Designed by Richard Neutra, with an add-on by son Dion, Hendershot House is an architectural gem

Harumi Taniguchi lived alone in Nichols Canyon for years after the death of her husband.

She wrote poetry, painted, practiced ballet and even met with documentary filmmakers interested in telling her story.

But she rarely went out, preferring to stay within the confines of her longtime home, a tranquil modernist retreat designed for her and her husband by famed architect Richard Neutra in 1962. She lived there until her death this year.

Houses often take on or reflect the personalities of their owners. Stepping into what the official Neutra canon refers to as the Hendershot House (Taniguchi’s husband’s surname) gives you a sense of serenity.

There is no traffic noise; a wall of windows looks out onto a quiet wooded dell.

Neutra’s design unfolds as you walk through it: What at first seems a modest yet pleasing single-story modernist box is soon revealed as an L-shaped series of stories that descend to the forest floor below, through which, improbably, flows a stream.

“One of the nicest aspects of the home is its pure tranquillity — it’s private, it’s gated and it’s nestled up in the hills of Los Angeles. So you have the best of everything,” said real estate agent Ron Papile of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.

In the front of the house, a later addition by the architect’s son Dion adds a large living space that looks out onto a walled garden.

It’s hard to shake the sense that the serenity of the place springs directly from the former owner, who was fond of taking snapshots of her cats dozing in the sunbeams that filter through the trees and set the blond wood interior of the house aglow.

If it is the peace of Harumi Taniguchi that endures in the Hendershot House, it was in some ways a hard-earned peace.

She was born in 1921 in the U.S., the daughter of a farm laborer and a member of the nisei generation of Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II because of their ethnicity. Records indicate that she was held at the Pomona Assembly Center before being moved to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center near Cody, Wyo.

Her occupation was listed as an art teacher.

After the war, she made art, she published books of poetry, and she danced. She married Robert Hendershot, and together they built their house with Neutra.

After her death, during a walk-through of the house by the agents who handled the listing, they found his original plans, including chalk renditions of the exterior elevations, rolled up in the back of a closet.

“Everybody loves to know it’s a single-family home, especially when the original drawings are included,” Papile said.

On the plans is the trap door that led from the lower living room to her studio, where she worked on the paintings that filled the walls. From there it was a short walk to a bench by the stream, where the neighbors often saw her sitting.

The home was listed for $1.9 million; its sale for an undisclosed sum is pending.

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