Any Pinterest or web search on “mid-century kitchen” is going to yield a plethora of open plan kitchens featuring a central island. But, as we learned a couple of weeks ago from friend of the pod (and mid-century houses everywhere), Atom Stevens, a mid-century kitchen is a room with four walls. Most of our mid-century homes were built with L or U-shaped kitchen featuring wall-engaged cabinetry for maximum single cook efficiency, NOT a central island. On the high-end we might have a peninsula dividing our kitchen from a “cozy” (ahem…tiny) dining area.
So where did this “open mid-century kitchen” myth come from?
Well, partly from TV sets built for filming mid-century families like the Bradys and the Petries. And a few high concept, architect designed mid-century homes feature brilliant, functional island designs that then influenced high-end home builders throughout the country. But that took some time and these tend to be homes from the later part of the era.
So, who actually started the whole thing?
I’m wrapping up our kitchen season with a deep dive into one of my all-time favorite open kitchen plans – it’s also very likely THE OG island kitchen – The Stahl House (Case Study House 22), designed by California architect Pierre Koenig.
You know this one…even if you think you don’t. It’s been featured in dozens of television shows and films, from Colombo to Playing by Heart. The Stahl House is famous for its high-drama views and distinctive pool. But the kitchen is where the real design work happens. Koenig didn’t just place an island in the middle of a room; he created a space that balances openness with intentional definition.
(June 1960 issue of Arts & Architecture featuring photos of Stahl House/Case Study House 22 by Julius Shulman)
While you shouldn’t (and likely can’t) copy and paste a design from a glass-and-steel cliffside landmark into your own home, this house is a masterclass in how to tailor a space to specific needs. It’s more than just a “cool” kitchen. It’s a kitchen built to fit the lifestyle of its occupants.
Even in an open floor plan, Koenig defined the kitchen as its own distinct space. He used a slightly dropped ceiling—which may have originally featured lighting hidden behind a translucent screen—to create a sense of enclosure without needing four solid walls.
He incorporated a full-height wall that houses the refrigerator and oven. This creates a “protected” zone where clutter can be tucked away, providing a spot for recipes or messages that don’t need to be on display.
The kitchen island allows for movement around both sides. By providing multiple routes of travel, Koenig eliminated potential “traffic jams,” a concept that is just as important in a kitchen as it is in urban planning.
Design Moves You Can Borrow
Us of lesser means or colder climates don’t have to own a $25 million architectural landmark built of steel and glass to borrow from Koenig’s specific, clever design moves.
Here are a few concepts most of us can use:
- Float your cabinets. The Stahl House cabinets sit on little legs rather than being mounted to the floor with a kickplate. It makes the kitchen feel light, airy, and “floaty”—a classic mid-century move that works beautifully in modern updates.
- Use height to your advantage. Think about where you want to see through a space and where you need screening. In the Stahl House, a higher bar-counter divider and floating shelves separate the kitchen from the dining area. It allows for conversation while effectively hiding dirty dishes from guests.
- Embrace constraints. What makes the Stahl House iconic isn’t that it’s “universal” or “in-fashion.” It’s that it was designed specifically for the needs of the people living there and the constraints of a very tricky site. Your remodel should be just as specific to your life.
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Resources
- Learn more about this mid-century masterpiece at https://stahlhouse.com.
- See other designs from Pierre Koenig on his page at US Modernist.
- If you missed it, the replay of my recent Mid-Century Kitchen Clinic is available.
- My birthday is June 8, and every year I offer my age as a percentage discount on my learning programs. The sale runs from June 6th through the 8th, so keep your eyes peeled for the biggest discount of the year! Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel at the deepest discount I offer.
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
Let’s round out the kitchen season with one kitchen in particular. I often get asked by clients if it’s okay to put an island layout into the kitchen of a mid-century house. And my answer is always, yeah, of course it is.
While builder-grade ranches in the Midwest typically had an L or sometimes a U of wall engaged cabinets, there were some original island designs even in the mid-century years. And one of my personal island kitchen icons is the one designed into the Stahl House, or Case Study House 22, by California architect Pierre Koenig.
This house is mid-century modern with an all-caps modern, but I think it also can serve as inspiration for any of us trying to make mid-century appropriate choices for houses today. Hey there. Welcome back to Mid-Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, architect Della Hansman, Mid-Century Ranch enthusiast. You are listening to episode 2407.
Okay, so a couple of bits of business before I get into talking about what’s cool about this house, what’s individual about this house, and what we can learn as potential modifiers of mid-century kitchens from this particular house. This is going to be the last episode of season 24 of the Mid-Mod Remodel Podcast, and we’re going to take a little break lasting until mid-July.
We’ll be back with another season focusing on bathrooms, another incredibly common area for remodels, and an area that’s important to get very right if you’re thinking about making great choices for your mid-century home. Between now and next season, there’s a couple of key calendar items I want to draw your attention to. The first one is that this weekend, well, really next Monday, is my birthday.
And not to make it all about me, I actually want to make it all about you. Every year on my birthday, I discount the Midmod Remodel courses and learning products. So if you are curious about joining Ready to Remodel and getting round-the-year calendar advice on how to make good choices for your house and getting access to the suite of support materials, guides, references, lessons on mid-century structure, mid-century layouts, mid-century materials, all of that is included in Ready to Remodel.
And we will be discounting that and all of the two-hour design clinics, like the mid-century kitchen cleaner recording, which we just re-upped, by 44%. Watch your email this weekend only for that discount.
And I guess the party that I’m inviting you to is next month’s Architect’s Office Hours as a happy member of Ready to Remodel. And then for every month thereafter, on the first Monday of every month, we get together and I answer all of the pressing questions that my current remodel students have got about their homes, how to talk to contractors, how to choose materials, how the height to hang your pendant lights, tricky layout challenges, all of that and more. So I’d love to have you take advantage of this.
This sale happens only once a year, but it’s been a fun tradition, and we always it’s fun to get an influx of new members joining the Mid Mod Remod Squad for my birthday and yours. Um the other thing to note is if you’re looking for hands-on design advice and assistance from MidMod Midwest, then we will be having our annual summer office closure the week before and after the 4th of July this year. So we won’t be taking new uh work in during that time.
And we our current clients will, hey, if you’re listening, you’ll hear from us that we won’t be communicating with you during that time. We’ll all be refreshing our creativity and our energy and being whole human beings during those two weeks. But I will say, if you’ve been thinking about starting a design process for your home at any point in the near future, then I recommend you get onto our calendar for uh a one-on-one conversation with me sooner rather than later in the month of June.
We’ve been booking out quite far right now. Something about everyone’s mood has got people feeling active, and we are booking out for projects. Design projects for signing now are gonna be finishing up in the fall. So if you have ambitions for changes to your house you want to make this year and you’d like to work with MidMod Midwest to make those changes, now is absolutely the right time to fill in our apply to work with us form on our services page.
You can find links to all the different references I’m gonna make during this episode and how to work with us and information about the birthday sale on the website at midmod-midwest.com slash 2407. Okay, so let’s talk about the Stahl house because it’s been on my mind recently for several reasons, one of which is that it is currently for sale.
Yes, this piece of mid-century history is a private residence, and as is the right of the private residence’s owners, um, now the children, the I would say quite adult children of the original owners, they have decided to no longer be responsible for this and they have put the home on the market. There is it’s such an iconic house. It is a national landmark that wallpaper magazine wrote an article about the fact that it’s been listed for $25 million. If you have $25 million laying around and you would like to make a lifelong commitment to architectural history, maybe check out that article and the listing.
If you don’t have $25 million, check it out either way. This house is, I mean, it’s not a mid-century ranch. It’s not mid-modest or anything along those kinds, but it is, in my opinion, a perfect example of fitting a design to the specific place and the specific needs of a family. As are all of the case study houses, they’re really what’s the plural of Tour de Force? They are really Tours de Force? I don’t know. I don’t speak French very well at all, really.
But they are they are all incredible adventures into what is possible with creativity in design. And although, yes, it was not a cheap house at the time, it was a reasonably priced house at the time. Now, of course, it’s $25 million, but it doesn’t, it’s not laden in luxury, it’s not enormous, it does have a truly incredible view looking out over a precipice at the city of LA below it. But this house really to me represents what’s possible when we take constraints and make them interesting. It has a couple of specifically fascinating features.
The bedrooms front right onto the pool. There is basically no front of the house. You pull into a little carport, walk through a little gated opening, and find yourself walking along the bedrooms, which look out of the pool, you get to the bedrooms from the pool deck, and then looking at the L-shaped part of the house that projects out over the cliff edge, which is kitchen first, dining area next, and then the projecting living room with an open, floating hearth. It’s a steel and glass structure. It’s really remarkable.
I, if you can’t conjure images of this when you hear the name Stahl house, go check out some links on the website to images of it. But today I want to talk about the kitchen specifically because it’s a really interesting space. I want to talk about it in plan, the way it works from a circulation perspective. I want to talk about it in elevation, the way that different heights of different parts of the kitchen relate to each other, and I want to talk about it in perspective, the way that the house relates, the way you see it from the pool deck, the way you see it from the living room, the way you see the kitchen from the dining room.
You will not remodel your regular house to look like the Stahl house. You’ve got to start from scratch to make it that. And you will not remodel your kitchen to look exactly like this kitchen. But there are design moves we can take from this house. And when Koenig was designing this, he used an island layout in a relatively open space plan in a similar way multiple times. He doesn’t put out island completely on display the way that a modern sort of blow it all out open plan remodel would do. He does create some privacy.
In fact, um, as I’ll get to a little bit later, he designed the kitchen of this house with sliding panels that could block it off somewhat from view. Although I would really love to know if they were ever actually used regularly by the occupants of the house. But he designs a central island that you work around and then a secondary island, which serves as kind of a buffet or a bar counter that screens the space visually from the more social parts of the house.
When you look at the house in plan, I’ll put I’ll sketch up a rough plan and put it on the show notes page. You will you will think that the kitchen is entirely the open center of the house. And that’s not untrue, but it is also very visually self-contained. It has a specific material language that happens only in and around the kitchen.
The ceiling is actually dropped slightly over the kitchen area. It has its own lighting solution that it may be fluorescent lights behind an opaque or a translucent screen, which, if so, I hope they’ve fixed that with LEDs by now. But it has a drop ceiling. It is surrounded and defined in a very particular way. His go-to combination um for kitchens, and I if you if you read books about him, if you scroll through examples of him, I’ll link to his reference page on usmodernist.org.
You can see a number of his houses have riffs on this kitchen design. I actually don’t know whether this was his first or his last, his greatest, his pinnacle. I’m not sure, but this kitchen is excellent, usable, social, and I’m sure has always been really the heart of the home. One thing he does that I adore is that he has part of its open plan and part of it has a full height wall where he has an embedded refrigerator spot.
So you can slide it in and it feels not chunky, not sort of standing out blocking space. He’s got a wall oven and probably an added after the market, aftermarket uh wall microwave in a full height storage area. And on that same bit of wall, there is a bit of wall-facing countertop with side enclosures. On one side it’s the whole wall fridge, and on the other side it’s the built-in wall space.
This is really helpful to have in a kitchen, even in a relatively wide open kitchen, to have a little bit of counter that’s more protected, a place to tuck something somewhat out of complete view, clutter is a little less visible in that spot, and you’ve got a bit of kitchen wall surface for plugging things into or posting up messages or recipes on or putting some common phone numbers on, regardless of how open plan the rest of the structure is.
The indisputable center of this kitchen concept that you see perfectly exemplified in the Stahlhouse is a generous four-foot island that I think is 10 or maybe 12 feet long. I have to check my notes on that. But it has room for full-depth undercounter cabinets accessible from both sides. He places the main kitchen sink here. There are drawers for common reach and tools. There’s a space with no storage underneath that you can pull up a chair and sit in the main working side.
And then the cooktop, not the it’s not a range, it’s a wall oven and a cooktop, is also located in that island. There’s a fairly clearly defined working side of this big island and then prep or assistance side. The work side is has this sort of kitchen triangle appliances in it. It’s got access to the refrigerator, to the oven, to the cooktop, and to the main sink.
On the opposite side, there’s a secondary sink in the little bar stool, rather, in the little um bar height counter. And that’s a space where someone could sit and look at the cook, or could chop and prep with the cook, or could do a more elaborate baking project, or spread out homework, whatever you want. They’re in the kitchen area, but you’re not in the kitchen working zone. I did note that it is an electric cooktop in the island, nicely spaced out from the main sink.
So the nice thing about having a full island that you can circulate all the way around is that you’ve got multiple types of work that can happen multiple types of places. In fact, you’ve got the secondary island, the narrow one that separates her from the dining room, could be handy for bar top duties facing the dining area, among other things.
And it is backed with a breakfast bar style higher divider that screens it visually from the dining area. This is really important to the perspective viewing of this kitchen. The fact that there are four posts, four columns inside the house, non-structural, that define the edge of the, or four column points. There’s sort of lighter mini columns that define the island that separates it from the dining room. But there are vertical elements that surround all four corners of the kitchen within the house unit.
There are circulation aisles on both sides, and that that higher island that separates it from the dining room has both a bar height counter that gives you just a little bit of visual privacy and some floating upper shelves that again, you can see through them, you can talk through them, you can pass through them, but they create a sense of separation between the dining area and the kitchen. They also very practically block your view.
Specifically, if you are sitting at the dining area at the dining table, you are no longer able to get eyes on a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink or any remaining detritus from the meal prep. It’s all screened from your view, screened from your guest’s view as well.
This is a really lovely thing. And I think when we are thinking about how to interpolate or borrow ideas from this kitchen, having a relatively open connection between a kitchen and another space is fine, if that’s your preference. In my episode a few ago, my interview with Adam, uh, where we talked about the definition of a mid-century kitchen, we defined it as a room with four walls. This is definitely not a room with four walls, but it is still defined as a space. It’s a space with four sides.
And the biggest distinction, actually, there are two the strongest wall side is a real wall that separates the kitchen from the corridor that leads to the bathroom and owner’s bedroom and private spaces in the house. And the next strongest, we’ll call it a quote wall, unquote, is that separation between the kitchen and the dining room. And then on the on the two sides that face out to uh the neighbor’s yard beyond and out to the pool deck on the inner L, there’s not much of a sense of wall, but there is an overhead connection.
If you were in the space in three dimensions, you would feel it as a defined space. So this is what’s so interesting to me. If we think about the Stahlhouse, the iconic image, the um Julia Schulman photograph that is probably most commonly shown of the Stahlhouse is not the kitchen. It’s a shot taken at night of two women in circle skirts sitting in mid-century minimalist furniture in a glass and steel box suspended out over the night skyline of LA. High drama sticks in your mind. It’s gorgeous.
Um honestly, I’ve I have not been to the Stahlhouse. I would love to. I hope that the new owners permit tours because it it’s on my bucket list and I’m not made it there yet. Uh, I am not great with heights, and I wonder how I’ll feel if I get a chance to stand in that living room. Personally, I’ll probably spend more time standing in the kitchen for two reasons. One, because I like it better, and two, because I don’t like feeling like I’m standing over a cliff edge.
But this house is so much more interesting to me than that high drama image because the kitchen is so specifically functional. Thinking about it in perspective, it does so much. Thinking about just a straight cut section through it, the different full height and partial height areas where you can reach across, where you can walk across, where you can see across, is so well thought out, so specific.
Um, it really makes me wonder about the the personal life, the history, the interests of the architect, Pierre Koenig. Did he cook? Did he spend time in a kitchen? What was his level of sympathy for the women in his life who are more likely to have been expected to spend time in kitchens at that point? He really uh put empathy into this space. What was his uh conversation style with the original owner of the home? What did she request and how literally was that request carried out?
I’ve mentioned several times that the house you don’t understand in plan how it feels connected and how it feels specific, but it is actually a fascinating space to discuss in plan. When we talk about circulation, sorry, architect word, when we talk about how you move around this space, there are generous, if not enormous, aisles of movement surrounding the kitchen and within the kitchen.
Part of the reason that an island of any size is really useful in a kitchen, part of the reason that I recommend putting a 22 inch by 22 inch piece of furniture butcher block into the center of a classic mid-century U-shaped kitchen, even if it’s only seven feet across from one cabinet face to the other, is that humans are so capable of getting into traffic jams unless there is a defined route of traffic.
Okay. We’re gonna take a pause on talking about iconic California high modernism, and we’re gonna talk about urban planning and the use of snow to map routes of travel in Midwestern cities. This is gonna be relevant, I promise. I care a lot about urban planning as well, even though I don’t talk about it very much here, because my sister, who is a family medicine doctor with a deep professional interest in pedestrian safety in walkable and multimodal cities as a health indicator, has done a lot of research, uh, particularly in her MPH, on pedestrian safety, on bike safety, on urban planning infrastructure.
And here’s something that becomes very clear when you start to study this, which is that human behavior is more modified by physical structure than it is by a suggestion. You can paint stripes on the street, and at the end of the day, cars will, people in cars will ignore them most of the time. But any amount of actual built infrastructure makes a night and day difference. That’s why poured cement bump outs at a pedestrian crosswalk do cause drivers to slow down.
And you can actually, when I mention the word snack down, if you have not heard this, this is a weird little fun thing to Google. This is when you look for patterns in snowy winter landscapes, in urban landscapes, um, to see where the drive patterns are and where the walking patterns are, and you can see the worn away parts in the snow to see how people are or are not using parts of the street.
And then you can go in and sort of mark out, oh, you know what, no one’s actually even driving here, and also they shouldn’t be. So why are we making this pavement? This should be uh a concrete bumper with a little bit of a urban garden in it, and that’ll make it safer for someone to walk less of a distance across car area from one sidewalk to the next.
If you did not know the term snack down, you’ve just learned something new, and I bet you did not expect to get it in an article in a podcast on the Stahlhouse and Pierre Koenig and Julia Schulman. Uh but the other thing that’s really true is that so like a zebra stripe paint job on the job on the ground doesn’t do the same job as a pedestrian bump out.
Similarly, painting a solid white line to define a bike lane in a wide road does not protect that bike lane. Um, in the Wisconsin winter, it becomes absolutely invisible to the eye as soon as we get a solid slick of snow on the roads. And even in the middle of summer, when it’s completely visible, people will park in that bike lane if they personally feel a need.
But even the slightest little row of built-in bollards, vertically plastic, vertically mounted plastic dividers spaced out every six or twelve feet, and a tiny little concrete bumper that any person killer modern SUV could easily roll right over, does very effectively prevent people from parking in the bike lane and keep the bike lane safe. It’s a huge difference in protection for bikers. And even though the step up from conceptual to actual is really small, it makes them feel nearly as safe as a chunky concrete wall, but with better visibility.
So, what does this mean for the Stahl house? Having, as we have in this floor plan, two distinct full loops of circulation. So you could get around the kitchen by going around the island, little loop, or you could get around the kitchen by making a full loop out through the bedroom hallway, around through the dining room. You could go outside the house. I don’t know that you can get outside the house on the neighbor side.
So maybe it’s two overlapping loops. But there’s such a good way to get around. You can always move around the other way. And having multiple routes, you can go around one side, you can go around the other side of the island, allows for slimmer spacing inside the kitchen itself, more space devoted to the counter surfaces, and then you can run around someone rather than hip bumping with them to get to something on the other side.
Sure, it’s a few more steps, but it makes it possible. I find it to be really interesting that you can actually approach the kitchen from two sides. You can walk along the outer edge of the house and you can walk along the inner pool-oriented edge of the house, and that they chose to make it a full island rather than a wall-engaged peninsula on one side. I really would love to know use case, you know, how much people did come up one side versus the other, slickerware patterns in the flooring material or something like that.
But it is also a very creative, pleasing balance of the space and deals very nicely with the the walls of the house being essentially huge sheets of glass and big sliding glass doors. So here’s the thing about this house the choices. Made for this kitchen would not work everywhere. This house has a lot of features that we can be inspired by and we can generalize from. Have a look. I’m going to be doing some sketching after I wrap up this episode and I’ll put the sketches in the show notes.
On the way that I think this house works so beautifully, some of the features that can be adapted or borrowed. I love the way that the cabinets float. They’re all sitting on little legs. It’s a very European style design rather than being mounted with a kick plate right to the floor. I’m sure it’s hard to dust under the center of that giant island, but at the same time, the whole thing feels very light and floaty and again rests nicely inside the house. That’s a choice that you could borrow. The material palette is a choice you could borrow. The suspended ceiling is an interesting choice to borrow.
But you’re not going to copy and paste this. You’re not going to um translate this one-to-one from that house to yours. And when you look up the Stahl House online, you’ll see a lot of people criticizing it, talking about how weird the bedroom designs are or how they don’t like this kitchen. It feels too open. One of the reasons I love it so much is how odd some of the choices are, how specifically they were made for the site and for the family that lived there.
It blends very much with my personality and my approach to remodel design, which is very informed by the needs of people who will use it and the existing conditions of the house itself. I can’t, I won’t take on hypothetical design projects. People have asked me in the past if I would do a design project speculatively for a house they’re planning to sell.
And my answer is always absolutely not. I don’t know what features, what sociability, what conveniences would be prioritized by the next owners. I can’t design something that will work for someone I’ve not met. And I don’t want something to be built into the house that will then rub the future owners the wrong way and be torn out and thrown away in the next five years. Similarly, people sometimes ask if I could design them a new mid-century style home, a new build. And I could know everything about them, but personally I don’t enjoy starting from scratch. I like constraints. I like complications.
So what makes this house so great is how specific it is to the constraints of its very weird site, and it’s apparently quite creative, unusual family. It is the freedom that you can find in constraints that Pierre Candid work with that make this house iconic today. It’s not that it’s bland and unobjectionable and inoffensive in this sort of HGTV Zillow makeover flipper way, because it is not.
And it’s not because it’s universal and easy fit for every space and every family, because it isn’t. It could not be dropped into any neighborhood in America. This design would not work in a place where your neighbors were too close. This design also required the work of a structural engineer to set it up with steel beams and concrete pillars that support it over the cliff. Architect Pierre Koenig worked in detail with a structural engineer on this, in this case, William Poruch.
He partnered with structural engineers throughout his career to set up the complicated steel and glass designs that he put up, that he put together. So we still see the Julius Schulman photo shoot images of this house today. We still know the name Stahl House. Um, we still think about this kitchen today because of how uniquely and specifically fit it is to its original design brief. And that I think is maybe the most important takeaway. But also this really cool open plan glassed in island design kitchen is really, really cool. Is really, really, really, really cool.
So um I’m gonna link out to some places where you can check out that amazing Julia Shulman photo shoot. I don’t know that, I mean, you can also see snaps that tourists have taken in more recent years, see them in modern color, but uh no one’s really documented it better than he did. And I’ll have some fun little sketching around that I will do in my free time between now and the time of airing for this episode.
But what I really want you to think as we wrap up the kitchen season is how can you end up with a kitchen that feels like the centerpiece of your home? It doesn’t necessarily need to be filled with the most beautiful, expensive, high-end materials, but the specificity of the choices you make, the care that you take with them, the amount that you honor what was originally in your house, or choose to modify it because it was never really doing the most important bold thing.
Let’s get inspired by a crazy cool building like the Stahl House. And by the way, if you want to see it show up in modern lights, this house is so cool and so interesting that has been featured in multiple movies. The first one just a few years after it was built, um, Smog from 1962. Uh things I recognize are Karina Karina, Playing by Heart, Galaxy Quest. It was in an episode of Columbo. Um, I’ll put a link to all of those things from the Wikipedia page also into the show notes page. But that’s gonna be it for today.
Go check out all of that at midmod-midwest.com slash 2407. And don’t forget to look out for the birthday sale. This is your big opportunity to jump into Ready to Remodel at a huge discount. Won’t come around again until next year, when it will be, of course, 1% a better discount, but still, don’t wait.
And if you’ve been thinking about getting in touch, wanting to work with Mid Mod Midwest on a master plan for your house, reach out now before we shut down for the summer and before we get any more booked out. I’ll be back on July 16th with another season of the Mid Mod Rodel podcast. And until then, have a great early summer.