WRIGHT

Like some angular cement garden, Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House looks out from a serene hilltop high above Los Angeles' bustling streets.

The showpiece structure in the city's Barnsdall Art Park, the house was uniquely designed for Southern California's climate and includes one of Wright's more unusual water features.

Yet it also has much in common with other houses designed by America's best-known architect: it is rich, complex, intriguing and at times even awe-inspiring.

As of this week, Hollyhock House also officially is open to the public after completion of a five-year restoration in which structural engineer Melvyn Green of Torrance had a key role. It's the only Wright-designed house in Southern California that currently can be toured inside and out.

The first of seven houses Wright designed in Los Angeles, Hollyhock House took two years to build and was completed in 1921. Wright was preoccupied with building the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for much of this time, and construction was supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright, along with another architectural luminary-to-be, Rudolf Schindler.

With its cement exterior, low, angular lines and exotic decorative touches, Hollyhock House represents a transition to the striking "Mayan-style" houses of cement block that Wright built in subsequent years on nearby hillsides.

The 6,000-square-foot house, with five bedrooms and six bathrooms, was commissioned by oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, a Pennsylvania native and an unconventional, independent woman who also owned a house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Barnsdall envisioned her Los Angeles house and its 36-acre grounds as part of an avant-garde theatrical community, and she enlisted Wright to design two smaller residences to house visiting artists. Decades later, Wright also was...