Added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 29, 1994

The Lanterman House in La Cañada Flintridge is one of my favorite kinds of landmarks on the National Register of Historic Places. Much like the Lopez Adobe in San Fernando, the Woodbury-Story House in Altadena or The Oaks in Monrovia, it tells the story of a pioneering family who helped build their own corner of Los Angeles from the ground up. 

The Lanterman Clan

Built in 1915, this was the home of Roy and Emily Lanterman, part of the family that more or less founded La Cañada Flintridge. Roy’s parents, Jacob and Amoretta, had come to California from Michigan to seek a cure for Roy’s chronic bronchitis in the clean air of the Crescenta Valley. In 1875, Jacob teamed up with a business partner to buy nearly 6000 acres of an old Spanish land grant, Rancho La Cañada, for just $10,000. He and Amoretta commissioned a Victorian estate called Homewood that still stands today on Verdugo Road, right around the corner from the Lanterman House. Before their new ranch could thrive, Amoretta had to secure water rights from Theodor Pickens, one of the few white settlers who predated the Lantermans. There’s a story that she threatened him with a shotgun before he relented and let the Lantermans access the water flowing from Pickens Canyon. 

Their son, Roy, was a trained doctor with a successful obstetrics practice. While living in Santa Monica, Roy met his future wife Emily, a highly cultured doctor’s daughter. They soon moved to downtown LA, and Emily gave birth to their two sons, Frank and Lloyd. After a surprisingly dramatic stint as County Coroner, Roy decided that they should return to his family’s land in the Crescenta Valley. Emily was reluctant to move to an area that was still pretty rural and isolated, without all the urban amenities she was used to living in downtown LA. But Emily made the most of it by taking active roles in the social, cultural and religious life of her new community. She also got a hell of a house out of the move, an 11,500 square foot home on 35 acres of land. It would become known as “El Retiro” – or “Retirement.”

El Retiro

While the Lanterman House’s connection to La Cañada’s first family makes it a locally famous landmark, it was added to the NRHP on the basis of its architecture. With its low-pitched roof, wide eaves, projecting rafter beams, wraparound terrace and a chimney piled high with river rock, it’s got many of the hallmarks of craftsman architecture, and is regarded as one of the best, most intact examples of the style in the Crescenta Valley. 

But in some ways it’s also an architectural outlier. Uncommon for buildings of the time, it’s oriented away from the north-south street that borders it, with the main entrance on its south wall. This is a rare craftsman-style house with a central courtyard, and in contrast to the rich, earth-toned wood siding familiar from the Greene & Greene school of craftsman bungalows, the Lanterman House was covered in roughly finished, unpainted concrete from the beginning. It also represents a very early use of reinforced concrete in a residential home, a fact that may seem a profoundly unsexy, mundane thing to focus on, until you realize why it was employed here. 

The day after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Roy Lanterman traveled from LA to the Bay Area as part of a medical relief team funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. He saw firsthand how so many buildings made of unreinforced masonry had crumbled as the ground shook, and how buildings of unprotected wood burned to the ground in the fires that resulted. So when Roy hired architect Arthur Haley to design his house, he insisted that it be built out of reinforced concrete. Though it was still a novel building material at the time, several Bay Area structures made of the stuff (e.g. Julia Morgan’s El Campanil belltower at Mills College) were still standing after the earthquake.

Haley’s design was built to last, and calibrated to take full advantage of the mild California climate. El Retiro has 30+ pairs of French doors and no interior hallways, so light and air easily flow through every room. Nearly every room in the house opens up to the courtyard or a terrace, an ideal layout for that quintessential California indoor-outdoor life. There was even an open sleeping porch, added above the kitchen a few months after the house was completed, so the family could sleep al fresco in the warmer months. It was attached to the ballroom that Emily had added as a second floor, with the hopes that her sons would meet worthy paramours at a formal dance at their house (she never held a ball there, and her sons were bachelors their entire lives, so you can tell how well that idea worked out).

Visually, my eyes go right to the network of criss-crossing trellises that surround the first floor outside, and cast shifting shadows in the sun. But aside from the trellises, the exterior of El Retiro is rather plain, all unpainted grey concrete accented with white doors and window frames and little in the way of decoration. 

The inside is something else entirely. Coffered ceilings and wood-paneled walls, loaded with built-ins, abound in the living room and billiard room. According to this video by the Lanterman Historical Museum Foundation, Emily Lanterman guided most of the aesthetic design of the interior. Her taste was on point for the time. Hand-painted friezes wrap many of the walls with exquisite floral patterns that are echoed in the lighting fixtures. Even the bathrooms display delicately painted irises on the walls. The rugs and leather chairs and fine china and silver and expensive furniture all suggest a place of Edwardian comfort and luxury, in contrast to the somewhat spartan outside. 

So much of what you see if you tour the Lanterman House (and you should!) is original. Everything from the rugs to the billiard table to the lighting fixtures were used by the Lantermans. In the kitchen, you’ll see Emily’s box of recipe cards and the oven that she used to cook meals for the family. Some of her clothing is still on display in the house.

Lloyd and Frank

The fact that the Lanterman House still has so many of its original furnishings has a lot to do with the fact that it stayed in the family until 1987, when Roy and Emily’s son Lloyd Lanterman died and left it to the City of La Cañada in his will. By that time, he had lived at the house for 70+ years, never marrying, and spending much of his time tinkering with steam-driven automobiles in the garage on premises. Lloyd had trained as an engineer at USC, and worked for a time in auto engineering. He even designed the winning car at the Indianapolis 500 in 1930. 

Frank Lanterman took a very different path than his brother Lloyd. Frank’s first career was as a professional organist for theaters, including the Alex Theatre in Glendale, where he accompanied silent films and vaudeville shows on the house Wurlitzer from 1925-1928. For years, Frank lived at home at El Retiro, managing the family’s business and real estate concerns. But after his parents Roy and Emily died in the late 1940s, Frank went into politics, winning an election to the California State Assembly in 1950, and serving for 14 consecutive terms until his retirement in 1978.

Throughout his long career in politics, “Uncle Frank” sponsored nearly 400 successful bills. His first magic trick was to pass the Municipal Water District Act, which let small California cities like La Cañada Flintridge form their own water districts, as an alternative to letting big cities (like Los Angeles) annex them in order to get water. Later on, Frank would become a champion of the rights of disabled and mentally ill Californians. The historic Lanterman-Petris-Short bill of 1967 enshrined the civil liberties of people who had been involuntarily committed. Other legislation he worked on created community centers for developmentally disabled children, and set up the modern framework for the education of kids with special needs.  

During his decades in politics, Frank bounced between Sacramento and El Retiro, where he and Lloyd continued to live together off and on. In 1964, Frank made one of the very few significant remodels to the Lanterman House: he closed off the central courtyard into its own room, and installed a 1923 Wurlitzer pipe organ in it, as one does. You can just imagine him flying in from Sacramento for the weekend and jamming a Bach fugue to let off some steam, just like old times. In 1992, after Frank and Lloyd were gone, the organ room was removed as part of a major restoration project.  

The Lanterman House Today

After Lloyd died and left El Retiro to the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California’s Office of Historic Preservation earmarked half a million dollars to restore and preserve it. As part of that work the Lanterman Historical Museum Foundation was created, and it has operated the house as a museum ever since, with its offices located in the old garage where Lloyd Lanterman used to build cars. 

This is pretty much the ideal house museum. The building is in great shape, with its unique exterior and interior features preserved, and much of the original furniture and effects intact. The docents are knowledgeable, and there’s even an in-house archivist who manages a vast trove of documents about the Lantermans and the surrounding community. Make a reservation and pop by on your way back from Descanso Gardens, just a couple minutes away. Now that’s an afternoon.

Thank you to Julie Yamashita & Laura Verlaque at the Lanterman House for providing all the historical photos for this post.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Lanterman House’s NRHP nomination form

+“Arthur L. Haley: Construction & Design of the Lanterman House”

+“Lanterman History” (LantermanHouse.org) 

+Emily Constance Lanterman – Grand Dame of La Cañada (video by the Lanterman Historical Museum Foundation) 

+Lawler, Mike: “Pioneer Memories: Emily Lanterman” (Crescenta Valley Weekly, 2021) 

+Meares, Hadley: “Lanterman House: The Enduring Legacy and Forgotten Scandals of La Cañada’s First Family” (KCET, 2015)

+Wheeler, Natalie: “Lanterman House celebrates its 100th year” (Los Angeles Times, 2014)