Egon Winkens' Hidden Mid-Century Masterpiece in Mt. Washington

A documentary portrait of a 1967 home hidden in the hills of Mt. Washington — the only house German architect Egon F.J. Winkens ever built in the United States. Anonymous from the street, it hides behind a garage and a big tree; what gives it away is the entry trellis, a gesture remarkable enough to make a passerby pull over, walk up, and knock on the door to ask who the architect was.

Winkens had come to Los Angeles to work in Richard Neutra's office. According to the owner, he found real success there, but with Dion Neutra the heir apparent to the firm, he hit a glass ceiling and realized he'd never make partner. This house was his answer — his single American commission — before he won a Scandinavian design competition, was pushed out of his work obligations, and returned to Germany with his two young sons, Falco and Zeno, one of whom would grow up to become an architect himself.

Stylistically, the house owes more to Rudolph Schindler than to Neutra — playful, experimental, full of irregular angles rather than the formulaic international-style look you could spot from the curb. There's a clear Japanese influence on its modernism: expressive folded planes where the roof bends down to become a wall, fins, and a lava-stone fireplace anchoring the main space.

Its most singular gesture is the "Dragon's Tooth" — a gallery hallway of slanted beams and shifting perspectives that separates the main living space from the den, with walls of glass keeping you constantly tethered to the landscape. Outside, a sunshade cantilevers the entire way around the building with no columns at all, seeming to hang off the walls themselves.

At the heart of the house sits the sunken conversation pit: a room built purely for talking in a pre-cell-phone era. It went unfinished for years — just a bare cement hole that friends joked they should fill with water and piranhas — before it became the home's icon and a small cultural phenomenon around town. Nearby, the hand-nailed strip-wood wall, with no visible fasteners, remains the owner's favorite showpiece, as much for its sound-deadening as its craft.

Underneath the architecture runs a personal thread. Dr. Donald Gaspar was born across the street and raised the house on a former WWII cow-barn lot his parents gave him; the Ming-red door with brass hardware was his late wife's choice. Julius Shulman photographed the place the day it was finished, hoping it would still be standing fifty years on — and now its owner is quietly looking for a steward to carry it into the next generation.