The most extensive private art collection in the Valley -- as well as one of its most architecturally celebrated homes -- belonged to an eminence of the 1930s movie colony. Josef von Sternberg, the Austrian-born director of such films as The Blue Angel and Shanghai Express, owned a ranch in citrus country between Northridge and Chatsworth with a house fashioned of glass and steel and surrounded by a sixteen-foot moat with drawbridge.

Modernist architect Richard Neutra designed the house in 1935 so that the master bedroom opened onto a rooftop pool stocked with tropical fish, and a drip system cooled the living room with "artificial rain." Von Sternberg could look from his bedroom through glass to the open living room below, and enjoyed views of the Santa Susana Mountains and across the orchards and horse ranches of the west Valley.

He cluttered his home and thirty-six-acre estate with paintings, drawings, sculptures and lithographs. When his collection later went on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it included works by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Renoir, Seurat and Gaugin.

The "Von Sternberg Home" at 10000 Tampa Avenue became one of Neutra’s most admired local works. The home was purchased in 1944 by the writer Ayn Rand, whose novel The Fountainhead had an outspoken architect as its protagonist. She lived there while in Hollywood for the making of the movie based on her book and while writing Atlas Shrugged.

Two years after Neutra’s death in 1970, the home was demolished to make way for a subdivision.