Rebuilding It Wright : Restoration of Lloyd Wright-Designed Home Honors His Vision
The letter is dated May 22, 1939, and refers to a home that existed only in architectural drawings and as a tiny model. Even so, its soon-to-be owner and builder Bill Adams wrote, “it’s a honey.”
Fifty-seven years, hundreds of worker hours and tens of thousands of dollars later, the tiny Reseda home--designed by Lloyd Wright, famed architect son of even more famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright--is a honey once again. It is also protected as a Los Angeles city historic monument.
At a Thursday ceremony held in the remarkably airy-feeling 600-square-foot home, City Councilwoman Laura Chick honored Barbara Adams, daughter-in-law of the original owner, for restoring the square, slant-roofed structure.
“I don’t want to add up how much I spent on it, but it’s worth it,” an emotional Adams said. “I wanted to fix it right.”
In Los Angeles, with its strict building codes, restoring the withering structure without compromising the visions of the famous architect, and the builder, was no simple task.
When Adams began work earlier this year--months after the death of her husband, Bob, who had helped his father build the home--building officials wanted to make several changes: Replace the shake roof with something more fire-resistant but less authentic, place a new circuit-breaker box smack on the front of the house.
After considerable lobbying, however, the city’s Cultural Affairs Department granted the redwood home special status in October, and Adams was allowed to rebuild it as it once was.
A smiling Eric Wright, Lloyd Wright’s son and an architect himself, clearly was pleased as he eyed the interior redwood paneling and the view from the large front windows, which now takes in heavily trafficked Tampa Avenue rather than the bean and beet fields that originally surrounded the house.
“It’s nice that the home is lived in too,” Eric Wright said. “I have a problem with museum homes.”
According to Adams family lore, patriarch Bill Adams, a great admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote to the famed architect in 1939 asking him to design a simple home that Adams could build. Busy with other projects, Wright passed the request--and a few suggestions for it, according to the family--to his son, Lloyd Wright.
Lloyd Wright drew up plans--which Barbara Adams still holds--for a square house with a square roof placed at an odd angle and slanted to take advantage of Southern California’s ample sunlight. And he set it at ground level so that the outside walkways seem to merge with the inside tile, Eric Wright noted, blurring the lines between the outdoors and the in.
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The only disagreement between architect and builder was over the roof. Lloyd Wright dubbed the structure the “Mat House” because he designed it to have a thatch-like roof made of woven bulrushes. But Adams, harboring doubts about the practicality of the mat design, nailed down shakes instead.
Lloyd Wright was so married to the concept of the mat, said Barbara Adams’ son Gene Miller, that when Bill Adams changed the roof plans, he declined to bill for the second half of his $125 fee.
Three other Los Angeles-area Lloyd Wright homes have been designated historic-cultural monuments. But several dozen others are falling into disrepair and even being torn down, according to Eric Wright.
In restoring this one, Barbara Adams said she felt “an atta-girl feeling of support” from the spirits of the late architect and her father-in-law. “And my father-in-law . . . I feel like he’s saying, ‘You did it right.’ ”
