LOS ANGELES – Like some angular cement garden, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House looks out from a serene hilltop high above this city's bustling streets.
The showpiece structure in a municipal arts compound called Barnsdall Art Park, the house was uniquely designed for Southern California's climate and includes one of Wright's more unusual water features.
CAROL KRON
What other than hollyhocks, a favorite of oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, would stand out in the gardens of Hollyhock House?
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Yet it also has much in common with other houses designed by America's best-known architect: it's rich, complex, intriguing and at times even awe-inspiring.
Last week, Hollyhock House officially was reopened to the public after a five-year restoration ... the only Wright-designed house in Southern California that currently can be toured both inside and out.
The first of seven houses that Wright designed in Los Angeles, Hollyhock House took two years to build and was completed in 1921. Wright was preoccupied with building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for much of this time, and construction was supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright, along with another architectural luminary-to-be, Rudolf Schindler.
If you go
Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House is located in Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., in the heart of Los Angeles. Parking is free.
Tours of the house are offered Wednesday through Sunday at 12:30 p.m., 1:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 for general admission and $3 for senior citizens and students. They can be purchased at the municipal art gallery near the house.
Call (323) 644-6269 for more information, or visit the Web site: www.hollyhockhouse.net.
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With its cement exterior, low, angular lines and exotic decorative touches, Hollyhock House represents a transition to the striking "Mayan-style" houses of cement block that Wright built in subsequent years on nearby hillsides.
The 6,000-square-foot house, with five bedrooms and six bathrooms, was commissioned by oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, a Pennsylvania native and, for the time, an unconventional, independent woman.
Barnsdall envisioned her Los Angeles house and its 36-acre grounds as part of an avant-garde theatrical community, and she enlisted Wright to design two smaller residences to house visiting artists. Decades later, Wright also was hired to design a temporary exhibition pavilion that was open until 1968 before it was torn down.
For his part, Wright viewed Hollyhock House as an opportunity to create a new, regionally appropriate architecture that he dubbed "California Romanza" (the latter is a musical term meaning "freedom to make one's own form"). Stylized hollyhocks – Barnsdall's favorite flower – were featured in friezes on the house's exterior and interior walls, and in statuettes that adorn the rooftop terraces.
Barnsdall lived in the house for only six years, donating it to the city of Los Angeles in 1927, along with 11 surrounding acres, on the condition that it be used for the arts. For the next 15 years, Hollyhock House was the headquarters for one of the city's leading art clubs.
Things changed in 1946, when the house got a full kitchen remodel and was turned into a USO-style club for servicemen. But the city eventually reversed course and began operating the house as a museum in 1976. In keeping with Barnsdall's vision of an arts community, a gallery and performing-arts theater were added to the surrounding property.
Then came the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which rattled loose some of the house's hollyhock friezes, cracked several walls and left other elements askew. In 2000, the house was closed for structural repairs, and more recently a second phase of work was undertaken to remove mold, termites and hazardous materials. The roof drainage was upgraded, the skylights were resealed and the exterior wood trim was repaired and repainted (like many of Wright's houses, Hollyhock House requires extensive maintenance even under the best of circumstances).
Carol Kron photos
In the two above photos, a shallow low-ceilinged foyer leads to the vaulted living room, where a Japanese gold leaf screen decorates the wall beyond the concrete fireplace. The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house reopened to the public last week after a $2.5 million renovation.
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Some $2.5 million later, it's ready for visitors.
Virginia Kazor, the city's historic site curator for Hollyhock House, noted that the narrow, confined entry to the house was typical of Wright, who liked to "compress" the entrances to his homes in order to increase the sense of grandeur visitors experienced once inside.
In this case, a shallow, low-ceilinged foyer leads to the house's "Wow" room, an enormous, vaulted living room with a concrete fireplace graced by an elaborate skylight above and a "moat" in front. When the moat is filled with water (originally pumped from a circular pool outside), it reflects the flickering flames in the fireplace, Kazor said.
A new, historically accurate carpet covers much of the living-room floor. The culmination of 15 years of research and fundraising by Kazor, it was hand-woven in New York and made possible by an unspecified donation by a private donor.
In the dining room, original wooden chairs by Wright surround an intimate dining table. And a wooden side table that Wright originally designed for the home was recently tracked down and purchased by another donor for $18,000. It will be put on display in an alcove off the living room, Kazor said.
"We're trying to recreate the ambience of the house when Barnsdall was in residence," she explained.
Angular leaded windows are everywhere, and one upstairs room was designed specifically to hold the luggage of Barnsdall, an inveterate traveler.
Perhaps the most unusual things about Hollyhock House, though, are the numerous outdoor patios and courtyards that "mirror" the interior rooms they adjoin. Wright included the outdoor spaces so that Barnsdall and her family could take maximum advantage of Southern California's relatively warm year-round climate, Kazor said.
Multiple, well-thought-out touches like that are one of the prime reasons so many people are drawn to Wright's architecture, she added.
"You hear it over and over again – the complexity," Kazor said. "I've been in this house 100 times, and I'm still seeing things I've never seen before."
