Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 6, 1971; designated a National Historic Landmark on March 29, 2007; Inscribed to the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of The 20th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright on July 7, 2019

Well – the building stands. Your home. It is yours for what it has cost you. It is mine for what it has cost me. And it is for all mankind according to all its cost in all its bearings. Can we not pronounce benediction upon it, now, absolving the building at least from rancor and false witness? Whatever its birth pangs it will take its place as your contribution and mine to the vexed life of our time. What future it will have? – who can say?

–Frank Lloyd Wright, to Aline Barnsdall, 1921

Hollyhock House sits atop a large hill on the border of Los Feliz and East Hollywood, at the center of Barnsdall Art Park. It’s a placement you’d expect from an ancient fortress, as protection against attacking hordes, not from Frank Lloyd Wright – the architect who wrote in his autobiography “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it.”

That imperious position is well-earned. Hollyhock House is easily one of the most renowned residences in Los Angeles, the recipient of nearly every distinction a historic building can have. It was named an LA Historic-Cultural Monument in 1963, just months after that program began. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s a National Historic Landmark, one of just 23 in LA. In 2019, it joined the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, for its outstanding value to humanity. As of June 2024 it’s the only LA-area site with that status. 

For a consensus pick like this, you’d think that everyone who raves about Hollyhock House would be raving about the same thing – a specific structure, built at a specific time, attributable to a specific person or firm. And yet part of the uniqueness of this house is how fluid its history has been. Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans for the house and its immediate neighbors were only partially carried out. What we see today on the crest of Olive Hill is the product of a century of continuous evolution.

Hollyhock House was commissioned in 1919 by Aline Barnsdall, a wealthy philanthropist whose grandfather had drilled one of the world’s first successful oil wells in Titusville, PA in 1859. In 1917, her father Theodore Barnsdall passed away, and Aline inherited half of his interest in the Barnsdall Oil Company. Barnsdall was a bohemian and a feminist at heart – an unmarried mother by choice, a friend of the anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, and an ardent supporter and producer of experimental theater.

While living in Chicago in the mid-1910s, Barnsdall and her theater company worked out of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. One of the other tenants was Frank Lloyd Wright, who at the time was trying to crawl from the wreckage of some traumatic personal and professional setbacks. In 1909, at one of the creative highpoints of his career, Wright had abandoned his wife and kids and run off to Europe for a year with Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, the wife of a client. The scandal was extensively covered by the press, and it took years for Wright’s architectural practice to recover. Then in 1914, an unhinged employee set fire to Taliesin, Wright’s home and studio in Wisconsin, and murdered seven people in the process. Among the dead were Mamah Borthwick and her two children, all three killed with an ax. It was just after this tragedy that Barnsdall and Wright first met. 

Barnsdall moved to Los Angeles in 1916, producing plays at a theater downtown. But she wanted something more. She envisioned a sprawling colony for experimental theater, complete with performance spaces, a cinema, a kindergarten, studios and living quarters for actors and directors. 

The late 1910s were a busy time for Wright. He had just received his largest commission yet, for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo – a project that would occupy much of his attention between 1916 and 1922. Still, he kept up his correspondence with Barnsdall, and sent her rough sketches of what the complex could look like, even before she had a location picked out. 

Wright wasn’t the only architect vying for the project. In June of 1919, Aline Barnsdall purchased a 36-acre tract of land on Olive Hill for $300,000. As late as August of that year, the Los Angeles Times reported that Walker & Eisen would be the designers of “a large Spanish style residence” with 17 rooms and a tile roof. Now don’t get me wrong, I love me some Walker & Eisen. They designed LA’s Fine Arts Building, the Oviatt Building and the United Artists Theatre, three downtown classics of the 1920s (their Halifax Apartments in Hollywood have a great backstory too). But for the sake of architectural history, I’m glad that it was team Wright that broke ground in early 1920.

Hollyhock House gets its name from Aline Barnsdall’s favorite flower. Wright and his compatriots inscribed a highly abstracted version of the hollyhock in manifold forms throughout the house, from concrete finials to light fixtures, rugs to art glass, the spine-like decorations on the dining room chairs to the frieze along the second floor hallway. This was an important element of Wright’s philosophy of “organic architecture,”  the idea that individual parts coalesce into a coherent whole. It sure helped that Wright custom-designed much of the above himself.

There are elements at Hollyhock House of the low-slung Prairie-style homes that made him famous in the early 1900s. The emphasis on horizontality, the free-flowing floor plans, the tucked-away front entrance and – all Wright hallmarks from the Prairie era, and all present here. The same goes for the 130 art glass windows that surround the house, many crafted by the beloved Judson Studios. Hollyhock House was one of Wright’s final projects to include a full art glass scheme.

At the same time, Hollyhock House represented a transition in Wright’s design style. Another part of the “organic architecture” philosophy is that a building ought to be inseparable from its setting. This was his first commission in Los Angeles, and he built a home that took full advantage of the mild climate and nonstop sunshine. Rooftop terraces, sleeping porches, a courtyard, planters and walls of folding doors – all of these elements were designed to make the outside as integral to the home as the interior spaces. Every major room has its outdoor counterpart just steps away. Wright called the unique style he employed here “California Romanza.”

At the Hollyhock House, Wright brought an aesthetic connection to the regional architecture of Southern California. After the Panama-California Exposition of 1915, buildings started sprouting up all across the Southland that referenced the area’s Spanish colonial past. The central courtyard at Hollyhock House is reminiscent of the haciendas of New Spain and the Spanish missions of late 18th century California, which tended to incorporate large interior courtyards.

But if your average “Spanish-style” home in Los Angeles recalled the red-tiled roofs and stucco walls of the mission era, Hollyhock went back hundreds of years further for regional inspiration, to the ancient architecture of the Mayans. The steep pitch of the upper walls is similar to the roof of the great palace of Palenque. The distinctive, cast-concrete ornamentation throughout the property was inspired by Mayan facades, too. Wright would take his pre-Columbian jones into even more radical directions with the four “textile block” homes (the Millard, Freeman, Storer and Ennis houses) he built in Los Angeles in the years after Hollyhock House was completed.

There were some new quirks that Wright tried out at Hollyhock House, like an indoor water feature that burbled in front of the living room fireplace in a golden moat, then linked underground to a pool in the patio area, which then flowed into another pool on the west end. It didn’t end up working, and had to be disconnected soon after Barnsdall moved in. But it foreshadowed Wright’s use of water at his famous Fallingwater, over a decade later. And even without the moat, the fireplace was a minor masterpiece on its own. Its 17 cast-concrete pieces reflect the abstract geometric forms that Wright distributed all over Hollyhock House. With a fire roaring below, glinting off the (attempted) pool of water below, and the sky visible through a slatted skylight above, this fireplace pulled together all four of the classical elements – a symbol of the hearth’s central role in domestic life. 

In addition to the main house, the smaller Residence A was built at the northeast corner of the hill in a style more akin to Wright’s Prairie work in Illinois. The multi-level Residence B was built on the Edgemont side of the hill – Frank Lloyd Wright himself even lived there for a spell in the 1920s, and Barnsdall herself would stay there in her autumn years. 

By 1921, only the main house and the two guest houses were complete. As often happened on Wright projects, the construction costs ballooned out of control, from $50,000 to $150,000. It didn’t help that Barnsdall was often traveling, and Wright was largely in Japan, consumed with finishing the Imperial Hotel. He deputized other architects to supervise construction on Olive Hill while he was away, first his son Lloyd Wright, then his assistant Rudolph Schindler. 

In retrospect, Hollyhock House was a proving ground for a new generation of LA architects. Lloyd Wright and Schindler made important contributions to the building, both as construction supervisors and as designers of some of its distinctive interior details. The brass handles and locks on the front door are Schindler originals, and he likely designed the wood ceiling mount for the hanging light fixture in the dining room. Schindler also finished the upstairs owner’s bedroom, adding a spindled partition that separated the main bedroom from a sunken area originally intended as a sleeping porch. The whole room had been left unfinished when Frank Lloyd Wright left the project in 1921.

Frank’s son, Lloyd Wright returned to the property in the 1940s and renovated the owner’s bedroom for use as a men’s lounge for the Olive Hill Foundation, a group dedicated to restoring Hollyhock House. He’s also responsible for some of Hollyhock’s coolest furniture, including a desk in the men’s lounge that repurposed parts of Schindler’s old partition as table legs, and a set of stacking tables that are now in the library. 

Even the great modernist architect Richard Neutra worked on the Hollyhock House in the mid-’20s. This was just after he had moved in with Schindler at his house on Kings Road, and three years before nabbing his first solo commission, the Jardinette Apartments. According to Cheryl Johnson, former co-president of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, Neutra worked on the landscaping and the pergola connected to the Theodore Barnsdall memorial, just north of the house proper. Other sources say he collaborated with Schindler on a terrace and wading pool on the southeast part of Olive Hill. 

An important footnote: Aline Barnsdall’s impact on modern architecture goes beyond the construction on Olive Hill. When she moved into her new home, she hired both Rudolph Schindler’s wife Pauline and a progressive teacher named Leah Lovell to help run an informal school for Barnsdall’s daughter Betty and other children in their social circle. The Lovell family would later commission Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra to build homes for them in Newport Beach and Los Feliz, respectively, both widely considered pioneering works of modernism. And Leah Lovell’s sister was Harriet Freeman, who commissioned her own home from Frank Lloyd Wright after a visit to Hollyhock House.  

Frank Lloyd Wright ended up leaving the project in 1921, and Barnsdall halted construction of the rest of the complex. The plans for the theater and its rooftop restaurant, the artist studios, the artificial lake on the north side of the hill – all were abandoned. And while Barnsdall would continue to work on small projects related to Olive Hill with Schindler and Lloyd Wright (she even re-hired Frank Lloyd Wright in 1926 to design the unbuilt “Little Dipper” schoolhouse), she was dissatisfied with living at Hollyhock House. The roof leaked. The rooms were too small. And she had trouble opening the 250-pound cast-concrete doors. “I need three men and two boys to help me get in and out of my own house!” she once complained.

So in 1923, Barnsdall attempted to donate Hollyhock House and the top of Olive Hill to the City of Los Angeles, “free of all strings and conditions.” She also floated the option that the City could purchase the remaining 25 acres for $2 million. And how did LA respond? They complained about the pricetag for the optional part of the deal, and rejected the entire offer. 

After traveling the world to blow off some steam, Barnsdall tried again in 1926, this time with the stipulation that the California Art Club could use Hollyhock House as its headquarters for 15 years. This time, the city agreed to accept the top 11 acres, and the new city park was formally dedicated in 1927 as Barnsdall Park, in memory of Aline Barnsdall’s father. But political infighting and legal disputes held up the transfer of the remaining acreage for years. In the meantime Barnsdall took to erecting signage on the streets surrounding Olive Hill, first promoting her position in all the Barnsdall Park ownership fracas, and later advocating for various liberal causes (e.g. Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign in 1934, or the Indian independence movement). Some of the signs were even designed by Lloyd Wright. 

Ultimately, the city didn’t maintain the park or its structures as Aline Barnsdall had hoped when she donated the land. Residence B was returned to her in 1940, after years of neglect; Barnsdall had to erect barricades on the roadsides to keep children from falling down the steep slopes. By the time Barnsdall died in 1946, at her home in Residence B, Hollyhock House had sat vacant for several years.

It’s a sad irony that Hollyhock House and Barnsdall Park got the attention they deserved only after the woman who dreamed them up was gone. The same year that Barnsdall passed away, a philanthropist named Dorothy Clune Murray leased the house, set up the Olive Hill Foundation to rehabilitate Hollyhock, and brought back Lloyd Wright to make some changes. During this phase Lloyd Wright remodeled the kitchen and updated the owner’s bedroom. He enclosed the pergola on the courtyard, designed new furniture and added a staircase leading to the basement where a powder room once stood. 

1954 was an “alpha and omega” year for Hollyhock House. A now-dilapidated Residence B was demolished, and Olive Hill witnessed the return of Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1954, the 80-something architect designed a temporary structure near Hollyhock, intended to house LA’s first Municipal Art Gallery. The gallery opened with the touring “Frank Lloyd Wright: Sixty Years of Living Architecture” exhibit. Wright had also proposed a master plan for future development of Olive Hill, but it was deemed too expensive. A temporary gallery space ended up being Wright’s final LA project, just steps away from his very first. It was torn down in 1969, a decade after Wright’s death. 

In the half-century since, Barnsdall Art Park has evolved into a pared-down version of Aline Barnsdall’s original vision for it. The city collaborated with the Junior League of Los Angeles to build the Barnsdall Junior Arts Center in 1967 (designed by Hunter & Benedict with Kahn, Farrell & Associates), followed by a permanent Municipal Art Gallery (architects Wehmueller & Stephens) and the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, both in 1971. 

The mid-1970s brought a major restoration of Hollyhock House, once again overseen by Lloyd Wright, and finally it opened as a public house museum in 1976. From 2010 – 2014 the city partnered with Project Restore to seismically strengthen Hollyhock House, repair water damage and reverse some non-original alterations. During the pandemic, restoration of Residence A’s exterior was largely completed; as of June 2024, they’re working on the interior, and hope to open it up to visitors soon. 

Today, Barnsdall Art Park is a thriving cultural center, and a popular place for weekend picnics and summer wine tastings. Hollyhock House hosts an ongoing series of installations and exhibits inside the main house, continuing the tradition of the California Art Club – and of Aline Barnsdall, who populated her home with art from around the world. As a one-time producer of children’s theater herself, Barnsdall would have especially appreciated the idea of the Bob Baker Marionette Theater’s ongoing “Puppets in the Park” residency at Hollyhock. It’s too bad Barnsdall couldn’t witness her vision come to fruition during her lifetime. But I’d like to think that she’d be thrilled that her home is still being used to foster an appreciation of art and architecture, more than a century after it was built.

I offer my undying gratitude to Abbey Chamberlain Brach, Leigh Wishner and Jenn Witte at Hollyhock House for imparting their knowledge and hooking me up with dozens of historical photographs. 

Hollyhock House is the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in Los Angeles that’s open for tours. Check visiting hours at https://hollyhockhouse.org/visit. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright” (UNESCO World Heritage Convention)

+ “Aline Barnsdall – The Ultimate Iconoclast” (Discovery Hollywood, Winter 2005/2006)

+ “Aline Barnsdall to Frank Lloyd Wright, Feb. 4, 1926. Read by Kate Devine Brady, 2021” (Video – Hollyhock House on YouTube)

+ “Barnsdall Estate Gift Is Accepted” (Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1923 – via ProQuest)

+ Brach, Abbey Chamberlain: “Hollyhock House Tour Guide” (PDF – Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles)

+ “Culture for Children: School on Olive Hill to Teach Finer Things of Life” (Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1923 – via ProQuest)

+ “For Olive Hill: Purchases of Famous Hollywood Property to Erect Home There” (Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1919 – via ProQuest)

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

+ Happy Birthday, Aline Barnsdall: 2021 Celebration (Video – Hollyhock House on YouTube)

+ Hart, Spencer: Frank Lloyd Wright (Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 1993)

+ Hollyhock House (LA Conservancy)

+ Hollyhock House Archive (original maps, plans, blueprints, perspective drawings, etc.)

+ Kilston, Lyra: “Philip Lovell: The Eccentric Health Guru Behind Neutra’s Lovell Health House” (PBS SoCal, March 19, 2019)

+ LSA Associates: “Supplemental Historic Structure Report: Hollyhock House” pt. 1-8 (ProjectRestoreLA.org)

+ Hollyhock House Virtual Tour

+ Johnson, Cheryl: “Aline Barnsdall: Creating Hollyhock House” (Discover Hollywood, winter 2024)

+ Kipen, David, ed.: Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018 (Modern Library, 2018)

+ Masters, Nathan: “When East Hollywood’s Barnsdall Art Park Was an Olive Orchard” (PBS SoCal, September 15, 2014)

+ McCoy, Esther: Hollyhock House’s NRHP nomination form

+ Meares, Hadley: “Lofty Ambition Amongst the Olive Leaves” (PBS SoCal, October 24, 2014)

+ “New Residence Tract Opening: Olive Hill District Also to Have Exclusive Shops” (Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1921 – via ProQuest)

+ Project Restore: “Residence A: Barnsdall Art Park” (projectrestorela.org)

+ Sutherland, Henry: “Strange Saga of Barnsdall Park” (Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1970 – via ProQuest)+ Wright, Frank Lloyd: An Autobiography (Pomegranate Communications, 1943 – via Google Books)