Owner who demolished historic San Francisco home designed by famed architect Richard Neutra is ordered to build exact replica
- The modernist Largent House was flattened to make way for a 4,000 sq ft mansion, despite owner Ross Johnston only having approval to remodel
- The San Francisco Planning Commission ordered Johnston to build Largent House exactly as it stood in 1936, using the same materials and methods
Richard Neutra’s legacy of modernist architecture, marbled throughout southern California, has a quieter history in San Francisco.
The Austrian-born architect designed just five homes in the city, including a Victorian town house for refugees from Nazi Germany, and his first local project, the Largent House – named for the modest family who moved into 49 Hopkins Avenue in 1936.
The stark white house with crisp lines, first occupied by a schoolteacher and an artist, joined a body of work that some have mentioned in the same breath as that of Frank Lloyd Wright – whom Neutra briefly worked under and admired so much that he named a son after the renowned architect.
“Their beauty, like that of any sea shell, is more than skin-deep – practical, not pretentious,” Time magazine wrote about Neutra’s designs in 1949, when he graced the cover.
Is it too late to save old Hong Kong from the wrecking ball?
Seven decades later, in October 2017, the business end of a backhoe scoop tore into the redwood-and-brick house in the leafy Twin Peaks foothills, levelling nearly everything except a garage door and frame in what city planners have called “an illegal demolition.”