In the 1940s, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd Wright designed furniture for the Olive Hill Foundation, a social club headquartered at Hollyhock House for a decade
A bronze jar of the type that Aline Barnsdall displayed here in the living room
The original sketches for Hollyhock House suggested a kind of temple, something you’d find in the hills of Yucatan, Mexico. Its hefty shapes, its extended courtyards, its trapezoidal parapets implied the Acropolis of Ek’ Balam made anew. Its ambition was so monumental that Frank Lloyd Wright, usually refined in his draughtsmanship, found himself spilling his pencil marks beyond the edges of the page. It was a building so deeply felt that it could not be contained on paper. The woman who commissioned it, oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, had already named it Hollyhock after her favourite flower. Wright had his own term for it: “California Romanza.”
Barnsdall was a figure of some romance herself, like a character from an F.Scott Fitzgerald novel. Having money but desiring bohemia, she managed to find both: training as an actress in London, mingling with theatre impresarios, directing companies, smoking cigarettes in public (most unladylike), travelling almost non-stop, and occasionally returning to LA, where a cabal of striving arrivistes enjoyed her dazzling displays of wealth. Like any good heiress, she also harboured collectivist sympathies and became known around town as a “parlor Bolshevik.” Wealth made her flighty, but benevolent. In 1916, she purchased the 10-acre site at Hollywood and Vermont for $300,000—nearly $9 million today—and asked Wright to design her a utopia of collectivism: a theatre, a movie house, shops, a kindergarten, residences for her actors, and, of course, a home for herself and her daughter.
Part of the child’s room, this sunporch has been significantly modified over time with Lloyd Wright creating stunning new art glass windows for the south and west facing sides in the 1970s
Off the living room, the reading alcove features Frank Lloyd Wright-designed furnishings
Wright soon shipped off to Tokyo, where he was working on the Imperial Hotel, and began planning Hollyhock. The brief suited him perfectly; so did the timing. Early success in the suburbs of Chicago, under the influence of his Lieber Meister Louis Sullivan, had taught Wright the fundamentals of his organic architectural ethos. Then, in 1905, he visited Japan and swooned so deeply that by 1909 he had begun frequently making the 16-day trip between Tokyo and his studio in Wisconsin. He collected Japanese prints, admired their shrines, and became an aficionado of their rectilinear building shapes. A rapacious integrator of influences, Wright was found by Barnsdall at a time when he was yet to fully achieve the unification between his erstwhile Prairie style and this newfound Eastern influence. She herself seemed to embody this unification: part of her brief to Wright had been to feature Japanese screens in the living room and untouched walnut in the detailing. He must have marvelled at his luck.
Added to these elements was an idea derived from Mayan archaeological ruins: a sympathy for ornament. The lynchpin of the Hollyhock design, the essence of “California Romanza” was the use of “integral ornament” to complement the hard lines and long planes that dominated Wright’s architectural aesthetic. Whence came a system of extended parapets, stretched sightlines, structured lawns, and low-roofed rooms, gently supplemented by geometric sculptural niches, the extraordinary Hollyhock friezes, water features devised in concentric circles, and—most tastefully of all—Wright’s patented asymmetrical, leaded-glass windows. Visitors to Hollyhock cannot possibly forget the indelible impression of those windows, of which there were 130 in total. By the time he deployed it for Barnsdall, this “art glass” had starred in Wright’s designs for almost three decades, a feature he individualised for Hollyhock by incorporating small touches of purple and green.
A torchiere providing up-lighting as part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s monumental living room furniture and framing a Tiffany Studios favrile glass vase
Three Dancing Nymphs is a 2016 replica of a 1st-century Roman relief that Aline Barnsdall prominently displayed in the loggia
“The Hollyhock House was to be a natural house… naturally built,” wrote Wright. This notion came from Lao Tze, an ancient Chinese philosopher and early figure of Taoism, whose teachings assert: nature is our great teacher; all we need do is follow it. Bewildered by the preponderance of a Spanish Mission style amidst a Southern Californian topography that hardly called for it, Wright opted for a design that was more sympathetic to the local climate and territory. Windows were re-orientated away from the Californian Sun and towards an interior courtyard. Light and warmth poured in from all the right places, even from the sky. In the living room, the fireplace was accented by a small water feature at its feet and a skylight above. In its harnessing of fire, air and water, the fireplace became a sort of shrine, a site of devotion where all of nature’s offerings could be adored—and in the living room, no less.
And yet, even with its cornucopia of idiosyncrasies and brilliances, Barnsdall’s enthusiasm for the house waned. The years of its construction, from 1919 to 1921, were arduous. With no radio to assist them, Wright and Barnsdall volleyed a series of telegrams back and forth from various exotic locales. Their respective emissaries supervising the construction only complicated matters further, and the experienced builder they had hired became paltry and amateurish when faced with some of Wright’s high-concept ideas. The house, eventually finished in September 1921, seemed to satisfy neither client nor architect. Within a few years, Barnsdall, eager to get back to her former life of cosmopolitan mischief, offered the entire 10-acre estate to the city of Los Angeles.
It sat vacant from 1942 to 1946, as word spread that the city was preparing to demolish it. (Several windows were removed and stored in the archives, just in case.) But that was all meretalk. It wasn’t only Wright, but the authorities as well, who were swayed by the exuberant California Romanza of it all. “Well,” Wright wrote to Barnsdall, “the building stands. Your home. It is yours for what it has cost you. It is mine for what it has cost me. And it is for all mankind according to its cost in all its bearing… Whatever its birth pangs, it will take its place as your contribution and mine to the vexed life of our time. What future it will have—maimed as it is—who can say?”
Running north-south, this open-air colonnade in the center patio features dramatic light and shadow play
Frank Lloyd Wright described Spanish Colonial architecture as “tawdry Spanish medievalism,” but he embraced the style’s patio form at the heart of this hill-top residence.
Dining room with Frank Lloyd Wright-designed table and chairs that feature abstractions based on Aline Barnsdall’s favorite flower, the hollyhock
Each elevation of Hollyhock House takes on a different character with the south terrace featuring imposing walls around this raised garden off the bedroom wing of the house
Patio view featuring art stone abstractions of the hollyhock as part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “California Romanza”
Situated in the center of a bustling arts park, Hollyhock House features a semi-enclosed patio, which served as an outdoor living room
Southwest corner of the living room, featuring one of a pair of Edo Period screens that Aline Barnsdall purchased from Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923
At the heart of the house, the fireplace was dramatically designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to integrate all four classical elements—fire, earth, air, and water