The rose bushes and flowering vines that once covered Casa de Rosas are long gone. Their absence lays bare a fresh gray-on-stucco paint job, and a rather spartan font chosen for the lettering at the front entrance. These humdrum choices contrast the more uncommon features of the building – the Tuscan columns that support arched window openings, the Victorian-era diamond-paned transoms above many of the windows. You don’t often find those kinds of details in buildings intended to be affordable housing for homeless veterans.

Though you wouldn’t know it just by looking at it, the 130-year-old Casa de Rosas is a vitally important building for LA architecture history, and also in terms of what happened inside its walls.

Built in 1893, the main building of the campus was the first documented project by Sumner Hunt, one of the giants of fin-de-siècle SoCal architecture. Hunt would go on to design the Automobile Club of Southern California HQ just down the road, the Southwest Museum, the E.L. Doheny Mansion, two iterations of the Ebell Club House (including the current one, visit #141) and the famous Bradbury Building downtown (though some attribute that one to an untested draftsman named George Wyman). 

Hunt had an outsize impact on what Los Angeles looked like in the 19th and early 20th century LA, both through his prolific architectural practice, and through his involvement with a bunch of professional clubs. He was President of the SoCal Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and also an early member of the Landmarks Club, a consortium formed by Charles Lummis in the 1890s to preserve the crumbling Spanish missions.

While there were very few styles that Hunt didn’t work in, he was particularly inspired by the California missions and Spanish colonial design as a way of accessing something unique about California’s aesthetic past. In Casa de Rosas he designed one of the first mission revival buildings in Los Angeles, a full two decades before that became a popular choice. Not all of the recognizable features are in place here – Hunt used a standard shingle roof instead of the red terracotta tiles that would become so ubiquitous in mission revival architecture later – but you’ll see arches arranged into an arcade, and a very early use of an interior courtyard, which wasn’t really a thing for residential architecture back then, but would be soon.

This pioneering building was built for an equally pioneering purpose: the introduction of kindergarten in Los Angeles. Casa de Rosas’ commissioners, John Pierce and Helen Claverie, were adherents of German philosopher Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of an early education system founded on self-expression, creativity, social interactions and “motor expression” – in other words, learning by doing. In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright rhapsodizes about the impact that a set of maple wood blocks, designed by Froebel, had on his design sense. 

Pierce and Claverie called their new building the Froebel (or Fröbel) Institute, and they spent about seven years giving LA young’uns a fine private education according to the Froebel’s active learning methods, in an environment meant to foster an appreciation for beautiful and natural things.

As Teresa Grimes puts it in her NRHP nomination form for Casa de Rosas, the school was “a victim of its own success.” Toward the end of the 19th century, major cities were coming around to the benefits of early childhood education; by 1895, the LA public school system had some 1300 kindergarteners enrolled in 49 classes across the city. Even in posh North University Park, a private kindergarten was an increasingly unnecessary luxury for local families. 

Around the turn of the century, Casa de Rosas was sold to the Girls’ Collegiate School, one of the few all-girls schools in LA at the time. The new tenants educated about 150 young women at a time in both a standard educational curriculum and the social graces expected of 7th to 12th grade girls from nice families at the time. It was during this period that the campus expanded with the addition of three more buildings, including a gym, a meeting hall, some additional classroom space and a dormitory. 

The Girls’ Collegiate School moved on in the mid 1920s, as changing demographics lured wealthy families further west, and many of the grand old mansions around Hoover and Adams were torn down and replaced with apartments. The following years witnessed a parade of tenants coming through Casa de Rosas. It was a hotel/restaurant, a dorm for USC’s international students, and a military barracks during WWII. In 1950-51, L. Ron Hubbard brought the LA branch of his Dianetics Foundation to Casa de Rosas, right around the time he published Dianetics, one of the canonical texts of Scientology. Hubbard didn’t stay for long – in 1951, he was accused of kidnapping his one-year-old daughter and skipping town. He was eventually found in Wichita, Kansas, by which time his California assets (including Casa de Rosas) had gone into receivership. 

Soon after Hubbard left, Casa de Rosas entered into its mid-century glory years. The space was purchased by Essie Binkley West, aka “The Angel of Skid Row.” West was a religious crusader who once used her trumpet and pipe organ skills to embellish Aimee Semple MacPherson’s wildly popular services at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. West’s Saturday night “Sunshine Broadcast” radio program brought her preaching to hundreds of thousands of listeners a week.

After decades of providing aid (and evangelism) to unwed mothers and the city’s most destitute individuals, West moved into Casa de Rosas in 1951 and rebranded it the Sunshine Mission. It would become the city’s first shelter exclusively for unhoused women, a role it filled until just before West’s death in 1976, and again intermittently over the next several decades.

The campus endured a whole lot since West’s passing. It was targeted by two separate arsons in the 1980s, and suffered damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It was abandoned for 12 years after the Sunshine Mission departed in the 2000s. In 2016, a construction crew working on a nearby building accidentally began to demolish it. 

Finally in 2015 the Housing Community Investment Department of Los Angeles submitted an RFP to redevelop Casa de Rosas as 36 units of affordable housing for veterans. It’s taken seven years and $18 million to get the job done, but finally in 2022 they started taking applications, and the renovation job by Milofsky & Michali won an LA Conservancy Preservation Award. In late March 2023, LA Mayor Karen Bass presided over the ribbon cutting ceremony. Nice to see that Casa de Rosas has maintained its aesthetic throughline with Hunt’s original plans and subsequent additions, and also kept up the spirit of Essie Binkley West, providing support and shelter to those who need it most. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Casa de Rosas Campus on the LA Housing Department website

+ “Casa de Rosas Campus” (LA Conservancy)

+ “Dianetics Man Found, Wife Says (Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1951 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ Hahm, Daniel: “A ‘House of Roses,’ long withered, blooms again on Hoover Street” (Daily Trojan, October 31, 2018)

+ Grimes, Teresa: Casa de Rosas’ NRHP nomination form

+ “Influence of Fredrich Froebel: Frank Lloyd Wright” (FroebelWeb.org)

+ Milofsky and Michali Architects: Casa de Rosas Housing development plan (PDF download – August 10, 2017)

+ Rasmussen, Cecilia: “Mission Maintains Its Effort to Educate Women” (Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2003)

+ Shelby, Kimberly: “WEDC’s Casa de Rosas Opens Doors for Veterans Again and Again” (Los Angeles Sentinel, July 28, 2022)