A house for a rare-book dealer, set below the road
Alice Millard commissioned the house in 1923, five years after her husband's death, wanting a place that could hold her books, her paintings and her clients. It was Wright's second house for the Millard family — he had built the first in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1906.
Wright chose the site against local advice: a wooded ravine adjoining the Arroyo Seco, land nobody wanted to build on. He put the house down inside it. Approached from Prospect Crescent you meet the upper floor first; the garden lies three storeys below.
Her brief was specific and spatial — a large living room with a great fireplace, an interior balcony leading to the bedroom, a guest room that could double as an office, and a bedroom looking into the ravine. Wright gave her all of it in a footprint smaller than any of the three textile block houses that followed.
Alice Millard used the house as a residence, an office, and something close to a small museum.
The pierced block carries the pattern all the way through, so the wall reads as ornament from outside and as a screen of light from within.
One block, sixteen inches
Wright cast the blocks on site in moulds of his own design, using decomposed granite dug from the property. Steel rods run through channels in the joints, horizontally and vertically, tying the blocks into a continuous woven wall — which is where the name comes from.
The same unit makes the exterior, the interior, the piers and the garden walls. Ornament and structure are the same object.
the cheapest (and ugliest) thing in the building world Wright, on concrete block, in his autobiography
The critical reception was poor. Architects trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition found it absurd that a wealthy client would live behind common building material. Wright kept developing the system anyway — in the Storer, Freeman and Ennis houses, and decades later in what he called the Usonian Automatic.
That same construction is why the house needs continual work. The restoration is here.
Chronology
Wright designs the George Madison Millard House in Highland Park, Illinois, for Alice and George Millard.
George Millard dies. Alice continues dealing in rare books and moves west.
Wright opens a Los Angeles office and begins La Miniatura — the first of his textile block houses.
The house is completed. Storer, Freeman and Ennis follow in the same system.
A separate studio is added, designed by Lloyd Wright, the architect's son.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 12 December.
Named a contributing property to the Prospect Historic District.
Photographs
The house, its blocks, and the ravine garden.