The Storer House is a residence at 8161 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles in California, United States. Designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the Mayan Revival style for the homeopathic physician John Storer, it was completed in 1924. The house is one of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, along with La Miniatura, the Ennis House, and the Freeman House. The Storer House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Storer House is a two-story structure with a T-shaped floor plan and sits on the slope of a hill. The exterior is built of concrete textile blocks, which are alternately plain in design or decorated with engraved patterns. The house is accessed by a series of terraces, which lead to five glass doors on the southern facade, separated by concrete piers. Inside, the house has approximately with three bedrooms, a den, and three bathrooms. The dining room and kitchen are on the lower level, while the living room is on the upper level. The other rooms occupy a separate, adjacent mass; two bedrooms and the bathroom occupy a mezzanine between the upper and lower levels, and the third bedroom and the den are in a basement under the mezzanine.
For the Storer House, Wright reused a set of plans that he had drawn for a family who ultimately hired another architect. A. C. Parlee was hired as the general contractor in late 1923 but was quickly replaced by Wright's son Lloyd. The house was formally completed in October 1924, and Storer sold it three years later. Over the next six decades, the Storer House passed through multiple owners and fell into a state of disrepair. The filmmaker Joel Silver bought the house in 1984 and spent up to $2 million renovating it, winning two awards for his restoration. Silver ultimately sold the house in 2002, and it was resold in 2015.
Site The Storer House is located at 8161 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles in California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the house sits on the side of a hill. Wright's nearly-contemporary Samuel Freeman House was also built on a hilltop site; the writer Robert C. Twombly wrote that this made the houses look "seemingly impenetrable" from the street. The site was originally part of a hilly parcel known as Cielo Vista Terrace, which was split into multiple lots in 1922; Aurele Vermeulen laid out the streets there around the same time. The house's original owner John Storer acquired an irregular pentagonal parcel just after Cielo Vista Terrace had been subdivided. Located nearby are the Stahl House to the west and Chateau Marmont to the southwest.
Architecture The Storer House is one of eight buildings that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Millard House (also known as La Miniatura), the Hollyhock House, the Ennis House, and the Freeman House. The Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer houses were the only four textile block houses he designed in Los Angeles. According to the writer Hugh Hart, "Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal." Few of his clients ended up commissioning textile-block designs, given the novelty of the construction method. As The New York Times later said: "Aside from the free-spirited oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, whom he fought with constantly, his motley clients included a jewelry salesman [Samuel Freeman], a rare-book dealing widow and a failed doctor [John Storer]." After designing the four textile-block houses, Wright went on to design various concrete-block buildings across the U.S., including Usonian houses made of "Usonian Automatic" blocks.
The Storer House is an example of Wright's pre-Columbian or early Modernist architecture. Wright was also intrigued by archaeological discoveries on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and used elements from Maya architecture and design in the Storer House. The four Southern California textile-block houses represented Wright's earliest uses of the exotic, monumental Maya forms. The architectural writer Paul Goldberger wrote that although the Storer House shared Mayan elements with the Hollyhock House, it also had vertical piers and large cornices in a similar manner to Wright's earlier Prairie-style homes. The layout was adapted from Wright's 1922 design for the Lowes family, who ultimately hired another architect to design them a house in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. Wright's original design for the Lowes family was supposed to have been made of stucco and wood, but this was changed to concrete when the plans were recycled for the Storer House's original owner, John Storer.
Exterior Due to the house's layout, it has five levels, despite being only three stories tall (the upper level of the house is a double-height space). (S.215) The plans are similar to those of the unbuilt Lowes House design, which called for a main house with a dining room and living room, two bedrooms in a separate wing, and a garage and kitchen extending off the house. As built, the main house is flanked by a one-story wing to the west and a two-car garage to the right.
Facade The typical block has square faces measuring across. Although each block is deep, the interiors of the blocks are hollow, meaning that the layer of concrete in each block is at most thick. Some of the blocks at the house's corners have two perpendicular faces measuring across, with a small hollow cavity, and other blocks measure across, with no cavity. Some of the blocks have three faces and are used on copings at the top of parapet walls. Unlike the later Ennis and Freeman houses, in which mortar joints are placed between the blocks, no mortar was used in the Storer House. Instead, the blocks had to be cut to precise dimensions and were separated by "reveals" that resembled joints. The blocks are fastened to each other using loops of steel and also contain steel rods. The "textile block" name is derived from how the rods are integrated with the blocks, giving them a knitted-together appearance. Wright's assistant Edgar Tafel also claimed that the blocks could be mass-produced, similar to factory-made items.
Wright used sledgehammers and aluminum molds to imprint elaborate Maya-inspired patterns into the blocks. The textile-block motifs were intended to blend the home's design into the hillside, in conformance with Wright's affinity for organic architecture. The house uses eleven block shapes, which are carved in four patterns. On blocks with multiple faces, all of these faces are decorated with recessed, concentric half-squares. The other patterns are used on the standard 16-by-16-inch squares and depict a convex motif, a patterned cruciform, or a group of three protruding rectangles. These designs were adapted from Wright's earlier Unity Temple and A. D. German Warehouse. Both the interior and exterior faces of the walls have engraved patterns. The textile blocks absorbed moisture easily and were prone to decay because of impurities that existed when the blocks were cast.
Terraces and entrances Wright included three exterior terraces in the Storer House's design, via which the house was to be accessed. Past the entrance gate (located south of the house), a flight of seven steps ascends to a terrace. Another flight of seven stairs extends off the right (north) side of the terrace, ascending to an upper terrace with a pool and fountain. The pool, added in a 1980s renovation, is surrounded by limestone blocks that resemble the design of the house's concrete blocks. Prior to the pool's construction, a sunken garden had been located there. The upper terrace is one story above the street.
The southern elevation of the facade has no conventional main door, but there is a series of vertical concrete piers, which divide the facade into five bays containing identical glass doors. Each bay contains a single glass pane. According to the writer Robert Sweeney, the second-leftmost door was supposed to be made of wood and serve as the main entrance. Since this detail was omitted from the final design, the westernmost door, directly in front of the exterior stairway, is used as the main entrance by default. One observer wrote that the house was laid out "as if to finalize the metaphor of privacy and retrenchment", while another writer said the lack of a front door was an example of Wright's predilection for entrances that were "secluded, mysterious, evoking our primitive ancestors finding shelter in a cave".
The north elevation of the house also has five bays, interspersed between concrete piers that are identical to those on the south elevation. Outside the northern elevation is a patio supported by a retaining wall, which in turn faces a hillside to the north.
Interior The house spans approximately with three bedrooms, a den, and three bathrooms, and is arranged on a T-shaped floor plan. The house occupies three separate, interconnected masses. The living and dining rooms occupy the T-shaped plan's stem, the kitchen extends off the dining room, and the bedrooms occupy the crossbar. The dining room and kitchen are on the lower level, while the living room is located on the upper level directly above the dining room. Two bedrooms and the bathroom occupy a mezzanine between the upper and lower levels, and the third bedroom and the den are in a basement directly below the mezzanine. The patterned blocks of the exterior are also used inside the house; for example, the patterned cruciform motif is used in partition screens, while the three-rectangle motif is used in the chimney.
Lower level and mezzanines
The rectangular dining room occupies the center of the lower level and is oriented with its longer axis running east–west., floor plans. The main entrance (in the second-westernmost bay of the south elevation) leads to the southwest corner of the dining room, where there is an entrance hall shaped like two juxtaposed squares. Similarly to Wright's other houses, the entrance hall has a low ceiling and leads to spaces with higher ceilings. The fireplace is asymmetrically placed near the dining room's north wall, directly facing the main entrance, and faces south. The dining room extends east from the fireplace and has a ceiling with exposed wooden beams, which connect the piers on the north and south elevations of the house. A square kitchen extends off the east side of the dining room; it includes green marble countertops with metal appliances.
On the west side of the dining room, a half-flight of stairs ascends to the bathroom, which is flanked by one bedroom on either side. The master bedroom abuts a wall of perforated concrete blocks, with a movable glass panel behind it. The bedrooms have ceiling beams which rest on concrete-block walls on opposite sides of each room. The stair continues up to the living room, wrapping around the fireplace and running behind a wall with perforated concrete blocks. Another stair next to the dining room descends to the basement.
Upper level On the upper level is a living room, which runs along the front elevation, facing the street. The ceiling of the living area measures high. There are columns, a double-height ceiling with redwood beams, and tall narrow windows on either wall. The ceiling beams run between the piers on the house's north and south elevations.