Added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 14, 1971

Could the Samuel & Harriet Freeman House be the least appreciated of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses in Los Angeles? It lacks the film pedigree of the Ennis (Etan Does LA visit #22) and the grandeur of the Hollyhock; it hasn’t been restored (yet) by a private owner like the Storer (visit #37) or La Miniatura. Just this February, it was sold for a song to a developer after 35 years of slow deterioration under the watch of USC’s architecture school. When I visited it the first week of June, the Freeman’s entryway was covered in tarps, with “NO TRESPASSING” signs and a freshly mounted security camera rigged up at the top – no doubt to keep out looky-loos like me (hi mom!), and to prevent any more brushes with thieves. 

So yes, the 98-year-old Freeman House is underappreciated and undervalued (quite literally – it sold for $1.8 million, a tenth of what the Ennis went for in 2019). But the more I read about it, the more I recognize how fascinating this building is from so many perspectives. So let’s talk about them one by one. 

Architectural History 

The Freeman House was one of four homes that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in LA in the mid-1920s with “textile blocks” made of sand and concrete – 12,000 in all at the Freeman, many of them imprinted with pre-Columbian design motifs that carry throughout the house. The premise with the textile blocks was to democratize modern housing by ennobling cheap materials that came from, and harmonized with, their surroundings. Certainly the Freeman House was not cheap. Construction costs ran way over budget, amounting to $23,000 – more than twice the original commission. The Freemans had modest means, and resorted to using cardboard boxes for furniture before they could afford Rudolph Schindler (more on that later). The fact that only four of these textile-block houses exist in Wright’s canon should tell you how many people cherished the idea of life inside a modernist Mayan temple. But over time, Wright’s textile-block houses have been recognized for their distinctiveness, their inventiveness, their boldness of form.

Wright carried over some of his signature moves at the Freeman, like the fireplace that was central to so many designs in his Prairie house period. But he also introduced some new technical ideas, most famously the miter-cut corner windows in the living room, uninterrupted by vertical framing. The technique would become de rigueur for mid-century modern designers, but it was nearly unheard of in America in the 1920s. 

This home is also a great example of how an original design – and an original designer – may be just the beginning of a building’s story. Preoccupied by his work on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Wright left the construction of the Freeman to his son, Lloyd Wright, who would emerge later that decade as a talented architect in his own right (see visit #84 to the Derby House & visit #21 to the Sowden House). Rudolph Schindler designed furniture for the place, and made several rounds of renovations in the ‘30s and ‘40s, remodeling the laundry room into an apartment and inserting dividers between the kitchen and living room (this spicy LA Times story suggests that Schindler did more with the Freeman’s furniture than just design it, ifyouknowwhatimean). The great John Lautner, another one of Wright’s proteges, was hired in 1968 to install metal frames between the living room windows after the original wood frames started to fall apart. Noted architects Gregory Ain and Robert Clark also did some minor work on the Freeman over the years. 

People’s History

Samuel & Harriet Freeman were a bohemian couple, communists both, drawn to Wright’s work after they attended a party at Aline Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House. Harriet was a dancer and dance teacher to high schoolers and Warner Bros. starlets; Samuel worked at his family’s jewelry store downtown until 1938, when he received an inheritance and retired at 49. 

The Freemans were passionate about the arts and politics, and opened their home to artists and intellectuals of all stripes, including Hollywood folks blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Actor Clark Gable, choreographer Martha Graham, photographer Edward Weston, fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, painter Galka Scheyer, architect Richard Neutra, director Jean Negulesco and bandleader Xavier Cugat were all connected to the Freeman House, though reports vary as to who was a guest at a salon, and who was renting one of the remodeled apartments downstairs. 

I love the idea of this complicated couple, creating a safe space for the bravest artists and thinkers of their day, as they sip cocktails in one of the most avant garde houses in the city – all while literally looking down on Hollywood, on the industry that employed them and blacklisted them. 

Harriet continued to take in tenants through the end of her life. In fact in 1985, 60 years into her ownership of the house and a year before she died, Harriet invited architecture teacher Jeffrey Chusid to live there; he would stay for 13 years, and help coordinate the use of the house after Harriet bequeathed it to USC. In 2011, Chusid published a book about the preservation efforts at the Freeman House.

Preservation History

Like many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, structural issues at the Freeman made it difficult to live in, and even more difficult to maintain. The flat roof leaked pretty regularly. The textile blocks were built with sand found on the building site, but this particular sand reacted poorly with the iron rebar that held them together, causing the rebar to rust and some of the blocks to crumble. Over the years rainwater seeped into the blocks and they started to corrode. The home was built right onto a steep hillside, which makes the view unparalleled, and the danger of the whole shebang slipping down the Hollywood Hills all the more frightening.

Still, when USC took over the house in 1986, the Freeman was deemed safe enough to occupy. The Northridge earthquake in 1994 changed that. USC applied for grants from FEMA, the Getty Conservation Institute and other private donors, and it was enough to stabilize and retrofit it to withstand future earthquakes. According to Los Angeles Magazine, some of the blocks were recreated using a 3-D printer and a robot milling machine. 

This whole time-consuming, expensive process made the Freeman House habitable again, but it was by no means fully restored. And despite progress over the last couple decades, the USC School of Architecture simply didn’t have the resources to finish the job. 

From one standpoint, it’s a shame that a vaunted university like USC, entrusted with the care of a historically vital property, wasn’t able to finish the job. They got extra facepalms when robbers stole two lamps and a chair from the South LA storage facility where USC was keeping much of the furnishings during the restoration process. 

On the other hand, the stasis meant that the Freeman House could became a laboratory for different ideas about what preservation should mean. If you restore, whose design do you restore? Do you preserve Schindler’s modifications? Do you replace Lautner’s metal window frames with recreated wooden frames, in fitting with Wright’s original design? USC students that visited and even lived there during USC’s ownership got to engage with these ideas and take part in the restoration. 

Those are still open questions for the Freeman House’s new owner, Richard E. Weintraub. His company Weintraub Real Estate Group has adaptively reused historic buildings in the past, like St. Vibiana’s downtown. His purchase comes with a conservation easement held by the Los Angeles Conservancy, preventing Weintraub from demolishing the Freeman or making additions that are out of touch with the original aesthetics. 

As part of the deal, the public will even get to access the home four times a year. I’ll be first in line, assuming I’m not arrested for taking a bazillion photos right in front of the security camera 🙂

Recommended Reading:

+Freeman House’s NRHP nomination form

+Video walkthroughs and photos (flwfreemanhouse.com)

+USC sells Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House to private buyer — with agreement that it be preserved (LA Times, 2022)

+The Freeman House, One of L.A.’s Most Iconic Homes, Is for Sale (LA Mag, 2021)

+Frank Lloyd Wright’s forgotten Hollywood sandcastle (Curbed LA, 2017)

+A Hollywood Legend (LA Times, 2000)

+Harriett and Sam Freeman House: The California Dream (YouTube lecture by Kathryn Smith, 2021)

+Samuel Freeman House @ FrankLloydWright.org

+Freeman House @ WikiArquitectura.com (contains architectural drawings and photos)