A Californian Now: The Thomas Mann House
By Lilian Pfaff, Ph.D.

Recognized in his lifetime as one of the greatest German writers, Thomas Mann was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. An outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, he and his family emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 and received Czechoslovakian citizenship and passports in 1936. In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to the United States.

Mann entered the United States as visiting professor to the University of Princeton. In July 1940, he and his wife Katia traveled by train to the West Coast, where they lived at 441 North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, Los Angeles until October of that year. By early September, Thomas Mann had made the decision to settle down permanently in California.[1] Through a real estate agent he found a property on San Remo Drive and, after a brief interlude back in Princeton, the family returned to California for good in April 1941. They resided at 740 (520) Amalfi Drive, Pacific Palisades, and from February 5, 1942, in the newly built home, designed by Davidson, at 1550 San Remo Drive, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272.[2]

The Mann family had initially commissioned the Hungarian architect Paul László to build their house in September 1940. László, who had come to the United States in 1936, had already made quite a career as designer of mansions for Hollywood stars. 

Unfortunately, the blueprint he submitted to the Manns on September 26 has been lost. The family initially had more traditional ideas of a colonial style villa with columns and portico,[3] but, with the estimated $22,000 costs being too high, they asked László to revise the project. They did not like the revised design, however, and rejected it.[4] How Davidson eventually ended up building the Thomas Mann House is unclear. Esther McCoy suggests Ernst Lubitsch, a mutual friend from the Hollywood film industry, as a possible connection,[5] as well as artist Galka Scheyer.[6] J. R.’s daughter-in-law Barnaby Davidson claims that Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich was the link, he and Davidson having been acquainted in Germany. Correspondence from March 1941 exists between the two of them, including birthday greetings from Davidson to Heinrich.[7]

Whether the Mann family cared at all for modern architecture is questionable, according to Barnaby. Katia Mann by her own account definitely did not.

 “It was a torture for him from the very beginning. He needed to think of a house that would accommodate a family of eight…it was very difficult. And of course because J. R. was used to the opposite of working especially with the woman of the household, so this was a complete reversal for him. She didn’t want anything that he had to say. And she wasn’t interested in the structure of the house….Mann was able to get the house design he wanted and Katia was able to decorate it as she wanted.”[8]

The daughter-in-law refers here to the interior decoration by Paul Huldschinsky who obviously appealed to Katia Mann’s bourgeois 19th-century lifestyle. This, presumably, is the reason that there are no photographs of the house’s interior. Barnaby suggests that, unlike Neutra who wanted to build Mann’s house, Davidson was willing to accept these conditions and stay out of the interior decoration and “he (Davidson) didn’t want the chintz to be photographed.”[9] The Richard Neutra episode comes up regularly in various secondary sources. The Manns apparently found Neutra too pushy and pretentious, while Neutra, in turn was frustrated that the family finally handed the contract to Davidson: “Why settle for less—when you can get the best?” (Neutra).[10]This affected both the relationships between the two men and between their wives, who up until this point had been best friends, and Dione Neutra ended up sending Greta a not very convincing letter of apology.[11]Correspondence reveals that in the spring of 1941, while the Mann family was already in touch with Davidson, they were also considering commissioning New York architect Paul Lester Wiener who would supposedly waive his fee.[12]

 The construction had its challenges,[13] and at some point was even postponed for financial as well as political reasons.[14] Although the United States had entered the War, resulting in a freeze on private home building, the project eventually came to completion.

In letters to his brother Heinrich, Thomas Mann briefly mentioned the house twice.[15] On September 22, 1940, he wrote from Brentwood that he recently acquired a property through a broker “with seven palms and many citrus trees.”[16] This, he wrote, was  inspiration for his current work on “Joseph the Provider,“ the fourth volume of his Joseph novel, since he was reminded of biblical Egypt. On February 4, 1941, he referred again to progress on the new house: “…We are in avid correspondence with Davidson our architect, and have reached a basic agreement on the plans, so work on the house can begin soon.”[17]

In an interview[18] with Thomas Hines, Davidson mentioned that the Manns initially planned to hire Paul László as interior designer, though they ended up choosing Paul Huldschinsky, a family friend from their Munich days, himself an émigré in Los Angeles since 1939.[19]

The following original Davidson statements are from that interview with Hines: 

 “Let me tell you what I feel about this house. I start with the places and the plan. I visualize them, that’s my strength. All my clients are very happy, because they realize it when they live on the property and they discover things in the plans they didn’t expect including Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann was teaching in Princeton and was away. So many things were settled by letters with Katia Mann. Then he came back and I visited several times.” 

Thomas Hines: “Did he give you a program?”

Davidson: “I asked him and Katia liked me. He has built like seven or more buildings (it was actually three—authors note) before in several places and they had quite an impact on his writings. I took all I could get by letters, descriptions, what exactly they want. I asked him what to do. And he has a very organized day schedule. In the morning he writes on his writings, then he makes a little walk on the piers on the esplanade in Santa Monica, then he has lunch and rest. Then I as an architect you could come at two or three get coffee and then could talk. Then he got tired. The admirers could come at four to five.”[20]

From April to June 1941 the Mann family tried to figure out whether or not to build a house in a time of political crisis. After negotiating Davidson’s price down from $30,000 to $24,000, they signed Ernest M. Schlesinger, another fellow German, as contractor. This surviving “Building Construction Contract” dates from June 21, 1941 and specifies the house as a “20 room single family residence and double garage.”[21] Only 140 days later, the house was ready for them to move in. The courageous decision to build the house was in keeping with Thomas Mann’s idea of wanting to settle down and be part of his environment. 10.1. and 10.1a Press attending the foundation stone ceremony on July 7, 1941, quoted him: “‘I will become a real Californian now,’ he added, pointing to the scores of lemon trees which surround his property on all sides.”[22] A caption to a photograph in the New York magazine Aufbau from August 15 announced that the villa “will be named ‘Seven Palms’ after a group of tall palm trees.”[23] As if to reinforce the name, a professional photographer at this time created a series of pictures of Thomas Mann in which he always appears before a backdrop of palm trees.[24]

The Mann family finally moved into their newly built home on San Remo Drive on February 5, 1942, and on April 10, 1942, Mann wrote to Davidson that it took a while until the last curtain was hung.  “In building and shaping our home, you have combined the practical and the tasteful with real mastery.”[25]

And he concludes: “A friendly and intimate environment is of such great spiritual importance in today’s oppressive times, and therefore we are greatly indebted to you and truly thankful for your service.”[26]

Davidson thanked Thomas Mann on April 18, 1942, and hoped “that you and your family may spend many happy hours with creative energy in that house.”[27] Mann himself described the elongated two-story house with its large garden as a “country house,”[28] while his grandson Frido, in his autobiographical novel “Professor Parzifal,”, referred to it as a protective castle that provided shelter and seclusion from the world.[29]

Davidson himself pointed out a special feature of the house: 

 “To assure the greatest privacy for Dr. Mann to work, a special wing was designed with the study on the ground floor and a private stairway leading directly up into his second floor bedroom with sundeck. The wall extension of the Study into the garden acts furthermore as a baffle against noises from the nearby terrace.”[30]

According to Ehrhard Bahr the house “by no means corresponded to the international modern style of the thirties, so that the architect did not count it among his best buildings,”[31] and “once referred to it in a nostalgic sense of the word as ‘German’.”[32] The house, in its cubic outline, is quite radical and unembellished. Its 19th-century interior, which exudes middle-class coziness, stands in stark contrast to the building’s overall sober architectural language. It is likely that Davidson did not perceive the bourgeois interior design as problematic, since he had already integrated it into his own Berlin penthouse—though in a more modernized French tradition, as his diaries show. Possibly he simply did not want to be associated with the interior. Either the Mann family didn’t know that Davidson was a renowned interior designer, or they wanted to be loyal to their friend. They may simply have found the interior design of Huldschinsky more suitable, conveying a familiar bourgeois mentality and continuity. From the summer of 1941 to March 1942, colors, wallpaper, furniture, and fabrics were selected. Davidson and contractor Schlesinger decided jointly on the exterior color. 

Heinrich Wefing interprets the contrast of inside and outside as the two principles of exile: “On the outside adapting to the new Californian world, inside the attempt to reenact, yet incompletely, what’s lost.”[33]

 The Thomas Mann House is one of the few new-build homes of German émigrés. It is also the most prestigious, although little is known about the actual construction phase.[34] Mann wrote many of his books there: “Doctor Faustus,“ “Lotte in Weimar,“ “Joseph the Provider” as well as parts of “Confessions of Felix Krull.“ 

The villa’s “moderate Modernity”[35] is not so much defined by the actual shape of the building but rather by its details, for example the segmented layout or the way that the second floor rooms face the veranda. The gently sloping roof complied with planning laws but was at odds with the International Style, as were the framed windows which were not arranged in the expected continuous strip. The lack of indoor-outdoor flow, and the consequent inward-looking spatial orientation also demonstrate a resistance to modern influences.  Floor-to-ceiling glass windows and doors in the Modernist style are lacking or are subdivided at window level, and there is a rather more conventional separation of living and dining rooms instead of a spacious open plan. Davidson’s heritage and personality may have been the deciding factor in why the Mann family chose a modern house in the first place – rather than “an aesthetic or even cultural-political statement.”[36]. He must have been the right man, one who does not engage in experiments—be they in spatial layout or the choice of materials. The building has a conventional wooden frame structure and is traditionally plastered. Davidson's primary concern was not to build a modern-style home, but to reflect the lifestyle and needs of its inhabitants. 

Visitors reach the building’s front door by a walkway next to the elongated north façade. They enter a hall with a staircase  and an immediate entry to the living room with its fireplace and large window facing the curved south terrace. Morning light enters through a double French doors facing east.[37] Opposite is the dining room, and behind it, the kitchen and staff quarters. Thomas Mann’s study with its panoramic windows to the south-east is a separate cube, tilting away from the ground floor’s center, the living room. The study is connected to Mann’s bedroom upstairs via a private staircase from a narrow hallway lined with bookshelves. A freestanding wall extending the façade of the tilted wing and closing off the southern terrace, gave privacy to the writer in his office and protected him from noise in the garden. Upstairs, three bedrooms are lined along the balcony with Katia Mann’s bedroom at the end connected to her husband’s bedroom in the angled wing of the building. These two bedrooms each have their own bathroom, while children and grandchildren share a bath between their three bedrooms.

Thomas Mann prized his study, and after moving in he described it to his daughter Erika as the most beautiful study he ever had. Later, when living in Switzerland, he wrote: “That house was so very much mine. I do not like this one.”[38] 

Building the home of the famous German writer did not really add to Davidson’s reputation. Only one journal published the project, and the architect himself did not even add the house to his various lists of work.

Excerpt from Lilian’s Pfaff’s book titled J.R. Davidson: A European Contribution to California Modernism, Birkäuser, Basel (2019)
Photography by Content Production
Floorplans from Architecture & Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum University of California Santa Barbara

Footnotes:

[1] Thomas Mann, Tagebücher (Diaries), September 3, 1940.

[2] Thomas Mann became a US citizen in 1944. He moved back to Switzerland in 1952, where he lived until he died August 12, 1955. 

[3] Heinrich Wefing, “We Are at Home Wherever the Desk Stands: Thomas Mann’s Residence in Southern California,“ in: Building Paradise. Exile Architecture in California (Villa Aurora Architecture Symposium 2003, Pöge Druck, Leipzig, 2004), p. 57.

[4] Thomas Mann, Tagebücher (Diaries), September 18, 1940.

[5] Esther McCoy, The Second Generation (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1984), p. 20. 

[6] Esther McCoy’s archive contains a note that Galka Scheyer, for whom Greta Davidson had worked as secretary, was the connection. See Esther McCoy papers, 1876–1990, bulk, 1938–1989. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[7] On March 31, 1941, Heinrich Mann wrote a letter to Davidson thanking him for his best wishes, presumably as response to birthday greetings. Letter from Heinrich Mann to J. R. Davidson, March 31, 1941, UCSB.

[8] Barnaby Davidson, interviewed by Kurt Helfrich, p. 47

[9] Lilian Pfaff, Interview with Barnaby Davidson, unpublished, Santa Barbara, May 19, 2012.

[10] Ibid., also Esther McCoy, The Second Generation, p. 21.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Thomas Mann, Tagebücher (Diaries), April 19, 1941. 

[13] Ehrhard Bahr, “Nach Westwood zum Haareschneiden. Zur externen und internen Topographie des Kalifornischen Exils von Thomas Mann,“ in: Newsletter of the international Feuchtwanger Society, Volume 8, 2010, pp. 12–24, 20.

[14] According to the April 18 diary entry, there was a discussion with the architect about abandoning the project and the sale of the property. Thomas Mann, Diary, April 18, 1941.

[15] Hans Wysling (Ed.), Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, translated by Don Reneau (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1970). 

[16] “Letter to Heinrich, Los Angeles, Brentwood, September 22, 1940,“ in: Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, p. 238 (the property was purchased September, 12, 1940).

[17] “Letter to Heinrich, Princeton, February, 4, 1941,“ in: Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, p. 242.

[18] J. R. Davidson and Greta Davidson in a conversation with Thomas Hines, June 27, 1974. 

[19] Ehrhard Bahr, “Nach Westwood zum Haareschneiden,” p. 20.

[20] J. R. Davidson and Greta Davidson in a conversation with Thomas Hines, June 27, 1974.

[21] Building Construction Contract “Thomas Mann House,” UCSB.

[22] Quoted from: “Thomas Mann Home Started on Riviera, Noted Novelist Plans to Become Californian,“ in: Evening Outlook, July 12, 1941, p. 7. 

[23] Der Aufbau: “Californien ist das Wunschland des Architekten,“ in: Die Westküste. Californien-Ausgabe des Aufbau, August, 15, 1941, year 7, edition 33, p. 11. UCSB.

[24] Presumably Ernst (Ernest) Gottlieb, a German emigrant (1938), who was Thomas Mann’s portraitist. Photographs of the house with the Mann family and the architecture also appeared in the publication “House for Thomas Mann,“ in: California Arts and Architecture(December 1942), pp. 36–37.

[25] Letter from Thomas Mann to J. R. Davidson, April 10, 1942, UCSB.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Letter from J. R. Davidson to Thomas Mann, April 18, 1942, UCSB. 

[28] Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer/Querido-Verlag, 1949), p. 681.

[29] Heinrich Wefing, p. 65.

[30] Davidsons description of the “Thomas Mann House,“ corresponds to the text published in: “House for Thomas Mann,“ in: California Arts and Architecture (December 1942), pp. 36–37.

[31] Ehrhard Bahr, “Nach Westwood zum Haareschneiden,“ p. 20.

[32] Notes from Esther McCoy, AAA Esther McCoy Papers. 

[33] Heinrich Wefing, “We are at Home,“ p. 83.

[34] Ibid., p. 51.

[35] This designation, also called “other Modernity,“ goes back to German-language research on Modernity and is used, e.g., to classify the buildings of the Swiss Otto Rudolf Salvisberg.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Historical photographs of the Lappen family, who bought the Thomas Mann House in 1952, show that the sliding doors were divided in the lower third and thus simulate traditional patio doors. 

[38] Thomas Mann, Tagebücher (Diaries), March 3, 1953, p.34. 
Susan Sontag does not comment on the house after meeting with Mann in the house on San Remo Drive. She does, however, remember the darkness of the study. Konrad Wachsman notices the beautiful property, but says about the house: “By Californian standards, nothing special.” Susan Sontag, “11: Pilgrimage,“ in: Stephen D. Dowden (Ed.), A Companion to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), pp. 221–239 and Wefing, p. 70, Note 42. In 1952 the house was difficult to sell. The new owners, Chester and John Lappen, removed the wall between Mann’s study and the living room, and they built a pool in the garden. In the spring of 2016, the house entered the real estate market without naming the architect or the famous builder. In a spectacular rescue operation, it was acquired by the German government in the summer of 2016 and now houses participants of a fellowship program. See: Lilian Pfaff, “Kulturdenkmal auf dem Immobilienmarkt,“ in: Tec21, (16/2016) and Lilian Pfaff, “Dieses Haus soll mehr sein als ein Denkmal,“ in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6/20/2018, p. 36