Hollyhock House

Story

Frank Lloyd Wright designed dozens of houses, but Hollyhock House — completed in 1921 on a knoll called Olive Hill in East Hollywood — is the one that resists easy categorization. Wright himself called it the beginning of his California work, yet it belongs to no single style. Critics have reached for Mayan, Aztec, and Californian vernacular as labels; none quite fit. That slipperiness is part of the point.

Aline Barnsdall was an oil heiress from Pennsylvania who had spent years trying to build a live-theater complex. She first hired Wright in Chicago no later than early 1915, when he designed a building for the Chicago Little Theatre. By June 1919, she paid $300,000 to acquire the 36-acre Olive Hill site. What she got, eventually, was a house but not a theater — Wright was simultaneously designing Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, and construction supervision fell to his son Lloyd Wright and a young Rudolph Schindler, with Richard Neutra also contributing to the broader complex. The theater never materialized. The house did, surrounded by two guesthouses, a garage, terraces, and a spring house.

The design's signature gesture is the hollyhock: Barnsdall's favorite flower, abstracted into a geometric motif and pressed into nearly every surface — friezes, capitals, cast ornament, furniture. The abstraction is so complete that the flower becomes something closer to a cipher, and only once you've seen it clearly do you begin to find it everywhere. Barnsdall donated the main house to the city of Los Angeles on December 22, 1926; it is now a National Historic Landmark and Los Angeles's first World Heritage Site, part of the UNESCO designation "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright." The building rewards patience. Most visitors move through it quickly. A few stop at the living room fireplace and stay a while.