FRANKLY ICONIC

A German expat brings a minimalist sensibility to a wildly sculptural early house by Frank Gehry in Southern California.

- JANELLE ZARA

When, in the late 1970s, a young Los Angeles filmmaker named Jane Spiller commissioned Frank Gehry to design her home in Venice, California, it was an early but groundbreaking period of Gehry's career. He was taking the kinds of inexpensive, workmanW structing homes distinguished by sculptural, exaggerated geometries.

"Jane Spiller was one of our greatest clients," he recalled in the 2009 book Frank Gehry: The Houses (Rizzoli). "She wanted us to do our stuff." The completed Spiller House, half a block from the Venice Beach boardwalk, is a pair of boxlike units, one designed for the owner to live in and the other to host tenants. Within an unassuming facade of unpainted corrugated-metal sheets, the virtually unchanged interior architecture still brims with idiosyncrasies-the appearance of naked studs uncovered by drywall, rooms cut at irregular angles, visible heating and cooling ductwork. From the ground-floor living room, a rectangular opening cuts through the second floor to reveal the almost perpendicular orientation of the skylight on the roof.