Outdoor Connection

The residence is transformed by a relocated mezzanine where a sunken interior court with a retractable glass roof connects to the planted green roof garden above. This gesture of subtracting volume from the interior brings the outdoors into the primary living zones. The roof, peeled back, showers the spaces with natural light. When open, ample air flow enters what was once a poorly ventilated and dark loft. By night, the court acts as an internal lantern illuminating the loft below.

Historic Dialogue

Embracing the building’s industrial past, a visual discourse between new and old is devised through insertions of modern materials along with restored or reclaimed materials from the loft. A custom steel stair repurposes timbers from the old roof joists as treads and landings. The multiple level residence is unified by a walnut fascia that serves as a conceptual datum.

Embracing the building’s industrial past, a visual discourse between new and old is devised through insertions of modern materials along with restored or reclaimed materials from the loft. A custom steel stair repurposes timbers from the old roof joists as treads and landings. The multiple level residence is unified by a walnut fascia that serves as a conceptual datum.

The concrete building was originally built in 1926 as a warehouse for the B.F. Goodrich tire company. Although the building was turned into condos in 1996, it retains metal factory-style windows, exposed ductwork, and concrete walls and pillars.

The homeowners relocated from a larger, more traditional home. Smith chose to celebrate the existing style but reorganize the spaces around a central core. The effect is a doughnut shape where most of the living and entertaining space is in the ring, while the hole, or core, contains office spaces, workout areas, bathrooms, and closets. “We chose to put the rooms that don’t require as much light in the center,” says Smith. “The rooms where people gather, like the kitchen and dining room, are built around that.”

The dining room is framed by two large metal support beams. Calder wouldn’t have it any other way. “I like how they define the space,” he says.

The homeowner says that, in her former residence, she had a set of Chippendale chairs around a dining room table. The chairs didn’t work here, so she and Woodson purchased a set of Chippendale-style chairs and had them lacquered, giving the traditional style a fun update.

Smith chose to do the kitchen cabinets and countertops in a muted shade in order to have the area blend into the open-space plan. “Because it’s so visible, I didn’t want it to stand out as a separate room,” he says.

The media room is outfitted with four swiveling chairs. They can remain stationary for conversation, or turned toward the television or the living room.

The master bedroom shows how two styles can live in harmony. The baroque bed is flanked by two metal nightstands and sits in front of sleek cabinetry.

Perched high in the exclusive Southridge community, with panoramic views of the Coachella Valley, including the city of Palm Springs and the San Jacinto Mountains, the 23,366-square-foot home was designed in 1973 by the California Modernist architect John Lautner. It was built to resemble a volcano, with three visorlike arches and an undulating concrete roof, a hole at its center opening a courtyard to the sky. The roofline has been described as one of the most distinctive works of architecture in the Coachella Valley. The house has also been likened to a giant mushroom. Its original wood frame burned down during construction, in a fire sparked by a welder. Work was finally completed in 1980.

The house is in a very steep lot overlooking the Acapulco Bay. The upper floor is a large open terrace surrounded by a cantilevered moat/railing pool that seems to overflow into the ocean below, creating a feeling of infinite space. The moat is wide and deep enough to allow for swimming. The curved, sloping concrete roof is anchored into the hill at one end, then sweeps over the house and the driveway and returns to the hill at the opposite end. The roof is low on the hill side and high on the Bay side, allowing a great view of the sky and the ocean. The enclosed family room and bedrooms are located in the lower floor, facing the Ocean, with a continuous planter/railing along the edge of the decks.

John Lautner is recognized as one of the foremost architects who practiced at the height of the modern movement. John Lautner’s highly personal designs for homes are known for their poignant originality as well as their ties to Frank Lloyd Wright’s theories of organic architecture. As a student of Wright’s, John Lautner continued his tradition but branched out–many of his designs, such as the Chemosphere, the Monsanto House and the Arango/Marbrisa House, have become icons of organic modern architecture in their own right. The John Lautner Marbrisa House in Acapulco is an icon of mid century modern architecture. Arguably the pinnacle of John Lautner’s architectural career and one of the most beautiful icons of modern architecture. The vast (25,000 sq.ft) “Marbrisa” in Acapulco was built for Mexican supermarket magnate Jeronimo Arango in 1973 and was jointly designed by John Lautner and the Belgian born Helena Arahuete during her first year with the firm. Perched on a hilltop site, with uninterrupted views across the whole of Acapulco Bay, the main living quarters are surmounted by a large open terrace with spectacular views of the beach and bay, encircled by a “sky moat” which snakes around its edge; the terrace is itself topped by a huge, sweeping semi-circular angled ‘shade’ made of poured concrete.

The upper floor, serving as the main living and entertainment area, composes a large open terrace surrounded by a cantilevered moat/railing pool, wide and deep enough to allow for swimming, that seems to overflow into the ocean below, inspiring a feeling of infinite space.

The curved, sloping concrete roof anchors into the hill at one end, then sweeps over the house and the driveway and returns to the hill at the opposite end. The roof rides low on the hill side and high on the Bay side, allowing an encompassing view of the sky and the ocean. The enclosed family room and bedrooms situated on the lower floor, facing the bay, provide elevated landscape with a continuous planter-railing along the edge of the decks.

When I first visited the site,

says Lautner,

I got the idea to build a large, open terrace so that all you had was the beauty of the Acapulco Bay and the sky and the mountains. You don’t feel you’re in a building at all. You’re out in space. With the beauty of nature.

Just viewing the house inspires. The curved lines provide the house a fluid feel, like the water that runs along the edges of the terrace or the clouds that embrace it, yet the dominant impression is one of boldness.

This house is the rarest of residencies: a house that is of itself, the environment, and the world expanding beyond… a house with few precursors and few progeny — a house with integrity. And therein lies its boldness, its originality, and its beauty.

The Arango House is more than just an artistic cure for a feeling of aimlessness or of ordinary existence. It is at once both a relaxant and a stimulant — a work of art that not only compels relaxation of mind and spirit but also inspires to live with more passion and to pursue creatively with zeal.

Images by Sarah Sackner, Alan Weintraub and Julius Shulman

This 310 square meters (3,337 sq. ft.) state-of-the-art luxury loft apartment has 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and a lower level integrated gym equipped with a sauna. The main living area has an open floor plan with a gourmet kitchen. The wraparound mezzanine has sitting areas all around and overlooks the main living area below.

The master bedroom has access to a balcony with view of the courtyard. There is a stone wall in the lower level which provides an interesting contrast to the modern staircase. The apartment design includes a two-storey high cathedral window and skylights which allow plenty of natural light to spread through the entire loft.

Even one as rigorous and consistent as Jerrold E. Lomax feels that urge, and he and his wife, Sandra E. Miles, have just completed their fourth residence. All were bold modernist statements, and the latest is the most radical and pared-down of them all: a loft in a live-work complex that Lomax helped develop in Sand City, a small coastal town just north of Monterey, California. His neighbors are warehouses and an electrical distribution building, and he’s matched their grittiness with poured-concrete and corrugated-metal cladding. I t was quickly dubbed “industrial chic,” and the owners delight in the kinetic sculpture of moving lights on the elevated freeway, even though this blocks the ocean view.

It’s a far cry from the refined pavilions of steel and glass that Lomax designed for Craig Ellwood in the 1950s, a job that brought him back to his native Los Angeles from Houston, where he went to school. And it may seem an odd shift from the elegant house on a leafy view site that the couple built in Carmel Valley, California, when he wound up his practice in L.A. and moved north. Lomax sees his latest venture as are turn to the frugal experiments of his early years, when idealistic young architects were striving to reshape postwar America and make well-designed housing available to all.

In its collective character, the complex recalls Gregory Ain’s terrace housing and, in its unabashed materiality, the livework space that Charles and Ray Eames built for themselves.

The Jerrold Lomax loft displays his signature expression of volume,fine details and sustainable matierials. Walls of glass, front/rear decks, grooved sawcut concrete flooring, radiant heat, chefs kitchen; a modern contemporary work of art.

Originally commissioned by Indiana based, modern architecture patron, J. Irwin Miller and his wife in 1953, and designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen. This classic modernist residence was declared a National Landmark in 2000.

Saarinen ensured the Miller’s home design was based around entertaining their important guests, with the installation of a huge sunken conversation pit in the lavish central living area. Four other private areas spoke from this hospitality hot spot, for adults, children, guests, and house staff plus kitchen and laundry utilities.

As one of the very few family homes that Saarinen designed, it is an excellent example of modernist architectural tradition, seen in the flowing open plan, the floor to ceiling windows in stone walls, and flat roof.

At approximately 6,838 sq ft the entire design and construction process took four years to complete, finishing in 1957, and boasts an impressive portfolio of work by a menagerie of 20th century talent including landscape architect Dan Kiley, interior designer Alexander Girard, and principal design associate at Saarinen office, Kevin Roche.

In a state of disrepair, it was purchased a few years ago by a developer and renovated.

The renovation took two years to complete as Cambron wanted to make this jewel of modernism once again habitable, fully fitted and decorated for a new owner.

Four bathrooms were added (there was only one bathroom in the original building!), as well as an indoor swimming pool and an elevator.

The 10,700 square-foot villa sits on a 5 acres lot, has 4,300 square feet of terrace and is for sale at the time of writing, for an undisclosed price…

 

The sleek, octagonal design, arguably the boldest work by the singular architect John Lautner, is considered a masterpiece of California Modernism and is beloved by cultists of midcentury design.

But the Taschens saw dirty, disco-era, wall-to-wall carpet on much of its 2,200 square feet, an old aluminum door, smudged windows and seven layers of paint on what was originally a gently austere, exposed brick wall.

Still, it was love at first sight,

says the laconic German, wearing a red Muhammad Ali bathrobe as he shows off the place on a hazy morning. The backlist of Taschen’s company — from homoerotic nudes to the original Lutheran Bible — includes books on Modernist homes, the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman, the works of Richard Neutra and the Case Study houses. Some of the titles, along with dozens of art magazines, are scattered around the house and its unobtrusive furniture.

Today, the place is serene and airy, with a simple, light-wood openness that suggests midcentury Scandinavian crossed with a ski chalet, and views that are pure Southern California.

“I bought it right away — as fast as possible,” says Taschen.

Frank Escher, who was brought in as restoration architect, vividly remembers the place’s condition.

“I have to give Benedikt credit for seeing past the disrepair and sad state the house had fallen into,” he says. “It looked like a rundown motel. It had been rented out for 10 to 12 years; it was like the ultimate party house.”

In fact, during much of that decade, the place had been on the market. “It was for sale for so long,” says Taschen, “that it was even in a ‘Simpsons’ episode: a house with a for-sale sign.”

There was no market for that house,

says Julie Jones, the Realtor in the sale, who had watched the place languish after she listed the house. “Everybody loved Spanish, and then shabby chic came in.” Midcentury houses “would sit and sit and sit — you couldn’t give ’em away. People would want to see the view, and that was about it.”

The fate seemed unjust for a structure the Encyclopedia Britannica had judged

the most modern home built in the world,

and which had appeared in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double.” It’s hard not to see the house, which sits on a 29-foot-high, 5-foot-wide concrete column over a long-considered-unbuildable Hollywood Hills site, as a hovering flying saucer or a prototype for the 23rd century architecture of “The Jetsons.”

But the 1960 house is very much a work of its time and place.

Alan Hess, an architectural historian and author of “The Architecture of John Lautner,” considers Chemosphere as perfect an expression of Southland culture as Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Case Study house and the finest work of Neutra and R.M. Schindler.

Chemosphere was characteristically Los Angeles of that time because “it didn’t have to look like a house,” says Hess. “It was an architecture newly defined. It could take on its own brand-new shape. It displays the optimism of its time: that technology can be used to solve any problem, just as Century City and Googie’s,” the Lautner-designed Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, did. “The West would not be possible without technology: Water, electricity, everything that it took to overcome dryness and distance was dependent in some form on technology.”

Hess finds the house fascinating partly because it was built for a couple and their four children. “And yet whenever that house is used in the movies, it’s always a decadent bachelor pad,” Hess says. “You have the reality of Southern California life, and the image of Southern California life, summed up in one house.”

It’s not the only contradiction the place contains.

“From the outside it looks like a spaceship which you cannot enter,” Angelika Taschen says from Berlin, where she now lives. (The couple were finalizing a divorce at the time of this article’s publication.) “But if you go inside, it feels very cozy … very Zen and calming. Maybe because you are floating above the city, above reality in the sky. You feel disconnected from the planet and completely free and happy.”

The house is the product of a fortuitous union of architect, client, time and place. Leonard Malin was a young aerospace engineer in late-1950s L.A. whose father-in-law had just given him a plot north of Mulholland Drive, near Laurel Canyon. The land was leafy and overgrown, with extravagant views of the San Fernando Valley.

“My philosophy at the time was, most people work their whole lives to build their dream house,” Malin says from Arizona, where he’s constructing a new home. “Why not build it now, and pay for it for the rest of my life?” This was a time, during L.A.’s postwar expansion, when a middle-class client could build in the Hollywood Hills on a modest budget: Malin had $30,000 to spare.

The only catch: At roughly 45 degrees, the slope was all but unbuildable. The plot may have remained empty had Malin not approached Lautner, whose work he knew from a nearby house. Lautner, a brilliant but reputedly prickly man, sketched a bold vertical line, a cross, and a curve above it. “Draw it up,” he told his assistant Guy Zebert.

Though Lautner could appear imperious, a quality he may have learned from his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, he was also a deeply practical and hard-headed problem-solver. Lautner didn’t see the house as a flying saucer but as a sensible solution.

However counterintuitive the scheme, it was also one of very few imaginable that allowed the plot to be utilized. And because of a concrete pedestal, almost 20 feet in diameter, buried under the earth and supporting the post, the house has survived earthquakes and heavy rains. (The house is reached by a funicular.)

“What was great about Lautner,” Benedikt Taschen says, “is that he had this dualism about nature and the city.” He says the home’s northern edge, which contains the bedroom and his office, is very quiet. “It’s pure nature, with all kinds of animals: skunks, bobcats, coyotes, deer. They are not shy; you almost have nose prints on the window.

“And here,” Taschen says, walking toward the living room window that faces the Valley’s homes and skyscrapers along the 101 Freeway, “it’s all city.”

Taschen admires the bold dichotomies the architect worked with. “That’s the characteristic of great artists: They can make things simple.”

Hess points out that Lautner’s embrace of Modernist innovation and organic forms made him a more interesting architect but also contributed to his obscurity during much of his career. During the 1950s and ’60s, the starker, cooler Modernism of the Bauhaus and of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reigned in intellectual circles, especially in Europe and on the East Coast.

“Organic Modernism was just as modern in its use of materials,” Hess says, “but it had a different sense of space, which was flowing. The way a building was put together was like a tree or a flower or a cave — natural forms. Wright was one of the founders of that approach to Modernism, and Lautner brought it to Southern California.”

Even out-of-state critics and scholars who could appreciate the sharply angular California Modernism of midcentury didn’t know what to make of Lautner’s merging of the modern with natural forms. “So they ignored him,” says Hess, “or put him in the category of undisciplined, far-out, do-whatever-you-want California architecture.”

Escher, the preservation architect, considers Lautner “the missing link between the classic Modernism of the Case Study Houses and the work we now associate with Los Angeles — the more expressive, more sculptural forms. Frank Gehry has said that as a student, he considered Lautner to be a god.”

Unlike a lot of the more didactic and theory-driven homes of Modernists from Le Corbusier to Philip Johnson, it’s actually pleasant, most of the time, to live inside a Lautner. The homes don’t force their inhabitants into an ant farm’s existence the way some houses do. Le Corbusier called his homes “machines for living in,” and sometimes they felt that way, with their narrow hallways and rigidly prescribed paths.

Chemosphere is bisected by a central, exposed brick wall with a fireplace, abutted by subdued seating, in the middle. One side of the house is public, with a small kitchen and blended living and dining rooms including built-in couches below glass windows. The house’s private half includes a master bedroom with bathroom, small storage and laundry rooms, an office made of two children’s bedrooms, and an additional bathroom. Despite being more compact than many new single-family houses, it has most of the essential elements.

Angelika Taschen, a PhD in art history, knew the house from Shulman’s photos before she saw the real thing. She worried it might be difficult to live there.

She said that besides limiting her trips out of the house because of the funicular, living there didn’t alter her behavior. “Day-to-day life is really easy,” she says, often easier “than in a conventional home where the architect has not thought so much about every single detail.”

Lautner, despite his reputation as having a strong personality, worked hard to suit his clients and their inner lives.

Angelika describes the place as having a spiritual impact, almost like a church. “With this house he found and expressed this almost religious spirit with a perfect architectural language in general, but also in detail.”

Benedikt likens the house to an eagle’s nest. “You feel safe. It’s warm and human, not a cold place. You would not expect it from outside.”

The only consistent problem with the house, Taschen says, is that its technology often fails in subtle but frustrating ways. “Every day there is something not working,” he says. “The maintenance is 10 times higher than in any other building. Everything is much more complicated. To get cable or Internet, they have to come 10 times.

It’s like having a vintage car — a ’55 Mercedes. More difficult. But they have a personality to them, ya?

In Escher’s first meeting with Taschen, the restoration architect pointed out which pieces were original, which needed to be replaced, and which details deserved restoration. “He interrupted me in about half a minute and said in German, ‘Herr Escher, why don’t you do what you think is right?'”

For Escher, a native of Switzerland who loves the rational, structure-inspired work of Lautner, Neutra and the late Pierre Koenig, this was a gift from the gods. His firm, which he runs with partner Ravi GuneWardena, had been partly inspired by classic California Modernism, and here he could delve into a great Modernist’s original conception. (Escher wrote the first book on Lautner a few years after moving to Los Angeles in 1988, and oversees the John Lautner Archives.)

The architect describes the job as a philosophical challenge.

“I think the hardest thing was developing an intellectual strategy for how to deal with it,” Escher says, calling the task, “a combination of research into history and technology, and to some degree into Lautner’s psychology. You can’t be afraid of a house like that: You have to, in some cases, be kind of forceful.”

The forcefulness was balanced with the architects’ own “sensitive and careful” respect for Lautner’s intentions: The goal was to undo the damage previous tenants had exacted, and to simplify. The restoration team removed layers of paint, paneled the walls with the same shade of ash wood used for the original built-in couches and cabinets (some of which needed repair or restoration), and replaced the fixed-paneled windows with frameless glass.

“We wanted to make it as invisible and elegant as possible,” says Escher. “That’s something that’s important to all our projects: We don’t try to draw attention to a detail. It should disappear.” GuneWardena compares the process to “pruning a garden, to reveal the clarity of the structure.”

They also tried to match what they thought Lautner would have chosen if he’d had access to contemporary workmanship and a larger budget: The original drawings, for instance, described a floor of random broken slate, but the day’s technology would not allow the stone to be cut thinly enough to keep from destabilizing the house. Escher’s restoration ran the flagstone pattern inside and out, across the bridge that connects the front door to the funicular.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing art into the house, difficult when a home already exerts a bold personality.

“The Taschens originally wanted to have more period pieces,” Escher says. “But we didn’t want the house to be a museum of the 1960s.”

Today, Chemosphere is furnished sparely with clean-lined pieces including Eames chairs and a coffee table and an oval Florence Knoll dining room table. Taschen commissioned the suspended lamps of bent plexiglass strips by Cuban-born L.A. artist Jorge Pardo and the pastiche rug designed by German painter Albert Oehlen.

“These Lautner houses are like custom-made clothes,” Escher says, “so you really have to find the right tenant for them. Taschen was perfect for the house — he immediately grasped what the house was about, and he was entirely open to our ideas for the place, like ripping out the glass and commissioning pieces by artists.”

During the first few years the Taschens lived there, the house became locally famous for their parties, where photographer Bill Claxton and his model wife Peggy Moffett would carouse with porn stars, jazz musicians and director Billy Wilder.

These days, now that Taschen has an office in Hollywood and a bookstore in Beverly Hills, the place has reverted to being, mostly, a house for him and fiancee Lauren Wiener. He canceled plans for a guesthouse designed by Rem Koolhaas at Chemosphere’s base because he feared it would visually compete with the main house. His only major plan is to replace the bird-cage-like funicular with a more open one.

Taschen remembers going to a Beverly Hills open house where “a fashionable Hollywood film star” was selling his Neutra home. The young actor, in the publisher’s estimate, “had robbed the soul of the house. If you make tiny changes that don’t fit the integrity of the house, you destroy it. It’s like a movie where you add a scene of someone with a mobile phone in 1958, or a style of shirt or car that wouldn’t have existed until years later.

“It’s the responsibility of the owner to preserve it for future generations,” Taschen says, “because a house like this doesn’t belong to one or two people: It belongs to mankind.”

The Chemosphere restoration won an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy as well as the approval of its original tenant.

“Today there are materials that weren’t available then,” Malin says. “The place is much better than when I was in there — and it’s in keeping with Lautner’s vision.”

Taschen says it’s hard to get bored with the place — despite the rain this winter — since the enormous windows offer an expansive view on the world. “It’s like a wide-screen movie,” he says. “Always changing.”

That the Ennis house garners so much reverence from the architecture community makes its current status all the more remarkable: for sale since June 2009, price reduced from $15 million to $7,495,000. Prospective buyers have shown much interest, according to listing agent Jeffrey Hyland, president of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, but as of yet, there have been no takers.

The house has long been an expensive proposition. Set on nearly an acre in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., the home — three bedrooms and three and half baths, plus staff quarters that push the listing to 6,000 square feet — cost $300,000 to build, about $3.8 million today, adjusted for inflation.

Wright’s client was Charles Ennis, the owner of a men’s clothing store in downtown L.A. and an enthusiast of Mayan art and architecture. For each of Wright’s houses built with concrete blocks, or textile blocks as they are often called, Wright designed a custom pattern. For the Ennis house, the pattern was a Greek key. Within the interlocking form, it’s possible to interpret a stylized “g” — perhaps an allusion to the Masonic Order, of which Ennis was a member, and the organization’s symbol, the compass with the letter “g” in the middle representing God.

Wright had used concrete in monumental projects, but in the 1920s it was still considered a new material, especially for home construction. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminum molds to create a block 16 inches wide, 16 inches tall and 3 1/2 inches thick. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position. The double-wall construction called for exterior blocks and interior blocks to be set about 1 inch apart, and estimates of the total number of blocks deployed by Wright have ranged from 27,000 to 40,000.

It was an experiment in the functional and artistic possibilities of concrete, which Wright believed held potential as a material for affordable housing. The phrase “textile block” came from the way vertical and horizontal steel rods were woven through channels in the concrete, a technique that was supposed to keep the blocks knitted together and held in position. The net visual effect was nothing short of monumental.

But although the Ennis house was grand in scale and historic in sweep, it remained “highly livable,” said Janet Tani, whose father, Augustus O. Brown, owned the property from 1968 to 1980.

One gets to experience the changes of light throughout the day and how that impacts interior spaces on a large scale,

,Tani said.

She noted how one side of the house seems to hover above a growing metropolis, while the other side points toward Griffith Park’s undeveloped hills and land “that looks like it must have looked 500 years ago,” she said. “By walking a few feet, one can be in a completely different environment.”

Karrie Jacobs, an architecture columnist and the founding editor of Dwell magazine, remembered visiting the Ennis house in 2005, sitting at the dining table and watching hawks circle over L.A. She said it’s her favorite Wright house, partly because it represents an evolution from the beginning of Wright’s career, when the architect “was still a 19th century Midwesterner.” His early Prairie Style houses tended to hunker down, low and dark.

“By the time he designed the Ennis house in 1923, he’d lived and worked in Tokyo and built several houses in L.A.,” Jacobs said. “He was more cosmopolitan and less afraid of sunlight. And Ennis is strangely, monumentally, vertical, with its double- or triple-height rooms. Usually, in Wright houses, I feel a little claustrophobic, a little trapped in the man’s tightly choreographed conception of domestic life. But during my one visit to Ennis, I felt as if I was in a different world, someplace I’d never been before — and maybe someplace Wright had never been before, either.”

The house, Jacobs said, doesn’t fit neatly into Wright’s oeuvre or any other architectural timeline. “I think of it, affectionately, as Wright’s San Simeon,” she said.

Residents included John Nesbitt, known for his radio and film series “The Passing Parade,” who owned the house from 1940 to 1942. He had Wright design a 20-by-40-foot swimming pool and convert a storage area off the entry into a billiard room with a fireplace. These 1940 additions also included Wright’s plans for furniture, window treatments and rugs.

In his drawings for Nesbitt, Wright renamed the house Sijistan, after a 10th century Persian palace. Although none of the furniture was built, several chairs were later produced for an owner of Wright’s Storer house, another textile block design.

Tani’s father was the last private owner of the Ennis house. To ensure its safe keeping, Brown created the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, now the Ennis House Foundation. The home sustained serious damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, then was briefly red-tagged after the torrential rains of 2004. The next year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Ennis house as one of the most endangered landmarks in the country. The Ennis House Foundation has stabilized a buckling retaining wall and made other repairs, but a significant investment in restoration will be required before the house can be the grand residence it once was.

Tani recalled how the house always managed to make visitors marvel.

“Shortly after we moved into the house, I came home from school one day and saw Edmund Teske standing outside on the sidewalk looking at the house,” she said, referring to the photographer known for his work with Wright. “I went inside and told my mother about Teske’s presence. She told me to go outside and invite him in, which I did. He was absolutely thrilled.”

Wright likely would have been thrilled, too. In 2009, 50 years after his grandfather’s death, Eric Lloyd Wright announced that the Ennis House Foundation was putting the landmark up for sale. A private owner, he said, would be better able to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy.

My

grandfather designed homes to be occupied by people,

his statement to The Times said.

His homes are works of art. He created the space, but the space becomes a creative force and uplifts when it is lived in every day.