Frank Lloyd Wright was fired after designing his favorite masterpiece.
Featured image credit: Kyle Magnuson
Perhaps it’s not as true as it once was, but there was a time when it seemed every American held a core memory from childhood of building something. Towers of wooden blocks. Fortresses of couch cushions and blankets. Castles of sand and interlocking Lego homes. Most of us grow out of it, following other fancies and pursuits to new corners of life. But some stick with it, turning piles of blocks into world-famous structures that inspire dreamers to reconsider the possibilities of a home. Perhaps the blockiest example of this is the Ennis House, a Los Feliz mansion, instantly recognizable from miles away, looming over the placid neighborhood from the verdant southern edge of Griffith Park.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Blockhead Period
In 1923, legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright was still riding the acclaim of his (almost) universally adored Hollyhock House. That’s not to say he was resting on his laurels. In fact, he was moving deeper into a recent obsession with homes conspicuously crafted from artfully designed textile blocks. And it was at this fateful moment that he was commissioned by retailer Charles Ennis and his wife, Mabel, to create what would become Wright’s personal favorite among his numerous architectural masterpieces. And that’s a bit surprising, considering he was unceremoniously fired from the project before its completion.
The Ennis House would be the largest, most lavish, and most well-known of Wright’s four Los Angeles-based block homes, the stirring climax to his cubic fascination. How else would one follow up the graceful texturing of the Millard House in Pasadena, the columnated temple of Hollywood’s Storer House, or the obscured majesty of the nearby Samuel Freeman House? The Ennis House delivered Wright’s fascination with building blocks proudly erected on a foundation of faith, confidence, and, of course, concrete.
Wright had entered this textile block obsession wanting to shake his reputation as a Prairie School devotee. Perhaps that’s why the Ennis House defied so many of his own conventions; chief among them, a horizontal design. The Ennis House is unapologetically vertical in orientation, seeming to climb the arid hillside with its thousands of concrete hoofs, cubes mounting one another, reaching ever higher for the cloudless blue skies over Los Feliz. Construction began in 1924. And while not everyone was thrilled with the turns it would take, the outcome is undeniably striking.
Building Blocks
The most distinctive feature of the Ennis House was also its biggest challenge… and the one that got Wright and his crew ejected from its development. We, of course, mean the 27,000 intricately patterned granite blocks that make up the 6,500 square foot home. Each of these concrete cubes was fashioned from a specially designed concoction of granite, gravel, and sand taken directly from its hillside site; earth that had stood in that place at Griffith Park’s edge from a time before Los Angeles was even an idea.
Wright’s team employed aluminum molds to cast the 16” x 16” x 3.5” blocks by hand. They were then assembled using steel rods for reinforcement in a “woven” pattern that inspired the textile block descriptor. Wright had made something of a tradition of creating custom patterns for each of his block homes’ cubic units. For the Ennis House, he designed a pattern often likened to the letter “g”, with some even theorizing that this was an allusion to Ennis’s association with the Freemasons. The most common symbol of Freemasonry is a letter “g” (indicating “God”) at the core of a compass.
Like so many of Wright’s most ambitious projects, function took a back seat to fashion (or at least art) with the Ennis House. And the home literally began to buckle under the weight of its own grandiosity. Crucial areas of structural support were compromised and cracked, unable to bear the strain of Wright’s vision. Since Wright had enlisted his son, Lloyd Wright (the designer of the Sowden House), to oversee construction, the Ennises felt it best to remove both of them from the project. With the Wrights out of the picture, the Ennises themselves took direction of the completion of the home from the point of the windows upward, making several key changes that deviated from Wright’s initial concept.
Beyond Mayan Revival
Regardless of where Wright’s plans ended and the Ennises’ revisions began, the Ennis House is often regarded among the world’s top residential architectural feats. It furthers the Mayan Revival style exemplified in several of the city’s other notable structures, including the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia and the aforementioned Sowden and Hollyhock Houses. Yet, the overall visual of the home is wholly unique.
A retaining wall effectively adds extra support to the hillside home, holding the thousands of interweaving blocks in formation. To beautifully blend the boundary between the interior and exterior spaces, a loggia surrounds the structure. You’ll find the driveway terminating to the north in a steel gate vaguely echoing the intricate patterns of the blocks and windows. The home itself consists of two detached structures: the primary home and an apartment with a built-in garage intended to serve as living quarters for a chauffeur. A courtyard produces a barrier between the buildings.
The Ennis House, Inside and Out
Inside, you’ll find soaring ceilings, recalling the home’s vertical climb, forever frozen in time and concrete. Art deco windows providing panoramic views of the blinking lights of the city, seemingly burning below the blocky hooves of the property, punctuate the granite. The interior mirrors the exterior’s attention to detail with meticulously etched block surfaces and support columns, meandering through a kitchen, dining room, and numerous bedrooms, guest rooms, and bathrooms, each maintaining the ancient character facilitated by Wright’s singular vision. If you wander the road that circles the property, you’ll find yourself standing beneath the looming windows of the dining room, peering over the southern-facing retaining wall.
Charles Ennis would reside in the quixotic home for the rest of his life, with Mabel selling it to actor John Nesbitt in 1940. Nesbitt wasted no time in bringing Wright back to his favorite professional accomplishment to add a billiard room and swimming pool, and work a heating system into the unique design.
Leave a Beautiful Corpse
A vision as iconic as the Ennis House comes with high maintenance costs. Over the years, it became clear that the home’s textile blocks were decaying faster than anticipated. The reason? Wright used decomposed granite to craft his blocks, perhaps sold on its rustic aesthetic and affordability. However, decomposed granite struggles to maintain its integrity in extreme weather conditions. When exposed to the area’s rampant air pollution and occasional violent swings between arid heat and pouring rain, the exposure of the blocks’ natural impurities rapidly accelerated. The response was to slather the blocks in protective sealant, but this caused a new host of issues.
In 1994, the Northridge earthquake rattled the fragile Ennis House, contributing further to its mounting design woes. Then, toward the end of 2004 and stretching into 2005, an uncharacteristically heavy series of storms pummeled the area, eroding away at the home so intensely that it was red-tagged as uninhabitable.
Resurrecting the Ennis House
Since 1980, the home had been owned by the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage thanks to a donation from its previous owner, Augustus O. Brown. It was even known as the Ennis-Brown House for a brief period in tribute to the man who had owned the home since 1968. But in 2005, with the home deemed unstable, the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage was renamed the Ennis House Foundation and took up a marked interest in returning the home to its intended majesty. Taking into further account significant damage to the retaining wall, the foundation determined that stabilization alone would cost $5 million. And a comprehensive restoration? That would add another $15 million.
But great works seem to find a way, no matter how unlikely. By the end of 2005, the red card had been downgraded to a yellow card, brightening the home’s future. The foundation made further headway by securing a FEMA grant in 2006 and an additional $4.5 million from a loan through First Republic Bank to go exclusively toward construction costs. In addition to reviving (or outright replacing) several decaying blocks, the massive restoration effort also fortified the home’s structure, repaired numerous windows, and built an entirely new roof.
The Ennis House in the Modern Era
By 2007, the Ennis House was, more or less, like new. And the Ennis House Foundation was ready to turn it over to private ownership once again for a price of $15 million. Perhaps it was ill-timing or its reputation of disrepair, but they found no takers. In fact, the home would eventually sell to savvy businessman Ron Burkle for less than a third of its original asking price: a mere $4.5 million.
Burkle seemed to have a better understanding of marketing a historic property. By 2019, he had flipped the Ennis House for $18 million, selling to an LLC operated by Robert Rosenheck and Cindy Capobianco, who founded cannabis lifestyle brand Lord Jones, which picked up stakes and departed for Canada in 2023.
Not a Celebrity Home. A Home Celebrity.
If the Ennis House looks familiar, it just means you’ve likely turned on a TV in the last half century. Boasting over 80 appearances, its filmography could go toe to toe with Hollywood legends. Most of these appearances were filmed during the lengthy period from 1980 until 2011, the time when the home was owned by the Ennis House Foundation. However, its initial silver screen appearance is believed to have been in the 1933 romantic comedy Female.
But the unique structure practically had a starring role as the titular home in 1959’s Vincent Price-led House on Haunted Hill. It would clock considerable screentime in subsequent cult favorites such as 1982’s Blade Runner and 1989’s The Karate Kid III, as well as beloved television shows including David Lynch’s 1990 masterpiece Twin Peaks and the 1997 Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
For Blade Runner, the home itself was only used for some brief exterior scenes. However, the home created such a striking impression that set designers meticulously recreated the textile block aesthetic on a soundstage for interior shots. It’s a house that tends to elicit that kind of response in those fortunate enough to witness it.
How to View the Ennis House in Person
But witnessing it, at least in person, can be a bit tricky, considering the Ennis House is a private residence. Yet, prospective guests still have opportunities. At least 12 a year, to be specific. The Ennis House Foundation drafted a legally binding clause that all owners (including future owners) must open the home to the public for tours so that Wright’s work can be admired throughout the generations.
To get on the list for upcoming tours, you need only send an email to the foundation at [email protected]. Or, you can simply appreciate it the same way thousands of Angelenos do every day: as the brooding, remote mansion climbing up a Griffith Park hillside that has become as much a fixture of the cityscape as the neighboring Observatory and Hollywood sign.
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