Pasadena location managers don’t need a flux capacitor to travel back in time. Instead, they have the Stuart Building, a gorgeous 1950s-era former office complex that has the ability to immediately transport filmmakers – or anyone who sets foot inside – to the midcentury. A virtual time capsule of authentic retro beauty, the sprawling site was initially erected in 1958 and has remained largely unaltered since, affording film crews the unique opportunity to shoot against a pristinely preserved Neo-Formalist backdrop. The place has become such a show business fixture, in fact, that it was featured in two period productions last year alone – the Starz biographical miniseries “Gaslit,” about famed whistleblower Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts) and her central role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, as well as the much-ballyhooed Olivia Wilde-directed psychological thriller “Don’t Worry Darling.”
Located at 3360 E. Foothill Blvd., the streamlined complex was originally built as a headquarters and plant for the Stuart Company, a vitamin and pharmaceutical manufacturer best known for developing the popular Mylanta heartburn medication. Designed by celebrated modernist architect Edward Durell Stone, who also gave us Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Art and Radio City Music Hall in New York, the property was highly innovative for its time. Crafted with employee comfort in mind, the Stuart Company’s forward-thinking founder, Arthur O. Hanisch, commissioned Stone to create a work environment that would foster wellness and healthy living for his large staff. To that end, numerous recreational amenities were incorporated into the design, including a pool, a pool house, a shaded pavilion with patio furniture fashioned by Brown Jordan, a garden, a dining hall and a terrace. While office napping pods and meditation rooms were several decades away from inception, Hanisch and Stone paved the way for the many employee-friendly office complexes that populate the Silicon Valley landscape today.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The site’s eye-pleasing aesthetic was also quite groundbreaking. Set back 150 feet from the road and boasting a handsome mix of concrete block screens, reflecting pools and pristine greenery originally designed by landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church, the Stuart proved that an office complex need not be utilitarian to be functional, an avant-garde concept for the day. The Los Angeles Conservancy remarks, “The building was cited as a prime example that industrial architecture could be attractive and appealing, as well as cost-effective.”
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The Stuart’s allure carries over to the interior. One step across the threshold grants visitors a glimpse of the structure’s show-stopping central atrium, a light-filled two-story lounge reached via a grand floating staircase. Seemingly plucked straight out of a high-end 1950s design magazine, the bright space is peppered with boldly-colored furnishings, hanging flying saucer-inspired planters and globe lighting. As a National Register of Historic Places Registration Form notes, the room is also capped by “81 translucent plastic skylights set within a coffered, suspended plaster ceiling” and lined with concrete block walls “imprinted with castings of oval-shaped pharmaceutical pills,” a cheeky nod to the Stuart Company’s primary output.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Upon completion, the stunning complex, which Time magazine dubbed “The Palace of Pills,” was chosen as one of the five best designs of the year by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and awarded the group’s prestigious National First Honor accolade.
Its cachet didn’t last long, though. The futuristic site was shuttered following the Stuart Company’s merger with Johnson & Johnson/Merck Pharmaceuticals in 1990 and eventually listed for sale at $16 million. The Metropolitan Transit Authority snapped it up in 1994 and, in a horrific turn of events, set out to raze it to make way for a parking lot. The Pasadena Heritage Group thwarted the plans, thankfully, securing the complex’s placement on the National Register of Historic Places and protecting it from demolition, but as it sat vacant in the interim, vandals descended, defacing nearly every surface and stealing anything not nailed down.
Finally, in 2002, the Stuart was acquired by BRE Properties and tapped for a massive renovation/adaptive reuse project to transform the former office site into a mixed-use apartment complex. Helmed by preservation architect Robert Chattel of Chattel, Inc., the ambitious venture took five years to complete and cost a whopping $54 million. The Stuart at Sierra Madre Villa, as it is now known, opened to new residents in 2007.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Though some ancillary structures were torn down during the renovation, the Stuart Company’s main office building and central atrium, which today serve as a leasing office and communal space, were left largely intact, as was the pool, behind which the residential units were erected. The result is a glorious mix of old and new. As heralded on the apartment complex’s official website, the Stuart “melds midcentury modern architecture with contemporary amenities for a one-of-a-kind living experience.”
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The complex’s 188 units range in size from 585 square feet with one bedroom and one bath to 1,205 square feet with two bedrooms and two baths, with rates starting at $2,288 a month. Residential amenities include a fitness center, a swimming pool, a hot tub, poolside cabanas, a club room, BBQs, conference and meeting space, a dog park, outdoor dining areas, and, of course, the atrium/lounge.
Despite the passage of 65 years, multiple changes of hands, vandalization and the adaptive reuse project, the latter still looks almost exactly as it did when the Stuart Building was originally erected, as evidenced by this historic 1958 photo. As such, very little set dressing or production design is required to make the space ready for its close-up – and location managers have certainly taken note!
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt In May 2022, the atrium popped up on “Gaslit” as the supposed Miami Beach hotel penthouse suite where Nixon donor Kenneth H. Dahlberg (Matt Malloy) hosts a raucous soiree (or “f*ck party,” as he not so eloquently describes it) attended by White House Counsel John Dean (Dan Stevens) and Special Counsel Dick Moore (Nelson Franklin) following the Republican National Convention in the episode titled “Malum in se.”
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt And in “Don’t Worry Darling,” which hit theaters to much hullabaloo last September, the atrium is featured as the luxe sales boutique located inside the Victory community, where Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and her fellow residents shop.
The two productions are hardly the first to take advantage of the Stuart’s magnificent architecture, though.
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Image Credit: 20th Century Studios In 1996, director Tom Hanks utilized the atrium as the Play-Tone Records headquarters, where Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) and his fellow Wonders pose for publicity shots shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in the beloved film “That Thing You Do!”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television Kal (Ellen DeGeneres) and Fran (Sharon Stone) visit a fertility clinic on the premises in the “2000” segment of the HBO movie “If These Walls Could Talk 2.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television Barry ‘Baz’ Blackwell (Scott Speedman) is infuriated when his meeting with Morgan Wilson (Laura San Giacomo) at the Stuart is canceled in the season two episode of “Animal Kingdom” titled “Betrayal.”
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television And the Stuart also pops up as the May Company department store, where Bonnie Nolan (Alicia Silverstone) gets a job after leaving her philandering husband on the television series “American Woman.” Only the exterior of the complex appears on the show. Interior scenes were captured on a set at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank.