Home Sweet Home Restored to Former State
The letter is dated May 22, 1939, and refers to a home that at the time 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 man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars later, the tiny 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, including replacing the shake roof with something more fire-resistant but less authentic and placing a new circuit-breaker box smack on the front of the house.
After considerable lobbying, however, the city’s Cultural Affairs Department officially granted the redwood home on the corner of Tampa Avenue and Valerio Street special status in October, and Adams was allowed to rebuild it as it once was.
A smiling Eric Wright, Lloyd Wright’s son and himself an architect, was clearly pleased as he eyed the interior redwood paneling and the view out 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 himself could construct. Busy with other projects, Frank Lloyd Wright passed the request--and a few suggestions for it, according to the family--along 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, blurring the lines between the outdoors and the inside, Eric Wright noted.
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 Bill 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 dubbed historic-cultural monuments. But several dozen others are falling into disrepair and are even being torn down, Eric Wright said.
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 alike. “And my father-in-law . . . I feel like he’s saying, ‘You did it right.’ ”
