House Fans Hope to Right a Wright

“I love this house so much it makes me crazy,” Michael Roberts, head chef at Trumps, was saying as he nibbled a caviar-topped potato slice prepared by Wolfgang Puck of Spago.

As for the house that drives him crazy, it is known as Millard House, or La Miniatura, and it was one of four experimental “textile block” residences built of concrete by the pioneering American architect Frank Lloyd Wright during his brief sojourn in Los Angeles in the ‘20s.

Many of Wright’s most blatant groupies convened for a formal dinner at La Miniatura in Pasadena on Wednesday to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the architect’s birthday and to raise an estimated $40,000 to repair and restore another Wright textile block residence, Freeman House in the Hollywood Hills. The late Samuel and Harriet Freeman, for whom the house was built, bequeathed their home to USC’s School of Architecture. It is in need of repair but is open for public tours.

At La Miniatura, rain didn’t deter Wright’s fans from dining outside at tables on the back lawn. Indeed, the weather made many people think of the leaks for which Wright’s block structures were notorious.

“Poor Harriet Freeman,” said USC architecture dean Robert S. Harris, recounting Freeman’s last years in the house, when it was desperately in need of patches.

“It shouldn’t have worked,” said Peter Sellars, director of the Los Angeles Festival. “Nobody had tried the blocks before. Nobody knew what would happen.”

Sellars didn’t have to leave home to attend the party. He has rented an apartment at La Miniatura since he saw a classified ad that cryptically read, “FLW studio” and knew what it meant. “I walked in and there was no question.” His space, he added, is utterly serene.

“It’s different every day,” said Nicole Daniels, who grew up at La Miniatura and still owns it. “The light shifts and the house glows.”

Eric Lloyd Wright, the architect’s grandson, said the mist in the air reminded him of evenings at Taliesin West, Wright’s rustic headquarters in Arizona, where people camped in tents and dined black-tie on the dusty grounds. “It’s wonderfully appropriate weather,” agreed Jeffrey Chusid, director of Freeman House.

Other dinners benefiting Freeman House were held earlier in the week at Silvertop, John Lautner’s futurist aerie, where Roberts cooked dinner, and at the Mediterranean-style home of Bronya Pereira Galef, widow of Los Angeles architect William Pereira, where John Sedlar of Bikini prepared the meal. First Interstate Bancorp, Paramount Pictures, Galef, R. Scott Johnson and Margot and Mark Armbruster hosted the events.