19995 Sischo Drive

The Topanga Historical Society keeps a photograph of a house on Sischo Drive with a caption worth reading twice: architect Earl Wear designed it to be "of" the land, not just "on" it. That was the Ware House of 1954, built for Bud and Joan Ware at 20015 Sischo Drive. Four years later Wear added the Anderson House at 19974, two buildings joined under one expansive roof, with an artist's studio following in 1964.

Wear is one of the canyon's quiet legends. Born in Windsor, Ontario in 1925, trained at the University of Toronto, a bombardier navigator in the war, he came to Los Angeles in 1952, worked with John Lautner, and built only nine houses in his career, following Frank Lloyd Wright's organic principles. In 1963 he founded the Topanga Association for a Scenic Community, the preservation group that still watches over the canyon. Two of his nine houses stand on this one short ridge in upper Fernwood.

Number 19995 is the ridge's next chapter. In 1970, between the Wear houses, went up a California A-frame: two pitched planes meeting overhead, the gable ends glazed floor to ceiling, the exterior stained black so the house recedes into the mature pines around it. Where Wear folded his houses into the hillside, the A-frame states its geometry outright, exposed structure, glass, and light, and the two approaches have been in conversation across the road for fifty years.

Inside, the full triangular volume reads at once. Exposed beams rise to the ridge line over white surfaces and natural wood, two glass walls frame canyon and treetop views, and a sculptural Danish wood stove holds the center of the room. Living, dining, and the original kitchen open onto broad decks built around two living pines.

The listing records a single ownership of 25 years, a director and writer, and the house shows the continuity: three bedrooms and two baths stepping down a multilevel plan that has stayed remarkably intact, the kitchen original, the terraced grounds mature. A double carport sits off the drive. Topanga's village, the trailheads, Malibu, and the Pacific are minutes down the canyon, and the record of the ridge is two doors away in either direction.