Inside an Enchanting L.A. Home That Looks Straight Out of a Storybook

[gentle music]

When you open the front door of this house,

you really have the sense

that you're walking into something special.

It's almost like being a kid in a playhouse

where everywhere you turn,

there's something unexpected and something new.

That is really a touchstone of my father's design,

is making a livable space

exciting for the people who live there.

[birds chirping]

My name's Zen Gesner.

I'm the son of Harry Gesner,

the architect of the Stebel House.

Sidney Stebel, Sid, he was a really great writer

and his wife Jan was a painter.

My father met them in the most organic of ways.

It was back in the late '50s.

He had just finished a house called the Cole House

and Jan and Sid Stebel started driving around

and they spotted the house from Sunset Boulevard.

They looked up and they saw this huge A-frame roof,

and Fred Cole, the owner, wasn't there,

so they just left a note tacked to his front door saying,

Hey, we love your house.

Can you please call us with the name of the architect?

This is how they did it back in the old days

before texts and emails and all that.

My father loved the fact that he was a novelist,

that Jan Stebel was an artist,

and he loved the fact that they didn't have a lot of money.

He saw that as a really great challenge

to try to create something that was like the Cole House,

which is pretty grand,

in a smaller scale, on a very difficult lot.

And in my father's normal tradition,

when he was hired to do any home anywhere,

he would find a way

to spend as much time initially on the site

to kind of get a feeling of how the wind was,

where it came from,

where the sun rose, where it set,

the light during the day,

all of these factors, including the trees, the rocks.

He liked the idea of really fitting something

into a natural area

and not impose upon that area,

but actually create out of it organically.

[gentle music]

He came up here with his machete,

and if you can imagine, it was probably full of weeds

and full of bushes,

but he cleared it out

and then camped up here for about six days

while he took his sketchpad and made renderings

of what he would present to the Stebels as their home.

He came up with the idea of making perpendicular A-frames,

and this is a really good vantage to see this.

You can see this gable on this side is one A-frame,

and that is the second A-frame on the second floor.

Both of these A-frames afford different views.

So from the bedroom, you have this view

of this mountain side here

and this A-frame on this side

projects down Mandeville Canyon

and you really get this incredible treetop view.

[gentle music]

It is almost like you are away in some mountainous area

like Lake Arrowhead.

And my father had spent a lot of time in Switzerland.

He was an avid mountain climber and a skier,

and he spent a lot of time around the Swiss chalets,

so that influenced a lot of the design as well.

[gentle music]

My father took inspiration from a lot of things.

I'd say the primary thing was nature

and the environment in which he lived.

The inspiration he also took from was life experiences.

He fought in World War II.

He was a scout.

They went fighting from town to town

across France and Germany,

and he was constantly sketching churches.

His sketches that he took from that

really inspired, I think, a lot of the gothic shapes

and some of the A-frame shapes that we see a lot.

So I think, you know, when I see my father's architecture,

I see a lot of his history in it

as well as his love of nature,

a lot of European influences,

I see a lot of Native American influences.

[gentle music]

So this is a very classic example

of a mid-century sunken living room,

but my father always puts

his own little twist on everything.

So it's almost like there's a zen garden that goes around

that's indoor and outdoor,

and these windows are sculpted in such a way

that you really don't even see the difference

between indoor and outdoor.

It's a sunken living room.

You're really sitting in nature,

and I think that's a stamp of my father's design.

When you walk in this room,

there's something that strikes you immediately

right off the bat,

and that's these enormous ceilings

and how they all come to a point at the end of that beam.

The high ceilings

really kind of opens your mind subconsciously.

[gentle music]

This bar is so cool

because it is absolutely sculpted

into the center of the house,

and what's really cool is in the renderings,

my father actually did have these speakers

embedded in the walls.

What's awesome is that the current owner has rewired

and reconfigured everything

so these things work and they work great.

Another very cool thing about this bar

is the back wall is curved

and it happens to be right at the center

of the join between this A-frame and that A-frame,

right in the middle.

This is the soul of the house.

[gentle music]

My father loved small homes.

The Stebel House really kind of redirected his focus

on the fact that people don't need all that space.

You can do so much with so much less.

It was beautiful to him to see how things fit together

and to have that exposed

and not covered up with stucco or something over it,

and it really gives people an idea

of how everything fits together.

He loved using reclaimed materials

in a lot of his houses.

The fireplace over here, for instance,

my father always believed

that a brick coming from something else

had a life before it, a soul,

and you're bringing all of that life into a new existence.

[gentle music]

The walkway from the parking area through to the front door,

it's concrete, which also uses inlaid stone,

using natural elements of the site

and creating something

that incorporated them into this design.

[gentle music]

My father was mischievous.

He would leave things for the owners to discover over time,

and my father has planted things throughout the house

that are very cool, but you have to discover them.

For instance, the stained glass.

There's one that's in the dining area

that is a beautiful piece of art,

and if you look out of that, if you look through it,

it's actually in the exact spot the sun rises.

Every morning, it shines through that window

and it casts its light and its color through the whole room.

Downstairs, the bar hides this staircase,

and in the spirit of discovery for anybody who's visiting,

it really kind of appears out of nowhere.

We are now in another A-frame

with another 20-foot-high ceiling

pointed towards this wooded area

with this amazing framing of the window.

Now, this may look like just a piece of art in its own,

but I guarantee my father chose every one of these frames

for a reason.

It's like you're looking at these little framed pictures

all blended together in a patchwork.

Each one of these frames shows a different picture.

This is like one of those artistic elements

that my dad was so good at,

that just, it's not shouting itself out there.

It's actually something you have to discover.

There's other whimsical things in this place

that are so much in my father's spirit.

This is an original chair

hanging here in this really cool little reading nook.

This bookcase was constructed

by a friend of Sid Stebel

who owned a paperback bookshop,

and so the space between the shelves

is meant for paperback books.

So you'd have paperback books fitting perfectly

and then you'd have an entire row of hardcovers

that are slanted at a certain angle,

and this entire bookshelf was just filled with books

in every which way.

[gentle music]

And out this door is the breakfast deck.

Very few of my father's houses

actually had railings on the decks.

I think he just didn't like the sight line.

But, you know, as long as you don't have really young kids

and you've got some sense of balance,

this is really a comfortable place to be.

In 2009, when my father was doing his book,

Houses of the Sundown Sea,

he had an enormous amount of fun seeing a lot of the houses

that he had built back in the '50s and '60s

pretty much for the first time

since the point that they were built.

And he mentioned that coming up to this one,

the trees had grown so much,

it was almost like he was discovering a time capsule

because the house was so well preserved.

So these trees, they keep it a bit like a time capsule.

[gentle music] [birds chirping]

Off the bedroom, this is the true sanctuary.

This is where Stebel's desk was.

And you can see the skylight,

which gave light to his typewriter.

And my father asked if he could bring the skylight down

so that Sid could have a view from where he was working,

and Sid was so dedicated to his writing

that he wanted no distraction,

and this skylight only purpose was to feed light down.

Down here was the art studio

where Jan would do her paintings.

And once again, you see this incredible framing

of the window,

each one with a picture of its own.

Because this studio space faces north,

you have a much more consistent light.

You have this diffused light.

You don't have to deal with shadows

and differences in light.

For an artist, that's perfect conditions.

[gentle music]

The house actually looks like it was some sort of creature

that's rooted into this hillside.

It's actually the design

and my father's architecture rooting this

to the foundation of the house,

and finding a way to do it

which supports the integrity of the design

and the safety elements,

but also gives a unique way to play with light

and the indoor-outdoor aspects.

[gentle music]

My father felt the Stebel House

was one of the best accomplishments of his career

because this house was a perfect example

of him downsizing a design

and making it work perfectly for the people living in it.

Blending it with the environment, of course,

the difficult landscape that this originally was, it fits.

He just had a way of doing that,

and I think he built his reputation

of building hillside homes throughout Southern California

in a way that felt right.

The roof line goes straight down to the concrete foundation.

This house is about as solid as you could ever get.

If you're on the inside of the skeleton,

you feel protected, you feel safe.

Once again, it's a subconscious thing,

but I think that design really pulls that together.

[gentle music]

You always hear of somebody being an original, okay?

Some of the greatest artists are originals.

They think outside the box of convention.

My father was an original in the world of architecture.

And if you take the Stebel House here, which is modeled,

if you blur your eyes a little bit, you see a Swiss chalet,

but he found a way

to take that conventional design in Europe

and bring it into a mid-century new twist.

In every one of his houses,

you really feel a sense

that it connects with something deeper, something primal,

and I think it takes a true artist to really recognize that

and be able to harness that feeling

and put it into something like a house that we live in,

a perfect habitat for a novelist and an artist.

[gentle music] [birds chirping]