SO SOCAL: The Best...The Beautiful...And The Bizarre : MYSTERY MOSAIC : Is This the Wright Stuff?

On occasion, in the dusty alcoves of Judson Studios near Highland Park, sunlight will strike a few of the leaden glass tiles that artisans are painstakingly piecing together. The gold glimmer causes David Judson to catch his breath.

Such was the case this April, when Judson, great-great-grandson of William Lees Judson, who founded the studios 102 years ago, caught a glimpse of the “fireplace mosaic.”

“I was amazed,” he says. “It looked exactly like the one at the Ennis-Brown House.” The fireplace mosaic--a 5-foot-tall, 9-foot-wide composition of about 1,100 glass tiles with gold leaf fired in a wisteria flower design--may be one of six such mantelpieces in the country. At least two of them were made for Frank Lloyd Wright homes.

Phyllis Murphy, a computer consultant with a taste for art nouveau, stumbled upon the mosaic at an estate sale in Simi Valley. “I couldn’t sleep after seeing it,” says Murphy, who won’t divulge what she paid for it. An appraiser told Murphy that he believed a Judson Studios artisan designed it around 1913, based on the original homeowner’s records. (The since-demolished house was located near Lafayette Park Place in mid-Los Angeles.) Murphy contacted the studios, hoping it could restore the few damaged or missing tiles and move it to her new Chatsworth home.

David Judson was baffled. “The technique for creating these tiles is unknown,” he says. He couldn’t find any record of the company having worked on it, and the studio’s artisans had no idea how to re-create its gold leaf tiles. So Judson and Frank Lloyd Wright scholar Tom Heinz traveled to the Chicago suburb of River Forest last month to study a similar glass mosaic created by Giannini & Hilgart. They now believe that Orlando Giannini, who came to La Jolla in the early 1900s, may have actually created Murphy’s fireplace mosaic. Judson will continue research on the mystery mosaic.

Heinz, who’s more confident it’s a Wright design, recently photographed it for his upcoming book, “Light Screens,” a study of Wright’s glass mosaics. The Getty, Heinz speculates, would “love to get their hands on it.”