Tour an Architect’s 1950s San Fernando Valley Home, Where Every Object Has Meaning

“I call it an ‘oyster house,’ because it’s ugly on the outside and beautiful on the inside,” Rachel Shillander states about the place where her professional and creative life cohere in the western reaches of the San Fernando Valley. The architect and founder of multidisciplinary studio LLand is inclined to reference a Valley deep cut when people profess geographic ignorance. “I’m like Frank Zappa’s Joe, and I have my garage,” Shillander says. (They still might not get it.)

While her peers are more likely to settle in post-bohemian hubs conventionally associated with LA’s creative ecosystem—think: Venice, Silver Lake, the Parks, both Echo and Highland—Shillander’s comfort zone is this under-the-radar, rough-around-the-edges pocket a few miles away from where she grew up in Calabasas. The nondescript three-bedroom home stands as a classic example of the post–World War II building boom that put the San Fernando Valley’s agricultural Eden in the rearview as the growth of low-density SoCal suburbia accelerated.

In a corner of the living room, Shillander’s homage to iconoclastic architect and Frank Lloyd Wright disciple Bruce Goff’s Al Struckus house in nearby Woodland Hills connects LA and Oklahoma. Objects on the Carving Table include Dave O’Brien woodwork, glass slag by the so-called Oklahoma Glass Man, and an Addison Woolsey vase. Jake Sheiner’s interpretation of the 405 North slicing through the Sepulveda Pass brings it all back home to the Valley.

This cozy capsule of mid-1950s normcore charm has proven to be a stabilizing anchor to mine what she calls “the generational aesthetic.” Shillander, who has developed expertise in residential construction management and contributed a plan to the Case Study 2.0 wildfire recovery program, studied architecture in Tucson and Copenhagen, and lived in New York City and Tulsa, interspersed with LA stints at UCLA for grad school and working for AD100 firm Marmol Radziner before resettling here. Her peripatetic stops included “a 200-square-foot trailer right on the creek” in the hippie hamlet of Topanga before rooming with her parents during the pandemic as she hunted for a rental property with a garage that could double as a studio.

“When I moved into this place, I finally got all my stuff,” Shillander says. Once liberated from the confines of a storage unit, assessing the material contents of her life proved revelatory for someone who spent years creating buildings and spaces for others. “I have a personal style,” she realized. Past the spinning Case Study Bell of her own design mounted at the front door, the aesthetic she describes as “a subconscious design language passed through eras, much like generational trauma—but in material form” takes over.

Tire prints by Oklahoma-bred artist Joe Andoe and an Entler wall sconce hang in the entry hall. Shillander whipstitched by hand the rag curtains used as window treatments throughout the house.