The Connell House

By the time that Richard Neutra received the commission to design Arthur Connell’s house in the late 1950’s he had three decades of connections with the intellectual life of the Monterey Peninsula. The connection started with a lecture in the fall of 1928. It continued with his early and continuing support of the careers of Edward and Brett Weston and with architectural assignments in the Monterey area in the late thirties and early forties and his ongoing relationship with Monterey-area media personality John Nesbitt. So he came to the Connell commission with a familiarity and deep appreciation of the cultural and natural assets of the area. 

It is a mistake to characterize the Connell house in Pebble Beach as a foreign “international style” created by an outsider. It is true that the Connell House’s flat roof, unornamented white surfaces and extensive use of glass would match the criteria laid down by Hitchcock and Johnson to qualify as “International Style,” (Hitchcock HR and Johnson P, The International Style, WW Norton, New York 1932).  However, the separation of vertical and horizontal planes, “exploding the box,” descends from Neutra’s idol, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1909 Gale House. 

Completed in 1958, the Arthur and Kathleen Connell House was an excellent example of the International Style within the Modern Movement in Pebble Beach, California, and it was representative of master architect Richard Neutra’s midcentury residential work. The house exemplified the rational design approach associated with Modem architecture, with thoughtful delineations between public and private areas that did not compromise its open, flowing spatial quality. (1)

With its complex but controlled massing, the Connell House embodied Neutra’s grand dual concern to design the house to meet the family’s needs and also to exploit the meeting of land and water below. In this regard he succeeded admirably, with every room, save the private den, commanding a stunning view of land and sea from Cypress Point northward.

The property was one of thirteen of Neutra’s twenty extant northern California projects retaining integrity. (2) Within that small number, a fraction of Neutra’s canon, the property stands out for its stunning response to program and site. Lying long and low, hugging the earth, open to light and nature, the Connell house exhibited those signature elements associated with Neutra’s residential architecture of the 1950s, including cantilevered roof slabs, crisp geometries, projecting beams, ribbon windows, and glass walls, culminating in what his biographer Thomas Hines identified as the most essential character of his work, “the interpenetration of inner and outer space.” (3)

The single-family residence at 1170 Signal Hill Road was completed in 1958 and later enlarged by construction of an addition at the southwest corner of the upper level. It was set into a slope on the west side of Signal Hill Road, a short, winding, street that extends steeply uphill from 17 Mile Drive. The house was set high above the Pacific Ocean, between Cypress Point Golf Course and Spyglass Hill Golf Course, in Pebble Beach. This unincorporated area of the Monterey Peninsula is also known as Del Monte Forest. The 2.13-acre parcel on which it was located is graded for a short distance to the west, then sweeps downhill. It was landscaped with a scattering of cypress trees to the north and east, some of which were planted by the original owners, Arthur and Kathleen Connell, for greater privacy. 

The house was designed for the Connell family by master architect Richard J. Neutra, who conceived of it as a long, low arrangement of orthogonal volumes and planes with dramatic views of land and sea. The upper level was U-shaped in plan, organized around a central courtyard that was enclosed on the east side by a tall grape-stake fence. The smaller lower level, beneath the base of the U, was rectangular in plan. The house rested partly on a concrete perimeter foundation and partly on a concrete slab foundation. The unornamented stucco-clad walls were painted a range of soft tones of grey, olive, green, and white. Other contrasting materials added texture and visual interest. These materials include narrow tongue-and-groove siding, painted a flat gray, which formed the cladding on most of the south side, including three swing-up overhead garage doors. Masonite panels, also painted a flat gray, were set below two banks of windows. One bank extended along the west side of the lower level and wrapped the comer to the north side. The other ran along part of the east side of the upper floor, facing the courtyard. The flat slab roof was characterized by wide eave overhangs and broad fascia and was finished with tar-and-gravel. At the northwest corner of both levels, outrigger beams extended several feet beyond the building envelope.

The primary entrance to the house was on the north elevation, at the end of a concrete walk reached by stairs descending from Signal Hill Road. A tall double wood door was flanked on the west by a panel that, like the door, was faced with plywood mahogany veneer. It opens to a half-floor landing illuminated by a band of clerestory windows that wraped around to the west elevation, where angled wooden louvers shielded the landing from the afternoon sun. The entry porch was enclosed by a railing and sheltered by a dramatic projection of the roof slab. A secondary entrance, with an exposed-aggregate concrete floor and a flush door, was located at the southwestern corner of the house, facing east, at the end of an asphalt driveway, where the western part of the building envelope projected some five feet past the garage doors.

Fenestration consisted chiefly of long bands of windows, comprising both floor-to-ceiling glass walls and various combinations of large wood-frame single-light fixed windows and small aluminum-sash casement and double-hung windows. On the upper floor, a window wall ran along part of the west elevation and wrapped around to the north side, flooding the living and dining rooms with light and providing wonderful views of the coastline and the Pacific Ocean. The window wall was composed of six sections on the west side, each featuring a large sheet of plate glass set in aluminum channels and separated by a wood glazing bar from a long horizontal fixed-light window and a small jalousie window below. A shorter glass wall, with large fixed sheets separated by louvered windows, ran along the north side of the courtyard and wraps around the east end of the wing. Two fixed windows on the north side of the lower floor provided natural illumination to the master bedroom. On the west, sliding glass doors opened from two of the three bedrooms to a concrete patio.

Above the ground floor, a cantilevered balcony with a metal railing was shaded by the deep roof overhang and wrapped around the corner to become a large private deck on the north side. The deck was accessed by a massive sliding glass door that was integral with the second-story window wall. On the south side of the north wing, at the top of the broad staircase leading from the half-floor entry hall, a sliding glass door opened to a glazed-tile terrace extending along the west side of the courtyard, which faced an ornamental garden enclosed by a grapestake fence. The roof slab reached several feet over the courtyard on the west and north sides and projected more than six feet on the east end of the north wing, resting on a wooden brace set against the fence. A second sliding glass door opeed to the terrace from the west side of the courtyard. At the northwest corner of the courtyard, a large brick grill for cooking was integral with the interior fireplace in the living room.

1 The significance statement, physical description, and history of the Connell House have been excerpted from Anthony Kirk and Barbara Lamprecht, Arthur and Kathleen Connell House, 1170 Signal Hill Road, Pebble Beach/Del Monte Forest, Monterey County, California, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, January 15, 2014. The excerpted text with accompanying footnotes has been lightly edited for the purposes of this HABS Documentation of the house.

2 Survey of northern Californian properties by Miltiades Mandros, 2003. Barbara Lamprecht Collection.

3 Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2005), 14.