The Wright Stuff : A Painstaking Restoration at Hollyhock House

RESTORING THE LIVING room of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House posed many riddles. What was the original color scheme? What were the dimensions and detailing of the magnificent sofas? And where, oh where, had the original sofas disappeared to?

Sketches and old photographs of the historic house, built by the eccentric Wright for the equally offbeat oil heiress, Aline Barnsdall (whose favorite flower was the hollyhock), offered tantalizing clues. But it took curator Virginia Kazor and a crew of preservationists more than a decade to uncover answers and raise funds to restore just the living room of this city-owned 1921 architectural treasure, one of seven Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Los Angeles area. The room will be open to the public starting Tuesday.

Wright’s massive mirror-image sofas with attached lighting towers and tables had disappeared in 1946. By studying photos, a Friends of the Hollyhock House volunteer came up with preliminary drawings. Then Pasadena-based craftsman James Ipekjian worked for four months to re-create the sofas of quarter-sawn white oak. The job was not easy: Detailing was hard to decipher in blurry photos, especially the applied molding on the tables and the incised carving on the four faces of the torchieres.

The original paint scheme was pieced together from references to “burnished gold walls and a ceiling of light Nile green and bronze” in a bulletin of the California Art Club, which used the house as a headquarters from 1927 to 1942. This palette--gold, ochre, terracotta and Nile green--was confirmed when restoration architect Martin Eli Weil climbed a ladder and found original plaster chips hiding in the light soffits.

The upholstery presented yet another dilemma until two of the original sofas’ cinnamon-colored cushions were returned by a photographer who had taken them during the 1946 renovation. The firm of Stroheim and Romann Inc. re-created the wool frieze fabric--the wool face was made first and then woven into an orange-colored cotton/rayon backing to reproduce the iridescent gold of the original.

The Hollyhock restoration also includes gold-leaf tile for the fireside pool, incandescent lighting to replace fluorescent lights installed in the ‘40s and four new bronze light fixtures over the hollyhock columns.

As for the original sofas, their rumored fate is a preservationist’s nightmare: Removed from the house during an earlier restoration, the sofas were apparently stored at the Greek Theatre and ultimately cannibalized for sets.

Hollyhock House , 4800 Hollywood Blvd., is open for public tours Tuesday through Thursday, Saturdays and the first, second and third Sunday of each month. For further information, call (213) 662-7272.