Added to the National Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places on April 6, 1987

Angelenos are blessed to live in a city where we can still visit the homes that many great architects built for themselves. You can tour the former residences of Schindler, Neutra and the Eameses, or drive past the homes where Charles Greene, Myron Hunt, A. Quincy Jones, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner and Paul R. Williams laid their heads in rooms they designed. 

No “architect as client” tour of LA would be complete without a stop at the Lloyd Wright House and Studio, at the corner of Doheny Drive and Vista Grande Street in West Hollywood. This distinctive 2000-square-foot house was where Lloyd Wright lived and worked from 1927 ‘til his death in 1978. You can imagine him sketching out plans for the Wayfarers Chapel (visit #118) and the Hollywood Bowl band shell in the downstairs studio, or pondering the layout of his home for Claudette Colbert over coffee on the enclosed balcony on the upper level. 

Wright designed his house and studio during a transitional point in his career. He was finally emerging as a successful independent architect, after years of collaborations and draftsman work for others, including early modernist Irving Gill and the preeminent American landscaping firm, Olmsted & Olmsted. In the early 1920s he handled much of the landscaping and supervised construction of the Hollyhock House, while his father Frank Lloyd Wright was occupied with the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Later he would contribute a guest studio to his dad’s first Mayan revival-style “textile block” home, the Millard House (visit #132), and manage construction of the other three, the Storer, Freeman and Ennis. 

By the time he designed his studio on Doheny in 1927, Lloyd Wright had carved out a unique design style for himself. So many Los Angeles architects in the 1920s were designing stucco and red tile odes to California’s Spanish colonial past. Wright went pre-colonial, evoking ancient Mayan temples in the rough repeating blocks on his Derby House and Sowden House facades (both from 1926). Yes, he was influenced by the “organic architecture” concepts of his father, and by the modernist ideals coming out of Europe, but his was a different strand of the architectural avant-garde emerging in Southern California.

Each of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan revival homes employed a different pattern for its blocks. Here, Lloyd Wright employs a stylized Joshua tree, perhaps a nod to the southwestern landscape that so inspired both Wrights. Those patterned blocks serve different functions throughout the house. They decorate the walls above the main entrance and garage, transforming them into pre-Columbian caves. They’re screens on the north, west and east elevations, filtering light; they make up a porous hallway that ushers you from the front door into the breathtaking living room/patio space. 

Early exterior photos of the Lloyd Wright House and Studio show a blocky cubist puzzle of intersecting masses, punctuated in a few places by those blocks. With its form laid bare like that, Wright’s home looks imposing, fortress-like. There’s an entire world inside it, with light-filled living spaces and drafting rooms with warm wooden floors, but it’s all walled-in. Even the open-air patio is separated from the street by a nine-foot wall. The arts critic Pauline Gibling (ex-wife of Rudolph Schindler) wrote about this tendency of Wright’s in 1932: “…the residences of Lloyd Wright…show another, but equal will for seclusion. They turn inward, wall against the world. The garden is not a continuation outward of the house, but a frame of setting. Or else he draws it within the house which thereupon surrounds it as a double wall, secluding it still more deeply and mysteriously.”

Contributing to that sense of mystery here is the landscaping. A 1927 Los Angeles Times article about the brand new studio cites Monterey pines, native flowers and “shrubbery and vine planting that eventually will decorate [the walls] and make them attractive to those who pass by.” Back then, the pine planted in the patio barely peeked over the wall. By the time Julius Shulman photographed Wright’s studio in 1977, that same pine consumed the airspace above the balcony, and ivy and vines covered the walls, just as predicted. 

No more romantic scene could be imagined than when Mr. Wright lighted a fire on the hearth of the ‘great hall’ and opened the canvas drapery which separates the room from the small patio over which the huge tree sprawls.

-David Gebhard & Robert Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide

Those massive Monterey pines are gone now. They have younger cousins on the north and west sides of the house that have matured over the decades, and offer plenty of shade in the afternoons. Much of the original landscaping has been swapped out for an impressive assortment of yucca and cactus. Maybe not what Wright intended, but it definitely plays up the southwestern aspects of Wright’s design.

As far as the house itself goes, almost nothing has changed since 1936, when Wright enclosed most of the balcony with wood and glass. At some point the heavy curtain separating the studio from the patio became a sliding door. In the 1990s the foundation was replaced and some crumbling blocks repaired under the supervision of Lloyd Wright’s son, Eric Lloyd Wright. Eric grew up at the house on Doheny, used to raise chickens there, and played in the bean fields across the street. 

Eric Lloyd Wright inherited the house after his father passed away in 1978. In the ‘80s a real estate firm helmed by Crosby Doe leased the space from Wright, but when he tried to sell the house to a financial planning firm in 1988, some West Hollywood neighbors complained. They argued to the City Council that a new commercial tenant would be a nuisance in a neighborhood zoned for residential use, and that the Lloyd Wright House and Studio should only be used and sold as a home (nevermind that for 50+ years, Lloyd Wright had treated his home as a split residential/commercial property). Thankfully the City Council agreed with Eric Lloyd Wright’s argument that complying with residential zoning requirements would mean destroying the architectural integrity of the building. And so the office space downstairs was preserved as-is, including the spectacular indoor/outdoor studio/patio. 

Since the restoration in the 1990s, the Lloyd Wright House and Studio has had a succession of owners, most of whom have used it as a residence upstairs and an office downstairs. A graphic design firm bought it in the ‘90s. In the early 2000s it was sold to a production company owned by commercial director Joseph Pytka; since 2015 it’s been the LA headquarters for the PR/branding agency Karla Otto. When I visited in June of 2023, it was up for sale for around $6 million; as of January 2024 the listing was removed. So right now I’ve got no idea who I have to befriend to score an invite inside. All good, there’s plenty to appreciate from the corner.

Thank you to Matthew Momberger for sharing his magnificent interior shots with me.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “Architect’s Dwelling Unique” (Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1927 – via ProQuest)

+ “FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT JR. aka LLOYD WRIGHT (1890-1978)” (USModernist)

+ Gebhard, David and Robert Winter: Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1994)

+ Gibling, Pauline: “Modern California Architects” (Creative Art, Vol. 10, February 1932 – quoted in the Lloyd Wright Studio’s NRHP nomination form)

+ Proffitt, Steve: “Eric Lloyd Wright: Seeking an Organic Way in Architecture–and Life” (Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1994)

+ Russell, Ron: “Sale of Lloyd Wright Studio OKd” (Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1989)

+ Russell, Ron: “Studio Stays: Architect’s Son Wins Battle to Preserve His Father’s West Hollywood Landmark” (Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1988)

+ Sutro, Dirk: “Carving a Niche With Wright Name” (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1992)

+ West Hollywood Planning Commission: “Consent Calendar, Subject: Approval of New Tenancy at the Lloyd Wright Studio” (March 19, 2015 – via Granicus)

+ “Westside Digest: West Hollywood Wright Studio Sale Opposed” (Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1988)

+ Wright, Eric Lloyd: Lloyd Wright Studio’s NRHP nomination form