Designed by the firm of Jones & Emmons, the house is a typical Eichler product: a boxy, one-story building of wood post-and-beam construction that looks fairly opaque from the street but that is light and airy inside, with a flowing, open plan, radiant heat and a back elevation that is mostly glass in order to let the outdoors in. The Kahns liked this particular layout because the rooms for their children, Ira and Claire, were a comfortable distance from the master bedroom. The house originally listed for $23,000.

The Kahns' genuine enthusiasm for modern design made the models come alive for prospective buyers worried about their livability. "For most people," Kahn recalls, "these houses were severe. But we thought they were very supportive of living, and living it up."

Although it was customary at the time simply to stock model houses with goods borrowed from furniture stores, Eichler asked the Kahns to apply their artistic sensibilities (Matt is also a painter and Lyda was a weaver) to the task. They mixed antiques with modern pieces. They made whimsical still-life arrangements, filling laboratory flasks with colored water and making feather-duster bouquets. They hung cheeses and salamis from the kitchen ceilings. In other words, they made these places feel like home.

But it was their own house that best demystified modern design. The rooms have the elegant simplicity of postwar domestic architecture without the austerity. The living room's mahogany-paneled walls are hung with Kahn's own paintings, pieces of tribal art and other quirky objects that he and Lyda picked up during their travels.

In contrast to the living room's neutral color scheme, the kitchen-family room is a riot of color, with orange-accented cabinets, a rug designed by Matt, one of Lyda's woven hangings, Bertoia chairs with brightly hued cushions and a striped Venini lamp that the Kahns bought in Italy in the 1960's.

At the rear of the family room, what had been Lyda's weaving studio is now a small, cozy dining area, lined with framed artworks, including ones by Ira (a photographer) and Claire (who works at WET Design, where she helped create the fountains for the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas).

The Kahn house has a lot to teach the young people who are now snapping up Eichlers (in some cases, at 50 times their original selling prices) and turning them into retro-modern stage sets, historically literal-minded down to the Danish teak ice bucket. Fascinated as the Kahns were with the visual world, "we were concerned with practicality," Kahn says, adding that he and Lyda sought a synthesis of old and new "to give people the sense that they didn't have to go modern" in order to be modern.