Son Describes His Architect Father's Creativity in Designing the Enchanting 'Stebel House' in Los Angeles

Actor Zen Gesner, son of legendary architect Harry Gesner, spoke with Architectural Digest about his iconic Stebel House, an enchanting Los Angeles home built in 1961 that looks like it’s straight out of a fairy tale due to the series of connected A-frame structures, the thickly wooded area around the home, and its close proximity to the city.

Zen explained that the house was built solely from his father’s creativity for writer Sidney Stebel and his artist wife Jan. They found the land and sought out Gesner to design their home.

He came up here with his machete …he cleared it out and then camped up here for about six days while he took his sketchpad and made renderings of what he would present to the Stebels as their home.

Zen shared some of his father’s greatest inspirations.

My father took inspiration from a lot of things. I’d say the primary thing was nature and the environment in which he lived. …And my father had spent a lot of time in Switzerland. He was an avid mountain climber and a skier, and he spent a lot of time around the Swiss chalets, so that influenced a lot of the design as well.

Zen also talked about his father’s talent in taking ideas from one place in time and making it modern.

And if you take the Stebel House here, which is modeled, if you blur your eyes a little bit, you see a Swiss chalet, but he found a way to take that conventional design in Europe and bring it into a mid-century new twist. In every one of his houses, you really feel a sense that it connects with something deeper, something primal, and I think it takes a true artist to really recognize that and be able to harness that feeling and put it into something like a house.