The Ennis House (also the Ennis–Brown House) is a residence at 2607–2655 Glendower Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles in California, United States. Designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the Mayan Revival style for the businessman Charles Ennis and his wife Mabel, it was completed in 1925 on top of a hill in Los Feliz. The house is the largest of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, the others being La Miniatura, the Storer House, and the Freeman House. The house has frequently been used as a filming location—appearing in films such as Blade Runner—in part because of its design and proximity to Hollywood. The Ennis House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and California Historical Landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Ennis House was built at a time when Wright was transitioning away from the Prairie-style designs of his early career and toward the Usonian designs of his later career. It consists of a main building and a garage wing, separated by a motor court and connected by a footbridge; all these structures are surrounded by a high retaining wall. The structure includes at least 24,000 concrete textile blocks, which are decorated with engraved patterns. There are also stained glass windows and ziggurat-like roofs. The main house's interior has around of space, with three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms; there is an additional bedroom in the garage wing. The entrance hall is beneath the main floor, in contrast to Wright's other spaces. The interiors are decorated with chandeliers, marble floors, mosaic tiles, exposed ceiling beams, and wrought iron details.
Charles and Mabel Ennis commissioned Wright to design the house after retiring in 1923. New-building permits for both parts of the house were issued in May 1924, and the garage was finished that December, followed by the main house in August 1925. The Ennis family lived in the house only until 1936, after which it had seven owners in 44 years. One such owner, the actor John Nesbitt, bought the house in 1940 and had Wright add a swimming pool, billiard room, and heating system. After further changes of ownership, the house was acquired in 1968 by Augustus Brown, who renovated it further before donating it to the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage (TPCH) in 1980. Over the next 25 years, the TPCH renovated the house, which was damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake and by heavy rains in 2005. The Ennis House Foundation managed and restored the house from 2005 to 2011, when it sold the house to the businessman Ronald Burkle, who made further repairs. Burkle sold the house in 2019 to the cannabis executives Robert Rosenheck and Cindy Capobianco for $18 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a Wright-designed building.
Site The Ennis House is located in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles in California, United States, with an address of 2607 or 2655 Glendower Avenue. The house's only means of access is via Glendower Avenue, a narrow road that winds through Los Feliz and surrounds the building on three sides. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the house sits on a hill, which slopes down sharply toward the south. Wright's nearly-contemporary John Storer House and Samuel Freeman House were also built on hilltop sites; the writer Robert C. Twombly wrote that this made the houses look "seemingly impenetrable" from the street. A writer for Contemporary Literature magazine wrote in 1997 that the house signified Wright's ethos of "extreme individualism" and his distaste for urbanism, especially given its site. Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy president John Payne said in 2003 that the house took advantage of its topography in a similar vein to Wright's earlier Prairie style work, which tended to be low to the ground.
The site covers approximately , measuring wide from west to east. The house consists of a main building and a garage wing, separated by an enclosed motor court, or courtyard for vehicles. A footbridge spans the motor court, connecting the main house's northern terrace with the garage wing. In addition, there is a koi pond and swimming pool in the rear of the main house, as well as terraces and other open spaces overlooking Los Angeles. The Ennis House overlooks Downtown Los Angeles and Griffith Park to the east, and it also faces the Pacific Ocean to the west. The house is one of several buildings in Los Feliz designed by Wright and his apprentices; other such structures include the Lovell House and John Sowden House. Prior to the development of Los Feliz, the site had been part of a Spanish-era land grant known as Rancho Los Feliz.
Architecture
The Ennis House is one of eight buildings Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Millard House (La Miniatura), the Hollyhock House, the Storer House, and the Freeman House. The Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer houses were the only four textile block houses he designed in Los Angeles; the Ennis House is the largest of Wright's four textile-block buildings in Los Angeles. According to the writer Hugh Hart, "Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal." Few of his clients ended up commissioning textile-block designs, given the novelty of the construction method. As The New York Times later said: "Aside from the free-spirited oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, whom he fought with constantly, his motley clients included a jewelry salesman [Samuel Freeman], a rare-book dealing widow [Alice Millard] and a failed doctor [John Storer]." After designing the four textile-block houses, Wright went on to design various concrete-block buildings across the U.S., including Usonian houses made of "Usonian Automatic" blocks.
The Ennis House was built at a time when Wright was transitioning away from the Prairie-style designs of his early career and toward the Usonian designs of his later career. It is sometimes described as having a Mayan Revival design, inspired by the motifs of Puuc architecture in Uxmal. Jim Guichard, who helped train the house's docents in the 1980s, said the house's architectural style had been selected because Wright wanted "an architecture indigenous to America" and found the Mayan style to be suitable for the southwestern U.S. Wright wrote that he had been inspired by Native American and Mexican motifs, saying in 1957 that he had wished to visit Central America at some point. The house has also been described as a "Californian Romanza" structure since its design was influenced by numerous architectural styles, including those of Egypt, China, and Western Europe. The writer Merrill Schleier described the patterns in the house's design as having been influenced by Japanese or Moorish architecture. A 2001 Architectural Record article described the design as bearing Cubism or Corbusian elements while stating that Wright's influence was still evident.
Exterior The main entrance is through a pair of gates for pedestrians and vehicles, which are decorated with Mayan motifs. The vehicular gate leads to the house's motor court, which is surrounded by a low wall. The motor court, in turn, connects to a detached carport or semi-open garage with space for two vehicles. A doorway leads from the motor court directly to the main house's loggia; the original plans called for an open-air loggia, but it was enclosed to give the house a direct entrance from the motor court. An outdoor swimming pool, dating from 1940, is located on a terrace abutting the house's northern facade. The pool is variously cited as measuring or across. The terrace abuts a bedroom and library inside. Both the main house and the garage wing have large windows and elaborate columns.
Walls
Sources disagree on whether the house uses 24,000, 27,000, 40,000, or 45,000 concrete textile blocks. The blocks were made of degraded granite from the site itself, which was mixed with sand, gravel, and water and then poured into molds. The buff color of these blocks was derived by mixing these materials with dirt from the site. The concrete was reminiscent of the adobe used in Mayan temples, and Wright had also perceived the material as blending in with the Southwestern United States' topography and climate. Mortar joints are placed between the blocks, which are fastened to each other using loops of steel; the blocks also contain steel rods. The "textile block" name is derived from the fact that the rods are integrated with the blocks to give it a knitted-together appearance. Wright believed that the textile blocks would protect the house against earthquake damage—which turned out not to be the case during the 1994 Northridge earthquake—and that the concrete would provide fire protection and cool down the house. Wright's assistant Edgar Tafel also claimed that the blocks could be mass-produced, similar to factory-made items.
The typical block weighs , with square faces measuring across. Each block measures thick. The blocks are decorated with patterns because, although Wright liked concrete for its malleability, he also thought that plain concrete was perceived as unattractive. There are engraved Greek key patterns that are variously characterized as vaguely resembling the lowercase letter "g" (a possible reference to the symbol of the Masonic Order, of which original owner Charles Ennis was a member) or local plants. In contrast to the Freeman House, where two mirror-image patterns were used, the Ennis House uses a single pattern, and the blocks are oriented in the same direction. (S.217) The blocks were manufactured in 20 or 24 shapes; some are smaller than a standard block, while others had patterning on multiple faces or inset glass panels. The textile blocks absorbed moisture easily and were prone to decay because of impurities present when the blocks were cast.
The house's outer walls are made of two layers of concrete blocks, with an air gap between them, which are supported by footings at ground level. The blocks on the outer walls are offset, making them appear more battered, and the interior and exterior faces of the walls both contain engraved patterns. The outer walls contain setbacks as they ascend, giving the facade a massing similar to a Mayan temple. Surrounding the house are large retaining walls, also made of textile blocks. According to the writer Robert L. Sweeney, the retaining walls made the house appear larger than it actually was. The walls are structurally separate from the rest of the house and are reinforced by concrete beams measuring across. Running perpendicularly to the retaining walls, and underneath the house, are crib walls, which are placed every . The spaces between the crib walls and retaining walls are infilled with dirt and sand.
Windows and roof
The facade contains gold, green, blue, and purple stained glass windows, which depict wisterias. These were the last stained-glass windows that Wright designed for a residential building during his lifetime, as he began using perforated wood blocks in his later houses. There are 32 stained-glass panels, divided into 29 stained-glass windows and three stained-glass doors. The final design of the windows contrasted with Wright's original plans, which called for a block-shaped pattern evocative of the facade. The window sills have large lintels, which shield the interiors from bright sunlight. The roof slabs are split across 14 levels; the shape of the roof is similar to that of the Hollyhock House in that some parts of the roof are flat, while others ascend in a ziggurat-like configuration. The roof includes telescoping towers, which become progressively smaller as they ascend.
Interior