Hollyhock House
4800 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
www.barnsdall.org
Story and photos by Kayte Deioma
Hollyhock House, located in Barnsdall Art Park on top of Olive Hill in the Los Feliz/East Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, is the first house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Los Angeles. The American Institute of Architects has recognized it as one of the most significant structures of the 20th century. It was the seventh building in Los Angeles to be declared a National Historic Landmark (2007).
The park is located on Hollywood Boulevard at Vermont, but you can’t see the Hollyhock House from the street, since it’s surrounded by trees. There is a parking lot next to Hollywood Blvd, with the entrance near the corner of Edgemont. You can also drive up through the parking lot and find spots along the loop road that circles the top of the hill.
The house is operated by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. After being closed for several years for major renovations, the house is open for self-guided tours. The entrance is through the Visitor Center on the loop road, which is connected to the main house via a long pergola. There is no photography allowed inside. See the website for hours and admission.
Background
The striking building was a commission from oil heiress, theatre aficionado and social activist Aline Barnsdall, who planned for the house to be part of an art and theatre colony. It was like pulling teeth for her to get the design out of Wright, who was otherwise occupied building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo during the entire construction time from 1919 to 1921.
He was trying to make an international comeback after multiple personal scandals in the US. Final features of the Hollyhock House were actually designed by another famous name in LA architecture, Rudolph Schindler, who Wright brought from Chicago to work on the project. Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, also worked on the original construction, even before he later qualified as an architect. Barnsdall eventually fired Wright, but brought Schindler and Lloyd Wright back to finish the job.
The hollyhock was Barnsdall’s favorite flower, and Wright’s design incorporates multiple variations of a geometric hollyhock motif on on textured concrete blocks called textile blocks and also in the stained-glass windows, carpets and furnishings. Exterior walls cantilevered slightly inward give a vague interpretation of a Mayan temple, leading some to call the architectural style Mayan Revival, but Wright called it California Romanza. Water flowed from a square pool in front of the house under the building into a moat around the fireplace and back out into a water feature in the courtyard. Like many of Wright’s concepts, that didn’t work out so well, having a tendency to flood the living room.
Nothing about the final design and construction of the 17-room house was very practical or comfortable, so Aline Barnsdall and her daughter never really lived in the house. With the cost overruns and the lack of a solid design for the theatre, she gave up on the arts colony idea and started work on donating the house to the City of LA before it was even finished. The City rejected the donation initially, but in 1927 the property was transferred with the condition that the California Art Club could lease the house for its headquarters for 15 years, and that Aline Barnsdall could stay in a smaller house on Olive Hill referred to as Residence B, which has since been demolished. She lived there until her death in 1946.
To create exhibit space in the house, the California Art Club knocked out two en suite guest rooms on the south side of the building to create a gallery, and that space currently has an exhibit of the original designs, drawings and history of the house.
In the 1940s, Lloyd Wright was contracted to do some renovations and made some significant changes, including completely redoing the kitchen and turning the sun room into an open patio. He was brought back again in the 70’s to make further alterations. The current restoration of the first floor is predominantly back to the original 1921 Frank Lloyd Wright design, with the exception of Lloyd Wright’s 1940’s kitchen.
Here is a preview of the beautifully restored Hollyhock House and see some of the details that were uncovered, and some of the second floor spaces not open to the public.
Hollyhock House © Kayte Deioma
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Since I was in New York this time with my sister and her kids, I decided that it was more important for the kids to get a taste of great art than to worry about not having time to see the whole thing, and thereby miss everything. We didn’t expect the kids to have the patience to stay in a museum more than a couple hours anyway.
We rented the audio tour headsets, which I don’t usually do on my own, but it turned out to be great for the kids. It was easier for the younger ones than reading the information panels. As we moved through the colorful sarcophagi, carved limestone monuments and painted hieroglyphics, they really enjoyed punching in the numbers and having control over which descriptions they heard. There wasn’t a child-friendly version of the tour like there is some places, but they seemed to do just fine.
We met the rest of the families downstairs in the Uris Center for Education. After a brief introduction, our guide, Amir Parsa, took us back upstairs to the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. We all settled on the floor in front of a glass case lined with carved wooden masks from Mali. After a brief Q and A about the use of masks around the world, we learned more about these Dogon Masks, used in mourning dances several years after the person died.
We moved around the corner to Papua New Guinea to study more masks and spirit boards from the temporary exhibit “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf.” After studying the intricately carved and painted spirit boards and learning how art and culture go hand in hand, children and parents were given paper and pencils to copy their favorite board designs, or create their own.
After our hour-long journey into art appreciation, we planned our exit route to take in the new Greek and Roman sculpture exhibit in the sky-lit Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. The atrium, populated with Roman statues from the first century BC to the third century AD, was a great preview for Derick, who would soon be setting off on an excursion to Italy.