remarkable for its layout and construction materials, but achieves singularity through its use of water, and the uniquely sensitive dialogue it establishes with its setting. Water, and the sound of water, is used as a means of communicating with the world, and to give the house a sense of place in natural cycle, preventing it from settling down into a static presence. In that way, the home is quite poetic: vibrantly relevant in that particularly acute manner characteristic of a work of art.
The use of water is strikingly relevant in the case of CSH #21 because it serves as the philosophical foundation for the home’s living style. Water features abut the house; the fluidity contrasts with the home’s fixity. And its layout works outward from a central courtyard holding the large bathroom; a place for bathing and an open space combine as the heart of the house. Japanese architectural tropes find their way into many Los Angeles-area modern and contemporary dwellings, but the resulting effect can be empty flourish—pretension, or pandering to fashion—without the continuation of the ideal into the home’s interior, and the cohesive subtext present in a residence like CSH #21.
The house apparently suffered grievously in the 1970’s and 1980’s, as insensitive owners attempted to tack on fashions and details contemporary for their period, disrupting Koenig’s original vision. In the 1990’s, though, it got its due, and was reborn through the efforts of a new owner who recognized the importance of the Case Study House Program to the city’s history, and this particular entry to the whole of the series. Koenig himself was commissioned to work on the project, restoring the house to its original, elegantly functional stature.
