No, it wasn't Schindler

The eager young men looked past the drab, disheveled appearance of the concrete slab structure with its corrugated fiberglass awnings, heavy drapes and thick tangle of rubber trees -- straight through to its true potential.

"It was a great party house," Pascal recalled. "We'd never seen anything quite this funky. And we definitely didn't have to worry about any damage we'd do."

Over the next two years, Pascal's friends moved out, but he stayed on. He had grown fond of this unusual place with its graceful curving walls, soffit lights, chrome stair railings and steel-casement windows allowing in great floods of light. In the spring of 1983, by then working as an equities trader, he was able to buy the house because "the owners sold it to me cheaply -- $235,000."

And so began this story that plays out like a good double-themed detective yarn -- the real identity of a house revealed through the stripping away of layers of disguise, and a mystery architect's identity revealed in the process. It became an amazing saga of dual rehabilitation, one that restored both the house and the architect's name.

The sellers had tried to convince Pascal that the house had been designed by Modernist architect Rudolph Schindler, designer of more than 300 structures in Southern California from the early '20s through the early '50s. But even with his limited knowledge of architecture, Pascal knew that couldn't be so.

"There are no unknown Schindlers," he said. But he also knew that, Schindler or not, this was most surely an example -- and a fine one -- of Streamline Moderne, a genre popular in the '30s that had fallen out of favor.

Six months after the purchase, Pascal met his future wife, Julie, a fashion designer, who, he joked, "started dating me in the first place simply because she fell for the house."

Together, they tackled what was to be a years-long task of returning the house to its essence: They cleared away 40 tons of debris, including cinderblock walls dividing up the yard, an aluminum patio and a terrace outside the bedroom.