Among legendary West Coast architect John Lautner’s more memorable Los Angeles-area designs — a long list that includes Googie architecture, an essential component of the singularity of the city’s landscape and character — are the Stevens House in Malibu, purchased in 2017 by actor Edward Norton, and the Deutsch House in the Hills. Over in Palm Springs, his ‘UFO House’, custom-built for Bob Hope, has one of the largest living rooms in the country.

New to the L.A. open market this winter is another Lautner-designed home; the fact that it is a stilt house makes it quite unique in the Lautner oeuvre, as it appears the architect only built a handful of such precariously positioned dwellings in the city. Known as the Garcia House and alternatively as the Rainbow House, the residence takes it its views from its vertigo-inducing position through an overall arched shape, with an asymmetric aggregate of occasionally colored glass panes of various sizes used to follow the swell of the façade to its apex.

A high modern masterpiece, the house is, like most Lautner designs, incredibly sensitive in its living style, and abundantly warm. The main living area is extraordinary, with curving glass panes on the underside that bring in a breadth of living green into the living style, and a dark grey fieldstone fireplace accent wall adding to the intoxicating equipoise of naturalistic feel and engineered paradox.

Overall, this remarkable house contains three bedrooms and three baths in its 2,596 sq. ft. of living area, and it is available for $16 million. For an artist or an artistically minded professional, it represents an exceedingly rare and mercurial opportunity in Los Angeles.

Tempus fugit.