John Storer House: Home to Frank Lloyd Wright Architecture Architectural Detail Group

Table Of Content

• Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Why his Los Angeles houses deserve a closer look
• Inside the far-right plan to use civil rights law to disrupt the 2024 election
• One of Wright’s four textile-block homes in LA, restored to its original glory
• Chicago citation style:
• Rights & Access
• Larkin Company Administration Building, Buffalo

Then, the right owners came along and saw the value of such a house full of history (and definitely an original piece of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture), and in 2015 bought it for a reported $6.8 million! The John Storer House found its family and currently remains a private residence. The restoration won several awards, and the John Storer House was once again on its way to the top.

Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Why his Los Angeles houses deserve a closer look

Wright’s Prairie style was uniquely American, inspired by the flat plains of the Midwest, and essentially acted as the catalyst for Modern architecture. The style featured horizontal lines, open floor plans, cantilevered roofs, clerestory windows, unfinished materials, and the integration of interior and exterior environments. The Storer House is made of concrete blocks, which were a relatively new building material at the time.

Inside the far-right plan to use civil rights law to disrupt the 2024 election

After the Sturges family grew even larger they moved next door and for decades two Hollywood luminaries — filmmaker James Bridges and actor, playwright, and librettist Jack Larson lived at the home. The Brentwood landmark last sold in 2016 for just under $2 million. The home was built in 1923 and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. This large and lovely home is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is also a Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Monument and a California State Landmark.

Storer offers practical solutions for tax relief - Buckrail

Storer offers practical solutions for tax relief.

Posted: Tue, 01 Nov 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

One of Wright’s four textile-block homes in LA, restored to its original glory

Due to its exoticism, the house has served as the backdrop in numerous films, commercials and tv shows including Mulholland Drive, The Rocketeer, Rush Hour, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Predator 2, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Blade Runner. The home sustained serious damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake and torrential rains of 2005. Privately owned by billionaire, Ron Burkle, it is undergoing a complete restoration and is currently closed to the public.

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He would soon be working on four more, along with an ambitious project called Doheny Ranch, a subdivision of 25 houses in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. The Storer House is also known for its stunning views of the surrounding city and mountains. Wright designed the home's windows and terrace to frame these views, creating a sense of connection between the home and its natural surroundings. The Storer House is a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles built in 1923. The structure is noteworthy as one of the four Mayan Revival style textile-block houses built by Wright in the Los Angeles area from 1922 to 1924.

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Maintained by the University, the building was stabilized in 2005 and is undergoing additional renovations due to earthquake damage. Some may say this is Wright’s least famous of the four textile block homes. Perhaps that’s because from the street the house is seemingly hidden behind a system of Wright’s textile blocks, as the house itself sits on a steep hillside and the rest of the house extends to two additional levels down the slope. Wright’s resulting $10,000 commission (and, in a story that played out over and over again between Wright and his clients, the final bill went way over budget, at $23,000) takes full advantage of the precarious Hollywood Hills site. Perched atop a hill in the Los Feliz neighborhood, it is among the best residential examples of Mayan Revival architecture in the country. The Ennis House rises in stages, with over 27,000 blocks arranged across a concrete platform and buttressed by a retaining wall.

The pre-Columbian elements that Wright draped across the exterior of the Hollyhock House became integral to the next four houses he designed in Los Angeles. The houses relied on a new structural technique developed by Wright — with significant input from Lloyd, who would go on to become an accomplished L.A. Architect in his own right — that the elder architect compared to weaving, dubbing it “textile-block” construction.

Larkin Company Administration Building, Buffalo

Multiple modifications obscure the original facade, but you can still see hints of the tower designs he repeated in other structures. Wright acknowledged the somber quality of his textile-block designs. “I think what you say is probably true as to its lacking joy,” he conceded in a letter to Lloyd Wright about the Storer House. What the four designs share is an interest in separating themselves both from the leading L.A.

Ennis House

The Storer House is a prime example of Wright's use of geometric shapes and asymmetrical design. The home is built into a hillside, which allowed Wright to create a multi-level design that takes full advantage of the site's natural contours. Skyewiay Road in Brentwood Heights, is considered a masterpiece of American design, often compared to Wright's legendary Fallingwater in southwest Pennsylvania. The Rodeo Drive shops called Anderton Court are a little-known Wright design and not widely recognized as one of his better works.

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The house is built on a steep hillside in the Hollywood Hills at a time when the hills did not have the rich foliage present today. At the time of its construction, Storer House is said to have resembled a Pompeiian villa. Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, was both the on-site construction manager and the landscape architect, providing an illusion of a ruin barely visible within its jungle environment. Frank Lloyd Wright architecture is known to be among the most influential and innovative in the world, but this structure initially was better as an idea on paper. This was an attempt by the architect to create a textile block house that the everyday man could easily build as well as afford. Visitors included photographer Edward Weston, Martha Graham, architect Richard Neutra, bandleader Xavier Cugat, and actor Clark Gable.

In the 1940s, radio and television personality Arch Oboler and his wife Eleanor set out to create an estate called “Eaglefeather” on the 360-acre lot they owned in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. An avid rock enthusiastic, Oboler gathered  many of the rocks himself, from a variety of locations, even driving his van to the Arizona desert. Their grand plans included a house, a film-processing studio, stables, and paddock, along with other structures. Regrettably, the main house was never built, but the other segments of the complex that were completed consist of a ridgetop stone and wood gatehouse and a small studio-retreat for Eleanor perched on a nearby hill. Built in 1923 for Dr. John Storer, this textile-block house is in the Hollywood Hills at 8161 Hollywood Boulevard.

The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and has been listed as a California Historical Landmark and as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. After the project is complete, Ennis House is expected to be open to the public a few days per year. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, which served as a location for films such as “Blade Runner,” has was sold to billionaire Ron Burkle, founder of the Burkle Foundation and a trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy. It was in this shaky state of mind that Wright began traveling regularly to Southern California. In January 1915, less than six months after the murders, Wright visited the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego and its gallery of pre-Columbian architecture. It was inside Taliesin’s main house that a deranged cook named Julian Carlton killed Mamah, her two children and four others on Aug. 15, 1914.

Current owner Konrad Pearce is the original owner’s grandson and is working to restore the house. Silver sold it in 2002, and it 2015 it sold again to a “preservation-minded buyer for what is expected to be a record price for a Wright house,” as reported by Curbed LA. They go on to say that the LA Times reported the final sale price as $6.8 million. In 1927, Barnsdall donated the residence and its surrounding 11 acres of land to the City of Los Angeles so that it could be used as a public park in memory of her father. Hollyhock House is now part of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, and the park is used for art classes, working studios, a gallery, and a theatre – returning full circle to Barnsdall’s original ambitions for the site.