#21 & #22: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House & Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House (Los Feliz)

Special for Halloween: A pair of Mayan revival homes with spooky connections from a master architect and his son

Happy Halloween! For stops #21 & #22 in my Etan Does LA project, HER and I ventured to Los Feliz to explore two of LA’s most famous houses, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his son, Lloyd Wright. Both buildings have spooky connections.

HER and I, about to be consuned by the Sowden House
Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House, from Franklin Ave.
Another Lloyd Wright home, the Samuel-Novarro House in the Los Feliz hills

#21: John Sowden House

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 14, 1971

Lloyd Wright was a building supervisor for his dad’s textile block houses, and he ran with the concept for this 1926 jaw-dropper on Franklin Ave. Speaking of “jaws” – that’s what the ornamental facade of the house kinda looks like. Only the front is viewable, but take the 360-degree “tour” at sowdenhouse.com. It’s pretty stunning, even virtually.

The spookiest thing about the Sowden House is its connection to the 1947 death of Elizabeth Short, in what became known as the Black Dahlia Murder. There are those who believe that physician she was tortured and killed by Dr. George Hodel in the basement of the house, where he lived from 1945-50. Though the police never formally charged Hodel, he was an active suspect; after his death, Hodel’s son – a former LAPD homicide detective – accused him of having murdered Short and several others. The case remains unsolved.

Recommended Reading

+Sowdenhouse.com

+John Sowden House @ NRHP website

+Curbed LA story about the Sowden House’s most infamous resident, Dr. George Hodel

Okay enough great architecture – let’s get outta here!

#22: The Ennis House

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 14, 1971

The last and largest of the four houses that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in LA using 27,000 interlocking concrete blocks with carved relief designs inspired by ancient Mayan temples. It was finished in 1925, after both Wright and his son (the house’s construction supervisor) had fallen out with the Ennises; when the LA Times ran a story on the house in 1926, it didn’t even mention Wright!

One of my best friends in high school lived just down the street from the Ennis House, so I drove past it often; most of that time it was under repair, due to damage from the 1994 earthquake or the record rains in 2005. After extensive retrofitting, the house went back on the market; in 2019 it was bought for $18 million by the founders of CBD company Lord Jones.

The Ennis’s Halloween pedigree runs deep as a film location for horror and sci-fi films. The 1959 Vincent Price B-movie House on Haunted Hill was filmed here; the exterior was used in Blade Runner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a whole host of other productions.