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Sheats Apartments

Architect
John Lautner
Year
1949
Style
Mid-Century Modern
City
Los Angeles, CA
Sheats Apartments
Photo: NielsBE, Niels Wouters, CC BY 3.0
See it on the map

The Sheats Apartments -- also known as L'Horizon, and nicknamed 'The Treehouse' by UCLA students -- is an eight-unit apartment building at 10919 Strathmore Drive in Westwood, designed in 1948 by John Lautner and completed in 1949. It was built for Neo-Fauvist artist Helen Taylor Sheats, who helped with the design, and her husband Paul Henry Sheats, dean of UC Extension and a UCLA professor. Its proximity to UCLA has made it student housing ever since, and it is now a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

the building

Eight separate treehouses. Architectural historians David Gebhard and Robert Winter praised the building's functionality, noting that each of the eight apartments is completely separated from the others, with its own terrace, deck, and outdoor garden space -- a degree of privacy unusual for multifamily housing of the era.

A futurist experiment. Lautner designed the building in an experimental futurist style in 1948, using unconventional structure and materials to give each unit its own distinct outdoor space rather than stacking identical apartments in a standard block.

the style

The Sheats Apartments is built in Lautner's futurist idiom, a style that pushed mid-century modernism toward bolder, more sculptural structural forms; its distinctive facade is what has made it visible and recognizable from the street for decades.

More on Mid-Century Modern

the architect

John Lautner was a major mid-century modernist architect known for pushing architecture toward experimental, sculptural forms; the Sheats Apartments is an early example of that futurist approach applied to multifamily housing.

significance

Sheats Apartments is designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, though the building's condition has drawn criticism over the years -- former presidential candidate and Westwood resident Michael Dukakis called it 'a dump' in 2004, spurring pressure for repairs.

nearby

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