Cultural Salon

As immigrants the Neutra's resolved to make contacts in Los Angeles society by using their unusual home as a magnet for social events, often inviting Los Angeles people along with distinguished international visitors who knew Richard Neutra from his publications or frequent international lecture trips. They would sit on this couch and on chairs eating off of specially designed trays that were handed through this  pass-through from the kitchen.  Mrs. Neutra kept a diary of visitors between 1938 and 1963. There are more than 300 names on this list.   For example, on September 10, 1941, the Neutras hosted a reception in honor of the French Painter Fernand Leger.  The guests included Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, the Stravinskys and Countess Tolstoy among others.  Over the years, foreign visitors included architects Alvar Aalto, Jorn Utzon Siegfried Gideon, Bernard Rudovsky and Enrique Mindlin.  American visitors included Frank Lloyd Wright, Architects, Serge Chermayeff, Charles and Ray Eames, Victor Gruen and Lazlo Moholy Nagy, Raphael Soriano, J.R. Davidson Historian, Henry Russell Hitchock, ceramists Otto and Gertrude Natzler,  photographers, Edward and Brett Weston,  and cultural figures such as Emil Ludwig, Grant Wood, Chet Huntley, , Robert Hutchins,  Josef von Sternberg, John Nicholas Brown, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Linus Pauling,  and editors Norman Cousins, Carey McWilliams and John Entenza. Local figures like John Anson Ford, Jake Zeitlin, Frank Wilkinson  actors Clarence Muse and Lousie Rainer and Unitarian minister Stephen Fritchman were also visitors.