Stahl House

Pierre Koenig’s steel-and-glass house projects over the hillside with very little between you and the Los Angeles basin. Completed in 1960 as Case Study House No. 22, the Stahl House cantilevers roughly ten feet from a site other architects had considered unbuildable, its floor-to-ceiling plate glass wrapping three sides of the living space.

The moment to aim for is the living-room corner. Julius Shulman’s 1960 twilight photograph — two women reclining inside that glass box, city lights spread below — turned this precise spot into one of the defining images of Los Angeles modernism. On the guided interior tours run by the Stahl family, by reservation, you stop there rather than simply recognising it from books.

Go in the evening if you can. The tour gives you the house as architecture, not just an image: the thin steel frame, the overhanging terrace, the sense of the basin opening beneath the glass. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places and status as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument feel entirely logical once you are standing inside it.