The Harold R. Newton house on Palisades Drive in Palm Springs was a small house perched on the side of a steeply sloping lot. Multiple terraces created a more stable hillside and provided space for an access stairway.
The Raymond Cree house was built on the border of Palm Springs and Cathedral City. Cree was a real estate developer who had originally wanted to build a luxury resort on the site; instead a two bedroom house with pool and valley views was…
The J.A. Lyons house was a large (5 bedroom), sprawling house in the Smoke Tree Ranch development in Palm Springs. With five bedrooms and four bathrooms, the Lyons house was much more grand than some of Frey's other residences.
The house for Edward Heath in San Marino (also listed as Pasadena), has some characteristics of a Regency style home, with an unusual double-height porch.
This house for Jack Warner (one of the founding brothers in Warner Brothers Studios), was an alteration of and addition to an existing house. The Georgian style mansion with a Greek-style portico featured interior design by William Haines and…
Oil company executive Leigh Battson was married to Lucy Doheny and living at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills when they commissioned Coate to design a vacation home on Lake Arrowhead. The estate featured steeply sloping roofs which prevented…
This church was one of Coate's early solo commissions, after leaving the firm Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate. It is also one of his few church commissions. The structure is a very good example of Spanish Colonial Revival style, which was very popular in…
The M.G. Eshman house in Bel Air is a very good example of a classic American Colonial Revival style house. Sited on a large flat lot, the house is just down the street from the famous Hotel Bel-Air.
This large Monterey-style house was designed for A Parley Johnson and his wife Geline "Gypsy" Johnson. They were citrus growers, and the house was originally surrounded by 50 acres of orange groves.
It was listed on the National Register of…
The area of South Los Angeles known as Leimert Park was developed in the late 1920s by Walter Leimert, and was one of the first planned communities in Southern California. The neighborhood was landscaped by the Olmstead Brothers, and in addition to…
Coate built this house for Mrs. H.C. Lippiatt and Mrs. F.M.P. Taylor in a Colonial Revival style, with influences of Spanish, Monterey, and New Orleans styles. The house backs onto the Bel Air Country Club golf course, and is close to the campus of…
This large house in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles was built for Lemuel Goldwater, a garment industry pioneer and relative of Senator Barry Goldwater.
This house, set on a steep lot overlooking the Silver Lake reservoir, was built for the director of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild Ursel Daniel. She was single at the time the house was built and later married Martin Irons.
This house and studio for Jocelyn and Jan Domela was located in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles. Jan Domela was a well-known artist and illustrator for the movie studios.
The Charles H. Edwards house was Ain's first solo commission after working for Richard Neutra and Harwell Hamilton Harris. The house, sited on a flat lot in the Hollywood Hills, was named House Beautiful Magazine's "House of the Year" for 1938.
The house for Anselem Ernst was built on a sloping hillside lot in the Los Feliz Oaks neighborhood. The exterior angles and interior use of space and geometry are very reminiscent of Rudolph Schindler, with whom Ain worked for a time in the early…
The Dr. I. Goldberg house was located in the Encino area of the San Fernando Valley. For this house, redwood siding was used. Ain generally preferred stucco since he did not like that the giant redwood trees were cut down for building materials.
The Isador and Rosa Becker house presented a slightly Streamline Moderne style front facade, with curved walls on the exterior. Inside, the house featured a 'reverse' floor plan-- the main living areas were at street level, and the bedrooms were one…
The A.O. Beckman house was sited on a flat lot, and Ain configured the house so that many of the rooms had direct access to the outdoors. The house was located in the La Brea neighborhood of Los Angeles, and was featured in both Architectural Record…
The Albert E. Byler house is located near the top of Mt. Washington, with a view towards downtown Los Angeles. The house is small, measuring less than five hundred square feet, with only a main room, kitchen, and bathroom. The exterior was clad in…
Harry Hay commissioned Ain to design this house for his mother, Margaret Hay. With clearstory windows and a garage at the front of the property and living room facing the private backyard, the house was seen as a perfect place for Harry Hay to…
This house for Leo Mesner is in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles. The only portion of the house visible from the street is the garage, with the main view of the house is from the backyard. Inside, the house is spread out on four levels, each…
The exhibition house Ain designed for the Museum of Modern Art and the Woman's Home Companion magazine was built in New York City in 1950. It was designed to show how modern living could be made accessible to most homeowners, with sliding walls…
The Maurice and Alice Orans House was located on a steeply sloped small lot in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. The garage was built at street level with entrance and exit doors; the curved driveway allows for easy entrance and egress, extra…
The Scharlin house in Silver Lake was built for the founder of one of the first co-operative nursery schools in Los Angeles, Rose Scharlin. The house sits at the top of the ridge, on a sloping site far back from the street, with views in multiple…
The house for Samuel and Celia Tierman was sited on a steep lot in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The small house, with a pyramid-shaped roof, stucco walls, and attached garage was part of Ain's philosophy of bringing modern homes to…
This house in Altadena for John C. Wilfong was a long, low, glass-walled house with views towards the mountains. The investment banker Wilfong wanted a house where he and his wife could entertain and raise their child. Ain designed a linear house…
The Russel Taylor house in Los Angeles is an example of a traditional house, with a Colonial style front facade and a center stair hall. The public rooms at the front of the house lead out to a back terrace, which faces an expansive flat year.…
While Myron Hunt is known for his houses in the Los Angeles area, he also designed houses in the Chicago area and along the east coast. This house for Mrs. Graham Babcock is an example of Hunt's eastern style.
This Italian Renaissance Revival mansion was designed by Myron Hunt for Senator Thomas Bard, who was an early land developer and founder of the Union Oil Company. The Bard family owned the house until 1944 when it was acquired by the United States…
Parking garages were a new type of building in the 1920s, with the recent invention of the motorized vehicle. Garages of this time period catered to the wealthy, with valet services, fuel stations, and service bays which would work on your car while…
Myron Hunt attended Northwestern University in Evanston, then studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traveled in Europe for a few years, and finally returned to Evanston to work for the Boston-based firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. In…
Throop Polytechnic Institute was founded in 1891 and changed its name to California Polytechnic Institute in 1920. Throop Hall was damaged in a 1971 earthquake and was demolished in 1973. Some of the decorative elements of the original building were…
The buildings for the California Junior Republic, an all-boys school for troubled youth, were designed by Myron Hunt in 1911, with additional buildings by Chambers and Hibbard in 1950. Originally named George Junior Republic, the facility changed…
These renderings for the Cafeteria and Boys Physical Education building at Canoga Park High School were designs by Chambers and Hibbard, the architects who continued the firm after Myron Hunt's death in 1952.
This house for Guy Cochran was designed in the American Bungalow style, and written about in the Craftsman magazine. It featured large windows overlooking a manicured terrace for indoor/outdoor living.
George Watson Cole was the librarian for the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery from 1915 to 1924. Previously, Cole had studied with Melvil Dewey, and worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago and public libraries on the East Coast. The…
The Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks (Lodge #672) has been the headquarters of the Elks in Pasadena since 1911. The Colonial Revival style building has been the site of many television and film shoots, as well as a prominent place during…
This estate for Katherine Sinclair Emery (widow of Frank Emery, who at the time of his death was considered one of the richest men in California) sits on 9 acres in San Marino. The Tudor style house is now known as Thornton Gardens. Hunt worked with…
This church is in the Spanish Colonial style, with a Churrigueresque style steeple. The building is in the shape of a Latin cross, with two-foot-thick walls which are made of reinforced concrete, and a red tile roof that highlights the Spanish…
The hotel was built for Senator Frank Putnam Flint, who later sold the hotel to the Bowman-Biltmore Hotels company. In 1931, the building and 30 acre grounds were sold to form the Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, a Catholic school for grades k-12.
The Flintridge Country Club was built with thick walls, to block out the hot summer air and retain heat in the winter. The Club maintained separate spaces for women and men-- locker rooms, lounges-- but the center of the main building featured the…
This house for Margaret Fowler was adjacent to the Boys Republic property she purchased for the organization. After her death in 1936, the organization donated the home to a polio treatment center, which was named Casa Colina Convalescent Home for…
This large beach house was sited directly on the sand. With large balconies facing the water, the house allowed for indoor/outdoor living on the beach. The house sat on a corner lot, and included a long wooden boardwalk through the loose sand dunes…
Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey were the supervising architects for the design of the James Waldron Gillespie House, for the originating architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Gillespie took Goodhue on a seven month around-the-world tour as inspiration for…
Howard Hawks was a director, screen writer, and producer from the 1920s until the 1950s. The house in Benedict Canyon was built with stucco and stone, with a vaguely Colonial style and early California ranch influences.
This Neoclassical style building was home to the Hueneme Bank, later served as the Port Hueneme city hall, and is now the Port Hueneme Historical Society Museum. It was named a Ventura County Historic Landmark in 1977.
The house that Myron Hunt designed for himself and his family on North Grand Avenue in Pasadena, California, bears a small resemblance to his previous house in Illinois. The gardens, loggia, and other outdoor areas highlight the difference in climate…
The original buildings are almost completely subsumed and surrounded by new medical facilities, but these original hospital buildings can still be seen from aerial views.
Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey worked for railroad magnate and real estate mogul Henry Huntington to design buildings to house Huntington's extensive library and art collections. The Mediterranean revival style building formed the basis for the Huntington…
This house, on San Ysidro Lane in Montecito, for G. Palmer and Louise Black was the second one designed by Riggs for the couple. An earlier house was on Greene Lane in Santa Barbara.
Kem Weber worked with architect Roy Cheesman to design the Art Deco-inspired Christian Science Reading room on State Street in Santa Barbara. It occupies a prominent corner near the Arlington Theater.
For the Dabney ranch house in the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Santa Barbara, Weber utilized outdoor living areas around the pool and wood tones on the interior.
This house for Stanford University English professor John Wendell Dodds sits in the hills above the university. The two-story house with redwood siding and many exterior angles, spread out along the hillside.
Weber designed this house in Glendale for the jewelry designer and painter Eduard Andrew Gisler. The house was sleek and modern, with horizontal lines and nautically inspired railings.
This house for David Gray was Y-shaped, and included large trusses to create a wide living room. The house was sited on a hilly plot, with many trees and exterior levels.
This house for Mrs. D. Kimball was a ranch-style design, with two wings spreading out from a central core. It also featured a unique curved loggia to take advantage of the view.
Weber designed the ballroom for the Mayfair Hotel-- a 13-story, 350 room hotel near downtown Los Angeles. Known as the "Rainbow Isle" for its raised dance floor with multi-colored glass tiles (lit from underneath), it was a Modern design success for…
In the 1930s, Weber designed the interiors for the Maynard Parker house in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. It is unclear if Maynard Parker was the photographer of these images.
In the late 1940s, Weber shifted his practice to designing and building houses. The George Peters house in Santa Barbara is one of his earlier houses; a ranch style house with a cantilevered roof.
The interiors for the Sommer & Kaufmann Shoe Store were designed by Weber; he worked with architect Alfred F. Roller on the building design. Additional design elements, under the direction of Weber, were created by sculptor Eugene Maier-Krieg and…
During World War Two, Weber worked with Otto Eitel and the Douglas Fir Plywood Association in Tacoma, Washington to build a model home using Weber's system. The model home took two carpenters only two days to build the home, after the foundation…
Weber and his wife Erika found a plot of land in Santa Barbara's Mission Canyon area in 1946 and built the house in 1948. The sloping, heavily wooded site influenced the design-- a stone walkway leads up from the carport to the entry of the house,…
The head of the art department at Pasadena Junior College, Archibald Wedemeyer, asked Weber to design a house in Altadena. The small two-story house featured ribbon windows and a trellised back patio for outdoor living.
Weber had first worked on the interior of the Zacho's store in Los Angeles in 1937. For the 1945 alterations, he brought in the Scandinavian Modern style-- smooth ceilings and floors, textured walls, and the use of different materials-- to update the…
Weber taught classes at the Art Center School in Los Angeles for many years; each year he had his students work on a group project to design a multi-building complex. For 1938, the students designed a new campus for the Art Center. Weber also…
Elizabeth Franklin was a teacher at the Art Center School and a friend of Weber's when she asked him to design a house for her in west central Los Angeles. The house was sited on a hilly lot, with the garage placed underneath the main living area.
The Harry Calendar garden, in the Windsor Square neighborhood in Los Angeles, was one of Hanson's first landscape architecture commissions. In the images above, the bird house holds a spotlight to highlight the lily pond. The colonial style pergola…
George Cochran, head of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, commissioned Hanson to create a garden on his multi-lot estate between Hobart and Harvard streets in Los Angeles. A long, narrow garden was created, with fully-grown trees brought in to…
These two images of Hanson show him at different points in his career. The first one from circa 1927 shows him while he was working on his most famous project, the Harold Lloyd estate. The second image shows Hanson as a well established land…
For the Kirk Johnson landscaping project, Hanson was introduced to the Johnson's by the architect of the house, George Washington Smith. The 8-acre property already contained many mature oak and cypress trees; Hanson utilized the existing trees to…
Hanson designed this landscape for the backyard of his own home in Westlake, Calif. The design shows how a sculpted landscape can fit into a smaller suburban yard.
For the Mrs. Dan Murphy garden, Hanson worked with architect Lutah Maria Riggs on the overall design for the landscape. Hanson had worked with Riggs previously on the Johnson estate in Montecito. The garden design was based on an Italian garden,…
George Washington Smith designed the home for Archibald Young in the Andalusian style. Hanson complimented this style with a similar landscaping, by utilizing various fountains and water features to highlight the design.
The Harold Lloyd estate, also known as Green Acres, was a 15-acre property with golf course, swimming pool, 900 foot long canoe racing area, handball court, and many additional outbuildings and features. Hanson designed all of the landscape features,…
The L. Wayne Beal house in Scottsdale, Arizona highlights the stark contrast between the white house and the darker desert hills. The house is perched on the side of a hill, with a view of the valley.
Lyricist Ira Gershwin commissioned Woolf to remodel the house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills in the Hollywood Regency style. The house was torn down in 2013.
Winemakers Louis and Flori Petri commissioned Woolf to design a house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Woolf also designed an apartment in San Francisco, a house in Napa, and a condominium in Palm Springs for the couple.
The design work on the Jack and Effie Potts home on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills consisted of detail work in the living room, and exterior work to the house and front gate.