Freeman House, Los Angeles: architect, style and history

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Freeman House in 1925 for jewelry salesman Sam Freeman and his wife Harriet, a teacher, on a hillside site at 1962 Glencoe Way in the Hollywood Hills. It's the smallest of four concrete textile-block houses Wright built around Los Angeles in the 1920s, alongside La Miniatura, the Storer House, and the Ennis House, and it was individually designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #247 in 1981.

the building

Textile-block construction. The exterior is built from 12,000 concrete textile blocks, cast alternately plain or with engraved patterns and stacked to form the walls themselves, Wright's system for turning a cheap, mass-producible material into ornament, structure, and facade all at once.

An L-shaped house on a slope. The house is an L-shaped structure with a detached garage, sited directly on the slope of the hill, with double-story corner windows and multiple terraces, including one on the roof, that open the small house, just over 2,500 square feet across two levels, out toward the view.

the style

Wright mixed Islamic and Maya architectural elements into the Freeman House's modern, concrete-block vocabulary, part of his broader 1920s experiments in what he called textile-block construction.

the architect

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Freeman House as one of four Los Angeles-area textile-block houses he built in the 1920s, a body of work, including La Miniatura, the Storer House, and the Ennis House, that pushed concrete block from a cheap building material into a decorative structural system.

significance

The Freeman House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (#247, designated November 25, 1981), a California Historical Landmark, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

more by Frank Lloyd Wright

Ennis - Brown House Los Angeles
Hollyhock House Los Angeles · 1921
Millard House Los Angeles · 1923
Anderton Court Shops Los Angeles · 1952
Barnsdall Art Park Los Angeles · 1927
Residence 'A' Los Angeles
Storer House Los Angeles
Sturges House Los Angeles · 1939

nearby

Highland Towers Apartments 450 ft
Lee Drug 0.3 mi · Streamline Moderne · 1935
Bank of America Building 0.3 mi · Beaux-Arts · 1914
El Capitan Theatre 0.3 mi · Spanish Colonial Revival · 1926
Hollywood Masonic Temple 0.3 mi · Neoclassical · 1922
Max Factor Make-Up Salon 0.3 mi · 1916

All 315 buildings in Los Angeles