KCET has reposted a story on the Ennis House from 2004, including an interview with Eric Lloyd Wright and Franklin DeGroot It’s video footage we’ve all seen, but it’s footage we haven’t seen enough.
The house has been stabilized since this was filmed; the Ennis House Foundation has spent more than $5 million to stop the decay. Millions more is needed, but the new owner, Ron Burkle, has committed to restoring the house.
The Ennis House, on the market since 2009, has been sold for $4.5 million . The buyer is Ron Burkle, an investor (and part owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins), Burkle ranks as #347 on Forbes list of riches people in the world (that makes him as rich as George Lucas, richer than Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Mark Cuban and Stephen Spielberg).
Burkle has committed to continuing restorations; public access to the house for 12 days a year was granted by a conservation easement to the Los Angeles Conservancy.
Built in 1924 (the last of Wright’s four Myan-themed textile block houses), plagued by problems most of its life, the house was severely damaged in the 1994 earthquake and then by heavy rains in 2005. It made the Nation Register’s list of most endangered historic properties in 2005.
The Ennis House Foundation has spent millions on stabilization efforts. It placed the house on the market in 2009 for $15 million, lowered the price to $7.5 million and then to $6 million.
These three links were published as fillers on their respective websites, but there are worse ways to waste time on the internet than looking at republished articles and photos of great Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
Arch Daily looks at both Wingspread and Unity Temple. I think they posted the first to chastize you (or at least me) for procrastinating long enough on the Friday Excursion tickets that they sold out, and the second to remind you not to dink around so long that Wright Plus will sell out.
The Los Angeles Times visits the Ennis House, and includes a lavish photo gallery, though I think it’s the same one they ran a few months ago, but it is worth seeing again anyway.
Mark Hertzberg has noted another passing this weekend: Robert Leary.
Mark has has a detailed remembrance (here , and a bit more here ) of Leary, who died Sunday at the age of 52, that you ought to read. Put simply, Leary energetic advocate for the Ennis House, serving as first chairman of the Ennis House Foundation when the survival of the house itself was in question (here is a 2005 article from The New York Times on the creation of the foundation).
Robert Leary did not work tirelessly to restore a unique Wright property, he worked to literally save one from destruction. But he didn’t just want to save the house, he wanted to understand it:
“Wright called a lot of his supports ‘dead men,’ joists, support beams, load bearing walls under the properties. I wanted to see just how the Ennis House had originally been supported. I was crawling in the guts of the house in the mud and the dirt, and there was this rusted piece of metal that was just sicking out of the dirt. I was wondering what it was. I dug and dug more. I saw it was a square with metal supports on both sides, holding two pieces of wood. I realized it was a mold for the negative space or the inside of a block. Obviously, when the workers were finished, they just left it there, so we have this wonderful cultural artifact of the craftsmanship of these four wonderful (textile block) houses, but especially of the Ennis House, of the 27,000 blocks, produced one at a time. They were not cookie cutter, not mass produced. Here was material that they used; that they used to build the Ennis House! “That sort of thing…is priceless. It is like finding the Raiders of the Lost Ark Holy Grail. Historians and researchers and craftspeople in the future can see that this was in effect just one on one, a worker producing his art.”
The Los Angeles Times has an article on the inability to sell the two Wright homes in LA that are on the market.
The agent listing La Miniatura claims that disassembling the house and moving it to Japan is at least a possibility (note it’s the listing agent, not the owner making that statement, and the possibility that he’s saying that simply to draw attention is not inconceivable).
After slashing the listing price over the last two years from $7,733,000 to $4,995,000 and not finding a buyer, Doe says he’s “talking to an international art dealer with Japanese art-collector clients who might be interested in buying the house.”
“With my position in the preservation community, I will probably be crucified for saying this,” says Doe. “But we have to consider all options. We moved the London Bridge to the Colorado River. Why couldn’t we move this house to Japan?”
The Ennis House is the other Wright currently for sale — its price has been lowered from $15 million to $7.5 million. Currently owned by a private foundation, the house has already had several million dollars of emergency restoration work done (partially due to the 1994 earthquake and torrential rains). The new owner will need to commit millions more to the house.
La Miniatura is in good shape having recently undergone a multi-million dollar restoration. The possibility of of one or both houses being acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been explored, but absent a donor with monumentally deep pockets,that isn’t going to happen.
One bit of good news is buried in the article. The Freeman House, though owned by the University of Southern California, has not been open to the public. USC is exploring the possibility of opening it to the public on a limited schedule.
As always, there is a gallery of photos with the article, with images of both La Miniatura and the Ennis House.
Later Update: The Chicago Tribune today has a related article on the inability of homes by famous designers in LA to sell. Homes by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler have also gone unsold. Even in Chicago, the famous Ferris-Bueller-plummeting-Ferrari house, on the market for over a year, has had its price reduced.
Open House LA has a three minute video of the Ennis House. It’s meant to market the house, so it shows all the good stuff — the mitered windows, the beautiful teak ceilings and the intact art glass windows. Clearly visible, though not mentioned (because it’s mean to market the house) is the deterioration of the exterior textile block. The guide in the video is Jeffery Burbank, member of the board of the Ennis House Foundation.
If unsightly wads of unused cash are plaguing you, Gregg Antonsen of Christie’s Great Estates at 505.983.8733, Aaron Kirman of Hilton & Hyland at 310.858.5479 or Ray Hayes of Dilbeck Estates at 626.287.9625 would be happy to exchange the Ennis House for $7,495,000 of your dollars.
Mark Hertzberg’s Wright in Racine blog reports that First Republic Bank granted the Ennis House Foundation an extension on the $2 million loan on the property. The search for a buyer is on-going; there has been interest in the property, though no offer has yet been accepted.
The Ennis House is listed by the firm of Hilton & Hyland, in Beverly Hills, California. The asking price is $7,495,000.
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