Johnstone House, William Kesling, Designer 1935

Johnstone House, William Kesling, Designer 1935, a photo by Michael Locke on Flickr.

One of Kesling's earliest commissions and one of his best. The home was built right after the success of his 'Model Home' in Silver Lake, which established the young architect-builder as a force in the Modernist Movement. It must have appeared on the outer edge of the avante-garde in the affluent Los Feliz of the time, when elegant homes of Spanish, Mediterranean and English Tudor design were most preferred. Resistance to this new 'machine' architecture was high; it took the speculators almost two years to sell the house after its completion.

The Johnstone House is located in Los Feliz on Lowry Road just north of Los Feliz Boulevard on the west side of the street.

For more information on William Kesling, be sure and read the fascinating book, 'Kesling Modern Structures: Popularizing Modern Design in Southern California: 1934-1962' by Patrick Pascal (with Photographs by Julius Shulman and David Sadofski, Balcony Press, 2002).