Inside The Yen House, One of San Diego’s Most Iconic Homes

From the street, the house appears unremarkable. But step through the bold, central-pivot wood-and-glass front door, and the Yen House from famed San Diego architect and visionary Kendrick Bangs Kellogg begins to speak. Undulating, interwoven spaces whisper secrets of living and possibility. Can a house be a sculpture? Can a sculpture be a house?

Located on a steep lot overlooking La Jolla’s Pottery Canyon and offering views of La Jolla Shores, the Yen House insists visitors ponder such equations. Sometimes referred to as the Lotus House for the petal-like shape of its roof lines, the structure is more than a dwelling. It is a singular achievement of San Diego design, vision, trust, and collaboration.

“The house will literally pull the breath out of your lungs and put a smile on your face,” says Keith York, founder of Modern San Diego. “It’s one of the most intoxicating living spaces in the county. Period. Full stop. It demands its own language.”

Outside, punctuating the blooming silhouette of the three-bed, two-bath home, is a sweeping concrete triangular column. Its top serves as the central fireplace of the main living room. At its bottom, it becomes a shower. Inside, the home plays with space, compressing those within before letting them go into grand arenas.

“It’s like a nautilus shell,” says Dee Yen, whose parents, Dr. Samuel and Kathryn Yen, commissioned Kellogg to build their dream home in the late ’70s. “Everything is on a curve moving downward. That it mimics nature so well is incredible.”

In the middle of the spiraling nautilus is a multi-floor glass-and-plexiglass atrium funneling light throughout the center of the home, offering an energetic compass.

“The atrium orients you, so you know where you are,” says architect, historian, and author Alan Hess, who featured the Yen House in a book on modern architecture in the American West.

“The house looks like a bundt cake with a hole in the center,” York adds. “It’s just otherworldly, almost like you’re underwater. There’s so much glass, you experience the outdoors from every room.”

Contemporary houses are often a collection of rectangles, marketed in terms of number of floors, number of rooms. With its Venn-diagram blueprint, the Yen House doesn’t just depart from this thinking—it seems to have never been weighed down by such formalities in the first place.

“Ken would have nothing to do with boxes, with convention,” Hess says, “because they don’t fit all conditions and demands.”

There is scarcely a corner to be found throughout the nearly 3,400-square-foot home. With its glass walls and bending movements of wood, the house conjures spaces that are decidedly un-house-like.

When standing in the kitchen, “you’re literally at the helm of a ship looking out at the ocean,” Dee Yen says. She remembers Kellogg and his crew steaming countless individual Douglas fir boards onsite, stapling them into place to create the wave-like ceiling. “The craftsmanship is incredible. The wood, the curves. To this day, when you walk in, it smells warm and woodsy.”

Kellogg, who was born in Mission Beach and attended Grossmont High School, died this year at the age of 90. His work is celebrated as an iconoclastic continuation of architectural demigods Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as local legends Irving J. Gill (La Jolla Women’s Club) and Llyod Ruocco (Civic Theater). Though his famous works span the globe in places like Hawaii and Japan, most of Kellogg’s designs can be seen throughout San Diego County.

And while Kellogg garners the praise, York points out that it was the Yens who provided him the latitude to imagine and build such an intrepid habitat.

“I give them a lot of credit,” he says. “They allowed this to happen.”

“My dad wanted to build a showpiece,” Dee Yen confirms. “He wanted something earthy and beautiful and show-stopping.”

And while the Yen family eventually sold the house after Dr. Yen died, his daughter says his collaboration with Kellogg fulfilled his dream.

“There is no other house like it,” York adds. “It’s just a radical house.”