Silvertop Began With an Inventor’s Ambition

From below, the roof appears to answer the hill. Its long arch rises above the Silver Lake Reservoir, making 2138 Micheltorena Street look less placed on the slope than drawn from it.

Los Angeles has plenty of houses that vanish behind hedges or dissolve into the larger city. Silvertop does the opposite. Its profile has become part of Silver Lake’s architectural identity—a familiar curve in a neighborhood defined by steep streets, difficult lots and homes designed in active conversation with the terrain.

The history of 2138 Micheltorena Street, Los Angeles, CA begins in 1956, when inventor Kenneth Reiner commissioned architect John Lautner to design the house. That pairing matters. Lautner is now one of the towering names of Southern California modernism, but concentrating on the architect alone makes the origin story too tidy.

A commission requires a client willing to imagine, ask and risk. Reiner was not simply the person whose name appeared on the paperwork. As an inventor, he brought his own ambitions to the project. Silvertop emerged from the meeting of those ambitions with Lautner’s architecture.

The architectural inventory records the property as the Reiner-Burchill Residence. That formal name performs a small but important act of historical repair: it returns the client’s name to a building frequently discussed through the fame of its architect.

This is one reason inventories, address histories and the work of knowledgeable real estate agents matter. Houses accumulate shorthand. Over time, a complicated collaboration may become “a Lautner,” just as another property might be reduced to a style, a celebrity association or a sale price. Licensed agents and careful researchers help preserve the fuller record—the people, names and chronology attached to the parcel.

Silvertop is unquestionably a Lautner house. But it is also a Reiner commission. Both statements are necessary.

The address also belongs to a broader Los Angeles tradition: the hillside house as an experiment. Silver Lake’s slopes are not passive scenery. They force decisions about structure, access, views and the relationship between private rooms and the city beyond them. Here, the arched roof became the defining public gesture, visible enough to join the reservoir and surrounding hills in the neighborhood’s visual memory.

That visibility can obscure the human beginning. Before a famous house becomes an icon, someone has to believe it should exist. In 1956, Reiner chose Lautner and set a design process in motion. The inventor’s role gives Silvertop an additional charge: this was architecture connected to a person accustomed to pursuing new possibilities, not merely repeating established forms.

I live and work in Los Angeles, where architecture is often encountered in fragments—a roof above a wall, a silhouette across a canyon, a structure glimpsed from a winding street. Silvertop rewards that kind of looking, but its record asks us to look past the silhouette too.

The address survives as more than a pin on a map. It holds the name Reiner-Burchill, the year 1956, an inventor’s commission and an architect’s response. Together, those facts explain why the house belongs both to architectural history and to the lived memory of Silver Lake.

Readers can continue exploring Silvertop at https://www.homestalgia.com/home/silvertop-los-angeles-ca and consult the Lautner material at USModernist and the neighborhood record at Just Silver Lake.

If your own home carries a forgotten name, commission or neighborhood memory, add its story to the record.