Morton and Betty Topper bought the house in 1961. Sixty years passed before it changed hands again in 2021. The new owners, longtime art gallery clients, asked Creative Space to oversee its restoration. We served as the owner's representative and developer through completion in September 2025 and have stayed on to support its ongoing care.
Our charge was clear. Return a nearly 100-year-old steel and gunite structure to full working order, and protect the historic fabric along the way. Decades of weather, seismic movement, and alteration had worn on the frame, the skin, and the interiors. When architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht wrote about the house in 2014, she described the pool below it as empty, dry, cracked, and broken. The work required a team able to treat the house as one system, from the steel frame to the smallest cabinet hinge.
We assembled the team around each layer of the house. Escher GuneWardena Architecture led the restoration. The firm's record on historic structures includes John Lautner's Chemosphere, Gregory Ain's Greene Residence, and the Eames House. Nous Engineering oversaw a seismic upgrade of the original steel structure. Buro Happold designed new mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Andrew Gray Studio restored the original woodwork. Luis Laplace led the interiors, and Terremoto designed the hillside landscaping. OM Construction served as general contractor. Lamprecht, a leading Neutra scholar, tied each decision to the archival record. Our role sat at the center. We managed the budget and schedule and set the quality standards a designated city monument demands. Throughout, we kept the owners' goals in front.
The restoration returns the sequence Neutra designed. You arrive from Dundee Drive across a bridge-like entry, with porthole windows and curved rails setting a nautical tone. Inside, a glass-enclosed, double-height stair descends past a Model A headlight. Legend holds Neutra's protégé Gregory Ain pulled it from his own car. A long suspended light trough ties together the shifting ceiling and floor heights of the living level. Lamprecht notes the bedrooms Neutra designed for the Lovell boys are lovely again. Below, the restored pool once again runs half beneath the house and half into the open canyon air. The project arrived alongside new scholarship. The Getty Research Institute published Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House, 1925–35 in 2025. The house remains a private residence.
