Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 14, 2004

Even on the garishly posh Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Anderton Court Shops (1954) stand out. They’re sandwiched in between the Balenciaga and Saint Laurent storefronts, both of which impose their image of luxury through monolithic, flat four-story facades. “Enter me, if you can!” the stores say. In contrast, the Anderton Court Shops feel withdrawn from the street, like they’re retreating from an invading sidewalk. They force you to engage with the building’s form before you can even find a door.

At first the Shops appear Escher-esque, a jumble of solid white horizontals and soaring glass verticals. A pile of pointy elbows and knees, compared to the straight-backed frontage of the surrounding buildings. But like everything Wright, there is a subtle spatial genius at work here. The individual shops are each somewhat small, differently shaped and slightly offset from their neighbors by a winding ramp. Wright resolves the off-kilterness with sheets of angled glass that soften the forms and give each shop as much exposure to Rodeo Drive as possible. It also helps to have that massive spire pulling in the eyes, right in the center of the otherwise asymmetrical mass of the building. It’s the figurative spine of the Anderton Court Shops – it even looks like a spine. 

That spire extends from the top of a hexagonal light well, shaped by the ramps. If you’re lucky enough to visit on a clear day, look up through the opening from the bottom floor for a glorious framing of the sky. When I visited, the contrast of clean white walls and piercing blue sky almost looked like a James Turrell skyscape.

Gotta give props to Frank Lloyd Wright for his use of simple geometric patterns to bring extra coherence to the building. At the Anderton Court Shops, it’s the chevron/V shape that you’ll see repeated all over, from that spire, to the decorative fascia below the rooflines, to these snazzy  columns that taper downwards from ceiling to floor.

Wright-o-philes may notice some visual echoes of his later buildings in this one. The massive Marin County Civic Center (1957) is similarly in-spired, and you’ll find a much fatter, more structurally involved version of the spire atop the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA, dedicated just months after Wright died in 1959. The spiraling ramp was a feature he toyed with a number of times, most famously at the Guggenheim Museum, also from 1959. I love the idea that the Master continued to test out ideas even in the autumn of his career. 

The Anderton Court Shops are unique in Frank Lloyd Wright’s prolific buildingography (I don’t care if it’s not a word, I’m going with it). While they aren’t the only retail establishments he worked on – the V.C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco is still around, and he designed an auto showroom in New York that was demolished in 2013 – this was the only instance where Wright got to envision a retail space from the ground up, instead of renovating a space that already existed.

The commission came in late 1951 from Mrs. Nina G. Anderton, a Bel Air socialite and philanthropist who inherited a successful textile mill called the Maanexit Spinning Company. Two interesting tidbits about Anderton: 1) she was robbed four times over the course of 20 years at her Bel-Air mansion, before moving to an apartment in Westwood 2) In her obituary, friends claim that she “introduced the permanent wave into the United States from France in the 1920s.” I have no way of confirming this and I desperately want to believe it is true.

Initially, Anderton wanted to name the Shops after her friend Eric Bass, a fashion designer; Bass was meant to live in the penthouse on the top floor, manage the place, and showcase his clothes in one of the showrooms. But Anderton and Bass had a tiff as the complex was nearing completion, and Bass jumped ship, leaving the project without a manager and one less future tenant.

By that point, Wright had already redesigned the Anderton Court Shops once due to cost overruns. After Bass left, Anderton was understandably concerned about the fate of her investment, so Wright continued to adjust the plans to reduce costs. The café and nightclub on the bottom floor were abandoned. So were the custom irregular-shaped doors, and those classic Wright textile blocks that he had planned for portions of the facade (how cool would that have been – a visual connection to Wright’s residential work in LA from 30 years prior). 

Wright had originally specified copper for the metal detailing on the exterior walls, a choice that proved prohibitively expensive. Instead, he and the construction supervisor Joe Fabris – a Wright apprentice, natch – went with a much cheaper fiberglass-reinforced plastic, imbued with an oxidized copper color to mimic the intended effect. Fabris had first heard about the technique from “a plastics man working with John Lautner,” according to a letter Fabris sent to Wright in March of 1953. 

Anderton Court Shops ended up costing $156,000 including Wright’s fees, nearly twice the original budget. In 1952, Wright had described it to Nina Anderton as “a little gem of an unusual sort.” But he was disappointed with aspects of the end result, especially the meager landscaping (he had hoped for hanging vines and flowers on the ramps) and the iron railing required by Beverly Hills, ostensibly to keep people from falling into the sunken garden on the ground floor. 

One wonders what Wright would have made of the changes foisted upon the Shops since it opened in 1954. The original sand-colored walls are now bright white, with black paint covering Wright’s copper-colored piers, fascia and railings. The streetside entrance to the lower-level shop was added later, and the short obelisks on either side of the stairs aren’t original either. A tall, spiky mast was removed from the top of the spire at some point in the 1990s. Signage and awnings have come and gone, none of them part of Wright’s plans. 

When I visited in November of 2022, only three of the shops had tenants – one a jewelry buyer, one a high-end cosmetics boutique, and up in the penthouse…another jeweler. The two retail spaces on the north side were both for lease. So if you’ve always wanted to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright, this could be your best chance. The next best thing to living in a Frank Lloyd Wright home is setting up a cot in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed retail space, right?

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Fabris, R. Joseph to Frank Lloyd Wright: Correspondence, March 23, 1953 (Archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, AZ, 1990 – as quoted in Anderton Court Shops’ NRHP application)

+ Fassbender, Tom: “Anderton Court Shops” (Los Angeles Explorers Guild, 2021)

+ “Heiress Raps Police After Third Robbery” (Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1959 – accessed via ProQuest)

+ Ladewig, Melissa: Anderton Court Shops’ NRHP nomination form

+ West, Dick: “Nina G. Anderton Dies; Only Thefts Marred Parties” (Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1979 – accessed via ProQuest)