The Chuey House: A Neutra Listed as a Development Lot, and What Happened Next

In the summer of 2017, a property at 2460 Sunset Plaza Drive in the Hollywood Hills came to market, offered as “a unique development opportunity.” The house standing on it was Richard Neutra’s Chuey House. The listing made no reference to its architectural significance.

That omission is the reason the house is worth writing about. Whether a Mid-Century Modern building survives often depends less on its quality than on how it is described on the day it is sold.

The house

Neutra completed the house in 1956 for the poet Josephine Ain Chuey and her husband, the painter Robert Chuey. It is small, 1,896 square feet, and sits on a ridge at the top of Sunset Plaza Drive. The Los Angeles Conservancy says the Chueys analyzed the two-and-a-half-acre site with Neutra to determine the precise orientation of the house. Floor-to-ceiling glazing looks over Sunset Plaza Canyon and the Los Angeles basin, and an expansive deck appears to float over the hillside.

The Conservancy lists a pair of reflecting pools and the extended beam “spiderleg” among the trademarks of his International Style residences. By 2019, though, The Real Deal reported that much of the original architecture was gone. What remained was the essential composition: a low house, a long view, and a carefully cut relationship between the two.

The deal that kept it standing

In September 2017 the Conservancy sent a disclosure letter to the listing agents, and a Historic-Cultural Monument nomination followed. In November 2017 the Cultural Heritage Commission voted to take the nomination under consideration. The city’s staff report, prepared for the January 2018 hearing, found “exceptional design by Richard Neutra” in its statement of significance.

The nomination was withdrawn in January 2018, and the Conservancy’s own account records an agreement with the owners to rehabilitate the house rather than clear the site. The details are best read on the Conservancy’s page.

A buyer who promised to restore it

The house was still on the market in 2019. Eric Choi and Philippe Naouri bought it, a sale the Los Angeles Times reported and The Real Deal relayed. They hired the architect Tim Campbell, whose firm had restored Neutra’s Singleton House, to design a comprehensive rehabilitation. Campbell began with the archival photographs of Julius Shulman, who shot the house in its earliest state.

“Everything in that quintessential Shulman photo will be added back,” Campbell told Architectural Digest’s Jessica Ritz.

Adrian Scott Fine, the Conservancy’s director of advocacy, welcomed the sale. “We’re pleased and we’re optimistic,” he said.

An open ending

The Conservancy’s page is careful about where things stand: to date, it says, plans are not yet complete. The studio lists Sunset Plaza among its projects in restoration.

That caution is the honest note to end on. A house that was marketed as a development lot has, for now, a restoration under way and a documented target. The result will not be known until the work is finished.