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Early last month, the National Trust for Historic Preservation unveiled its annual list of endangered buildings around the country. This year's roster includes Daniel Webster's New Hampshire home and farm, an 1897 hotel in Belleair, Fla., and pretty much all of downtown Detroit, where the wrecking balls have been swinging as freely as Ron Artest.
Also on the list, as actor-turned-preservation-activist Diane Keaton announced in a news conference here, is the Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles. Completed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 for the owners of a men's clothing store, Charles and Mabel Ennis, it's the largest and most ambitious of the experimental concrete-block designs Wright carried out in Southern California in the early 1920s, aided by his son Lloyd and a young Rudolf Schindler.
The house, which looms castle-like on a prominent site above Los Feliz Boulevard, was briefly red-tagged this winter by the city's Department of Building and Safety after near-record rainfall caused its retaining wall to buckle, sending several of its patterned concrete blocks tumbling down the hill. It is now yellow-tagged, which means it can be occupied only during the day. The National Trust estimates it'll take $5 million simply to stabilize the house and $10 million more for a complete restoration.
Meanwhile, a little more than a mile to the south, the first of Wright's residential designs in Los Angeles, the Barnsdall House -- also known, thanks to the abstracted floral motif that wraps around its exterior, as the Hollyhock House -- has just reopened after a five-year renovation. The work, which cost about $21 million altogether, helped stabilize parts of the house damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, removed mold and termites and replaced leaky pipes. It also included landscaping improvements in several areas of surrounding Olive Hill, $25,000 for a new rug in the living room and $100,000 for a sign on Hollywood Boulevard pointing the way to Wright's landmark.
Finished in 1921 and deeded to the city of Los Angeles by its original owner, oil heiress and theater impresario Aline Barnsdall, six years later, the house is now the only one of Wright's Los Angeles designs open to the public. Initial tours began passing through the house on June 8 and will resume July 13,...