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"The place had a magic, an ancient feeling, like a stone fortress that has withstood and sheltered and abides." --Esther van Dekker, describing the Freeman House, where she, her struggling actor husband and infant daughter lived for eight months in the mid-'30s.
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As quirky as the couple for whom it was built, the Freeman House sits in a state of disrepair overlooking a Hollywood in transition. But the innovative Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence, built in 1924-25 for $23,000, is at last getting a $1.2-million shoring-up, prelude to a planned renovation. Last week, holes 28 feet deep were being drilled, and 11 of the 23 caissons that will anchor the house to its hillside lot at 1962 Glencoe Way were being placed. The overgrown landscaping was being cleared to make room for scaffolding. The Rudolph Schindler-designed built-in furniture had been removed to storage.
Drilling that first hole without incident was a watershed, said Dean Robert H. Timme of the USC School of Architecture. "There were so many unknowns. We were afraid we were going to hit something down underneath there, the road or something." The 2,500-square-foot house is one of four Los Angeles-area houses designed by Wright known as textile-block houses, so named for their patterned concrete- block interior and exterior walls, and is architecturally important as the prototype for his Usonian houses of the '30s, which reflect the changing American lifestyles through their "tadpole" design-- large living/dining area, small private rooms.
Inside the Freeman House, a spacious, high-ceilinged living room, anchored on the north with a massive fireplace, is the piece de resistance. The kitchen and both bedrooms are, by today's standards, on the small side. Originally, there was one bath. A second, a makeshift affair added later, will be ripped out.
The house was designed for Harriet and Samuel Freeman, an avant- garde couple who were part of a social-artistic-political circle that included actor Claude Rains, dancers Martha Graham and Bella Lewitzky and photographer Edward Weston. Over five decades, it was the setting for many a salon gathering.
Built on a soft-soil slope in an era of far less rigid construction codes, the house presented problems long before the 1994 Northridge earthquake, from which it suffered significant damage. The...