Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 12, 1976

I would rather have built this little house than St. Peter’s in Rome.

-Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography

The four Mayan revival homes that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Los Angeles in the 1920s are united by one dominant feature: the cubes of patterned cement “textile blocks” that he stacked into each home’s unique shape. But Wright’s genius went beyond his innovative choices in material. He’d always been a master at designing buildings that responded to their settings, and the Millard House from 1923 – the first and smallest of his four textile block homes – is arguably the most beautifully integrated.

The Millard House sits atop a ravine right next to the Arroyo Seco, a dry riverbed on the western edge of Pasadena. If you approach from the main entrance on Prospect Crescent, you’re greeted with the main three-story stack of concrete blocks. The mass directs your eyes skywards but also horizontally across to a shorter garage, with walls punctuated by weathered wooden doors. It has the feel of an imposing medieval castle. But drive around to the backside on Rosemont Avenue, peer through the whimsical gate, and you see another side of “La Miniatura,” as the client called it. The doors open to the hidden jungle portion of the property: a low-lying dell, surrounded by eucalyptus trees and plants with a small lily pond in the middle, and an outdoor seating area just above. The landscaping is far from manicured. The man-made and the natural coexist, as if the building had been carved out of the rock itself.

On the inside, we get Wright’s masterful intertwining of space, light and material. The narrow entryway opens into an expansive living room, with high ceilings and natural light flowing in from a band of wood-framed doors. Strategically-placed blocks are pierced with an embedded cross of glass, letting in shafts of light that shift as the sun traverses the sky. High quality redwood lines the ceiling, accenting the door and window frames and adding warmth to the temple-like atmosphere of the concrete.

The Millard House came at a turning point in Wright’s architectural practice. He had recently completed the innovative Hollyhock House, and just returned from Tokyo, where he had designed the monumental Imperial Hotel. Both of these projects represented shifts away from the “prairie school” style that typified so many of his residential designs. With the Hollyhock and the Imperial Hotel, Wright introduced decorative motifs in concrete and stone, patterned off of ancient Mayan ruins. At La Miniatura, he took that idea even further. The carved concrete became part of the structure of the house, not just decoration.

Wright’s concept was more than aesthetic. As he put it in his autobiography, he was going for “…a distinctly genuine expression of California in terms of modem industry and American life.” He had the idea of ennobling the concrete block, making something that was both beautiful and affordable, and hopefully – if it caught on – could influence the next era of home design. 

What about the concrete block? It was the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world. It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. Why not see what could be done with that gutter rat? Steel rods cast inside the joints of the blocks themselves and the whole brought into some broad, practical scheme of general treatment, why would it not be fit for a new phase of our modern architecture? It might be permanent, noble, beautiful.

-Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Gerald Nordland, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas (source: greatbuildings.com)

Of course Wright first needed a client willing to indulge his vision. He found a perfect one in Alice Millard, a book and antiques dealer who had moved to Los Angeles in 1914 to run a rare bookshop with her husband George. The Millards were previous Wright clients back from their days in Chicago; the house he designed for them in 1906 is prime prairie style. Wright says in his autobiography that he “was proud to have a client survive the first house and ask me to build a second.”

After George Millard died in 1918, Alice wanted a place of her own that could showcase her collection of books, paintings and furniture. According to La Miniatura’s application for the National Register, “Her needs were specific and spatial: an unusually large living room with a great fireplace; an interior balcony leading to the bedroom; a guest room capable of doubling as an office; a bedroom with a view of the ravine.” Wright obliged. It must have been a relief to find an artistically-inclined client who knew what she wanted, and was moved by his ideas. “I unfolded to her the scheme of the textile-block slab house gradually forming in my mind since I got home from Japan,” Wright recounted in his autobiography. “She wasn’t frightened by the idea. Not at all.”

For Alice Millard her house functioned as a living space and office, but also something of a museum and a space for teaching. A lovely remembrance by Huntington Library curator Robert O. Schad, reprinted in the NRHP nomination form, points out that young collectors and students would stop by to see her objets d’art. Even after the home’s completion, Millard kept thinking about how to expand its role as a space for cultural interchange. In 1926, she hired Frank’s son Lloyd Wright to design her a studio/exhibition space in the style of the main house, to store more stuff and host more guests.  

If you’ve read much about Wright, you probably already guessed that there were major cost overruns during construction (the original $10,000 price tag ended up more like $17,000), and that the place leaked like crazy:

You will be sorry to know we had a very hard time during the recent flood. The storm drain was not adequate. The ravine filled up. The basement was entirely full of water and, of course, muddy water as it had never been cemented. This rose until the entire dining room floor was six inches underwater. Our furnaces, of course, all had to be taken out, taken to the shop, taken apart and relined with asbestos. It has all been expensive and discouraging.

-letter from Alice Millard to Frank Lloyd Wright, dated January 1933 (quoted in the Los Angeles Times)

But considering how Wright was using an untested construction technique, it’s remarkable how well this house has held up over the past century. Ironically, part of the reason the Millard House’s concrete blocks have withstood a century of weathering is because of something that wasn’t in them. For his next three textile block houses, the Storer, Freeman and Ennis, Wright’s builders ran steel reinforcement beams inside the blocks – nice idea, but the rebar corroded and expanded over the years, and the blocks would basically disintegrate from the inside out. For La Miniatura, they reinforced the blocks with standard mortar. Perhaps less sturdy in case of an earthquake, but at least the house isn’t eating itself alive right? 

It took wealthy private owners spending massive amounts of cash to restore the Ennis and Storer houses; the Freeman is right now at the beginning of that process. La Miniatura has also been blessed with at least one owner committed to do the work necessary to keep this historic building in great shape. Its latter-day patron was TV producer David Zander, an architecture lover who at one point owned Greene & Greene’s Duncan-Irwin House and John Lautner’s JW Schaffer House. Zander bought it in 1996, spent about a decade restoring it with the help of the Marmol Radziner firm, and then sold it in 2015 to a Chinese architect David You and his wife Jennifer Li, an engineer. Sounds like the perfect couple to prepare La Miniatura for its next century, right?

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Millard House’s NRHP nomination form

+Gee, Alison Singh: “Out with the New” (CrosbyDoe.com, 2015)

+Groves, Martha: “Tour shows off the blocks architect Wright played with” (Los Angeles Times, 2008)

+“Landmark houses: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Millard House (La Miniatura)” (Los Angeles Times) 

+Van de Walle, Mark: “The Modern House” (Departures, 2010)

+Williams, Janette, Dan Abendschein & Emma Gallegos: “Citybeats: Pasadena City Hall swine flu clinic canceled” (Pasadena Star-News, 2009)

+Alice Parsons Millard Papers and Addenda: Finding Aid (Online Archive of California/Huntington Library)