The Dwell on Design Home Tour is essentially Dwell magazine in three dimensions.

Fifteen Los Angeles homes – on the Eastside, Westside and in South Bay – will be on view and ready to be experienced, over three days: Saturday, May 23, Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31.

Five to six hundred fortunate souls will take the self-guided tours, which is nearly sold out. But before they set foot in any of the homes, they’ll be briefed by the architects responsible for the residential designs.

“There are two ‘Meet the Architect’ nights – one is Thursday the 21st for the Westside, and the other is on the 29th for the eastside and South Bay,” says Michela O’Connor Abrams, president and ceo of Dwell Media. “They’ll meet the architect and get a talk about that house.”

The idea is to give the attendees as much information as possible about the homes and their design. “It’s about modern architecture, expressed in many ways,” she says. “There are three different geographies: how it fits on the site, how it approaches the entire landscaping, and then the stories behind it.”

It’s also about contextualizing modern design and the way that people live in it. A home on the tour may be decades old – from the 1920s or ’30s or a mid-century modern, but brought up to the standards of this century.

“If the architect is presenting a home that’s a Schindler or paying homage to Schindler, we make sure it’s authentic about the elements and what it means to bring it into this century,” she says. “But we also look at how this family or couple or person lives in the home, and how it’s refurbished for the owners to live there – not just as a museum piece.”

Which totally fits into the Dwell ethos.

For more information, go here.

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