Content area
Full Text
When Frank Lloyd Wright completed the Ennis house in 1924, he immediately considered it his favorite. The last and largest of the four concrete-block houses that Wright built in the Los Angeles area remains arguably the best residential example of Mayan Revival architecture in the country. When The Times' Home section convened a panel of historians, architects and preservationists in 2008 to vote on the region's best houses of all time, the Ennis house ranked ahead of the Modernist Eames house, the John Lautner spaceship-on-a-hill known as Chemosphere and the Arts & Crafts beauty the Gamble house.
That the Ennis house garners so much reverence from the architecture community makes its current status all the more remarkable: for sale since June 2009, price reduced from $15 million to $7,495,000. Prospective buyers have shown much interest, according to listing agent Jeffrey Hyland, president of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, but as of yet, there have been no takers.
The house has long been an expensive proposition. Set on nearly an acre in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., the home -- three bedrooms and 31/2 baths, plus staff quarters that push the listing to 6,000 square feet -- cost $300,000 to build, about $3.8 million today, adjusted for inflation.
Wright's client was Charles Ennis, the owner of a men's clothing store in downtown L.A. and an enthusiast of Mayan art and architecture. For each of Wright's houses built with concrete blocks, or textile blocks as they are often called, Wright designed a custom pattern. For the Ennis house, the pattern was a Greek key. Within the interlocking form, it's possible to interpret a stylized "g" -- perhaps an allusion to the Masonic Order, of which Ennis was a member, and the organization's symbol, the compass with the letter "g" in the middle representing God.
Wright had used concrete in monumental projects, but in the 1920s it was still considered a new material, especially for home construction. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminum molds to create a block 16 inches wide, 16 inches tall and 31/2 inches thick. It took 10 days...