The Tremaine House

_{Above: Located in Montecito, California the Tremaine House designed by Richard Neutra in 1948. Photo: Julius Shulman / Getty Archive}

One of my personal favorite houses designed by Richard Neutra is the Tremaine House located in Montecito, California and completed in 1948. Situated on a rather dramatic site, with exposed boulders and large, ancient oak trees, the home settles beautifully into the landscape and perfectly demonstrates Neutra’s genius of mastering a site.

Of the Tremaine House Neutra poignantly wrote, “Like an albatross, the oceanic bird whose legendary powers of flight allow it to descend to land only to breed, the Tremaine House unfolds and spreads its mighty wings – hovering majestically in an ancient oak tree grove above Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean. Only a row of precise white beam ends are visible, as though they were the now-petrified joints of the bird floating above the glass amidst the dense landscape. That single beckoning gesture is the street ‘facade’ though one’s journey toward the house is then defied by the stone walls defining the patio and the guest wing. It is one of many moments of tension and transcendence rendered here in a poised equilibrium, a dialectic on many levels between floating and anchored. Between solid and opaque. Between machine-made and nature-wrought.”

Architectural illustration of the Tremaine house created by Richard Neutra. Photo: Taschen

Architectural model of the Richard Neutra’s Tremaine House.

Floor Plan of Richard Neutra’s Tremaine House, located in Montecito, California, 1948.

The Tremaine house is unique in Neutra’s oeuvre with the union between architectural expression and structural necessity. Articulated concrete pillars bear the long frontal girders, which in turn support eight foot cantilevered roof beams below an impossibly thin-looking roof slab all rendered in reinforced concrete. The use of concrete was partly in response to the threat of forest fires and one of the first homes to introduce interior space with raw, unfinished concrete – later to become known in more general practice as Brutalism. The home is still there today and is a masterstroke of architecture.

In the world of Mid Century Modern architecture there has rarely been a better professional pairing than photographer Julius Shulman and architect Richard Neutra. First meeting in 1936 Neutra and Shulman maintained a working relationship – as well as friendship – for 34 years up until Neutra’s death in 1970. In fact, it was because of Neutra that Shulman became an architectural photographer. The respect and understanding of Modernism so beautifully conveyed in Neutra’s work underscores Shulman’s photography and that, as an art form, the photo itself stands on equal footing as the architecture captured. The two are shown here on the first photoshoot of the Tremaine House in 1948. Photo: Getty Archives

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