The Hollyhock House: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ode to California
Hollyhock House may be best known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Los Angeles and the city’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, but if it weren’t for the vision and resolve of Aline Barnsdall, it might never have been realized.
A monumental fireplace featuring a bas-relief sculpture constructed of 17 individual cast-concrete blocks dominates the living room. The reproduction of a Wright-designed rug in the foreground displays a stylized hollyhock motif. As the architect once observed, "Miss Barnsdall wanted no ordinary home, for she was no ordinary woman."
Kanō School Japanese screens provide a backdrop for an arrangement by architect and ikebana artist Ravi GuneWardena. It’s part of an ongoing installation that highlights the home’s original connections with Japanese art and design as well as Barnsdall’s own floral displays. "The house needs to be in constant dialogue with the art communities here in L.A. and the artists," says Hollyhock House director and curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach. "It feels more alive than ever when we have contemporary art and design in dialogue with it."
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The oil heiress met Wright in 1915 and asked him to design a theater. Four years later, she purchased a 36-acre site in East Hollywood for the project. As the design brief evolved to include a private home, artists’ residences, and a cinema, Barnsdall and her famously temperamental architect butted heads.
In contrast to Wright’s earlier Midwestern-inspired Prairie-style designs, the temple-like Hollyhock House exterior was influenced by pre-Columbian architecture, notably Mayan and Aztec styles, though some have also described it as Asian or Egyptian. The result was something the architect described as "California Romanza," and Wright’s use of hollow clay tile covered in stucco presaged his later textile block residences.
A view west from the entrance pergola. "I see Hollyhock House as a harbinger of California modernism," says Brach. "This is the project that brought Rudolph Schindler to California, and there were other important contributions to the site made by Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra to renovate and restore the house."
Wright was often away, overseeing the construction of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, so his son Lloyd, Rudolph Schindler, and later Richard Neutra added their own contributions. When Barnsdall fired the elder Wright in 1921, the arts complex was only partly realized, but the centerpiece of the site was the main house, laid out around a courtyard and pool, along with two guest residences. In 1927, Barnsdall donated the structures and just under 12 acres to the City of Los Angeles as a public art park.
The central patio as seen from the loggia. Wright’s design featured indoor and outdoor living spaces, open-plan living areas, an outdoor sleeping porch, and cast-concrete doors weighing about 250 pounds each. Of their financial and artistic differences, Barnsdall wrote in a 1926 letter to Wright: "I hope we may not consider each other enemies, and that we may never attempt to work together again. It can’t be done. We are both too much of the same mold—egotistical, dictatorial, and creative."
These Hollyhocks growing in the patio appear in one of Janna Ireland’s photos of the house from her Even By Proxy exhibition, which was commissioned for Hollyhock House’s centennial and presented in partnership with Project Restore and the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University.
More than a century after Hollyhock’s creation, exhibitions by contemporary artists like Janna Ireland, Adam Silverman, and Louise Bonnet, and a new native garden by Terremoto are "the through line that keeps the house alive," says director and curator Abbey Chamberlain Brach.
As part of their 2023 site-specific installation Entanglements, Louise Bonnet’s oil painting Hollyhock Gold is paired with conjoined vessels by Adam Silverman set atop a Wright-designed table in the alcove off the living room.
Against Wright’s abstracted hollyhock details in the patio is an arrangement done by a group from the Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles Branch led by Kaz Kitajima from the 2024 Flowers for Aline exhibition.
All photos courtesy City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
Related Reading:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beloved Hollyhock House Reopens After Two Years
Iconic Perspectives: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House
More Open House: Los Angeles tours:
You’d Never Guess This Revamped Midcentury Cabin Is in the Middle of L.A.
This Australian Architect’s Silver Lake Home Is a Love Letter to Los Angeles
A 1954 Los Angeles Home Moves Into the Future With a Collection of Pavilions in the Landscape
Project Credits:
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Landscape Architect (since 2024): Terremoto / @terremoto_landscape
Historic restoration and preservation: Project Restore / @projectrestorela
The Barnsdall Art Park’s facilities, including Hollyhock House, are owned by the City of Los Angeles, operated by the Department of Cultural Affairs, and maintained by the Department of Recreation and Parks and the Department of General Services / @barnsdallpark @hollyhockhouse.
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