Nearing his 90th birthday, Kappe is one of the last living ar-
chitects to have practiced during the birth of mid-century
modern. And he’s still building modern homes, expanding
on the vision he fi rst established in the 1950s and 60s, when
he took the clean steel lines of his predecessors Frank Lloyd
Wright, Richard Neutra, and Rudolph Schindler and craft-
ed them in wood, lending a uniquely Californian warmth to
the modern era. Challenging natural sites are his forte, but
not as acts of man’s dominance over Mother Nature. Rather,
Kappe’s hillside homes pay homage to Nature’s complexi-
ties, echoing her elegant geometry.
The most notable example is his own home, the Kappe
Residence (1967). The 4,000 square foot structure in-
cludes materials like Douglas fi r, redwood, and glass
camoufl aged among the mature oaks and eucalyptus of
a steep hillside in Los Angeles’s Rustic Canyon. A warm,
luxurious home of multiple levels, it miraculously hovers
above a natural spring,
a monument of sorts to
Kappe’s fondness for
solving impossible prob-
lems. We sit inside this
midpoint of man and na-
ture, ground and sky, to
discuss the future.
canyon vernacular”; and in 2008 it was named one of the
top ten houses in L.A. by the Los Angeles Times.
For Kappe, two weeks plus some modern ideals can go a
long way.
• • •
Ray Kappe was born in Minneapolis in 1927, the son of
Romanian Jewish immigrants. His grandfather was a
cabinet maker and contractor who built Craftsman-esque
homes. Kappe loved Minneapolis, with its Scandinavian
infl uences, tree-lined streets, and pristine lakes. When
he wasn’t outside, he wished he could be. But he spent
most of his childhood staring out the windows of rented
apartments. It seemed his father had an unusual aversion
to the traditional American dream of home ownership.
“My dad never wanted to own a house, and he liked rent-
ing,” says Kappe. “What
brought that on, I’m not
sure. I never could quite
understand. Maybe it
was the idea of having to
keep up maintenance?”
All of these factors in-
fl uenced Kappe’s homes
to this day: no matter
how ambitious, they are
known for their sturdi-
ness, practicality and
energy effi ciency.
“YOU KNOW,
I NEVER FOUND
ARCHITECTURE
DIFFICULT,” KAPPE
SAYS. “I NEVER FELT
LIKE I WAS SUFFER-
ING THROUGH IT.”
“Whatever you do, en joy
your life,” says Kappe, as
unpretentious and warm
as his home. He’s dap-
per-casual in a charcoal
shirt open at the collar,
tan pants and a gray goa-
tee. Sitting on a royal blue
chair beneath a mid-cen-
tury metal lamp, Kappe
speaks wisely about both
architecture and life,
waving his expressive
hands as he talks, his voice a low, friendly rumble.
“You know, I never found architecture difficult,” he says.
“I never felt like I was suffering through this thing, nev-
er worked nights like so many others. Yes, it was very
rare if I worked a night or a weekend. I didn’t do any of
that because you get there just the same. I used to tell
my students, if you finish a project early, good. Go to the
beach. Sometimes the more you work on something, the
worse it gets.”
Case in point: it took him just two weeks to design the
Kappe Residence. The resulting structure is considered
“one of the most magnifi cent houses in Los Angeles” by
the L.A. Conservancy; in 1996, the City of Los Angeles
designated his home a Cultural Heritage Monument; in
2004, it was named and “a landmark of nature-friendly
modernism” by The New York Times Magazine, which
also described Kappe as “the only architect who truly
signifi es the seamless combination of Modernism and
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When he was 10, the fam-
ily packed up and moved
to California, taking a
long road trip across the
northern states to get to
their new home. Kappe
remembers a lodge they
stopped at in Glacier Na-
tional Park in Montana, and the state’s big skies and rustic,
expansive yet cozy structures continue to inspire him. “I
can still smell the big fi replace. I can feel the scale of it. The
whole thing. Those things stay in your subconscious,” he
says, his eyes welling up as he fondly remembers.
After arriving in California, Kappe enrolled at Emerson Ju-
nior High School in West L.A. which happened to have been
designed by leading modernist architect Richard Neutra. Ac-
customed to the claustrophobic brick and mortar confi nes of
his Minneapolis school, the bright clean lines and light-fi lled
hallways of Neutra’s school were a revelation to Kappe, who
had obviously inherited his grandfather’s fascination with
construction. “Walking the long corridors was a whole new
experience for me,” Kappe says, remembering the openness
and the light. He also visited a Neutra house as a teenager
and around the same time read an article about architecture
as a profession. He knew exactly what he was going to do
with his life. A gifted student, he eventually gained a place in
UC Berkeley’s architecture program.