Casa de Rosas
- Architect
- Sumner Hunt
- Year
- 1893
- Style
- Mission Revival
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
Casa de Rosas has spent over a century changing jobs. Sumner P. Hunt designed the Mission Revival building in 1893 as an experimental kindergarten, and it went on to serve as a girls' college-preparatory school, an inn and restaurant, a WWII military barracks, and even the headquarters of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics Foundation before becoming the oldest women's shelter in Los Angeles.
the building
Many lives, one shell. Beyond sheltering homeless women, the building has been a kindergarten, a prep school, an inn, a WWII barracks, and Dianetics Foundation headquarters — one of the more varied resumes of any building in the city.
An $18 million rescue. A 2016 demolition mistake exposed part of the complex to water damage, dry rot, and mold. The city's Housing Community Investment Department had already put the site out to bid for veterans' housing, and an $18 million restoration rehabilitated all four historic buildings into 37 residential units.
the style
The 1893 building is an early Los Angeles example of Mission Revival architecture, the mission-derived style that would come to define much of the region's early-20th-century civic and residential building.
More on Mission Revivalsignificance
Casa de Rosas is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, protections that helped drive its restoration into affordable veterans' housing after the 2016 demolition damage.
nearby
- Egg Company Building II
- Cockins House
- Forthmann House
- Kerckhoff House
- Miller and Herriott House
- Stimson House