Millard House (Pasadena, California)
The Millard House, commonly known as La Miniatura, is a house at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it was completed in 1924 for the rare-book dealer Alice Millard. The house was the first of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, the others being the Samuel Freeman House, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. It was Wright's second design for Millard's family, after the George Madison Millard House in Illinois. La Miniatura is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a contributing property to the Prospect Historic District.
The Millard House is a three-story structure with a detached garage, which sits on an arroyo with a ravine at the bottom. It has two entrances: a pedestrian entrance through the first story, facing Rosemont Avenue to the west, and a vehicular entrance at the second story, facing Prospect Crescent to the east. The water table of the facade is made of stucco, while the rest of the house is clad in concrete textile blocks, which are engraved with cross-shaped motifs. Inside, the house has of space, with a floor plan shaped like two overlapping squares. There is a dining room on the first floor, a living room on the second floor, and bedrooms on all three floors. Wood, plaster, and concrete are used as decorations throughout the house, and there are balconies in the living room and the topmost bedroom.
Millard bought the site in 1923, several years after moving to Pasadena, and rehired Wright to design her new house. A. C. Parlee received the general contract to build the house in March 1923, but Parlee quit partway through construction, leaving Wright and Millard to complete the house themselves. The house was finished around April 1924, and Millard used the house to sell and exhibit her collection of old books and other objects. Wright's son Lloyd designed a gallery to the north of La Miniatura in 1926, and Millard hosted various public exhibits in the gallery and her house over the next decade. After Millard died in 1938, the Daniels family owned the house for six decades. The television producer Barry Sloane bought the house in 1998 and renovated it for several million dollars. Sloane placed the house for sale in 2008, though it was not sold until 2015, when an anonymous Chinese couple bought it.
Site
The Millard House is located at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, United States. It occupies part of a pentagonal tract that faces east toward Prospect Crescent and west toward Rosemont Avenue. The original owner, the rare-book dealer Alice Millard, initially owned only the western portion of the tract before acquiring adjacent land in the 1920s and 1930s. The modern-day tract covers about.The Millard House was built in the Prospect Park subdivision of Pasadena and is a contributing property to the Prospect Historic District. The surrounding area includes houses in various styles, designed by architects such as Greene and Greene, Myron Hunt, and Wallace Neff. The Louise C. Bentz House, whose original owner had sold land to Millard, is immediately across Prospect Crescent to the east. Gartz Court at 745 North Pasadena Avenue is also located nearby, to the east.
The Prospect Park subdivision was parceled out in 1906. The house is located on an arroyo, a dry valley that turns into a waterway after rain. As such, its basement is prone to flash flooding. The Millard House's positioning contrasted with that of other buildings that the house's architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, which tended to be located atop hills. Wright had reportedly selected the site after seeing it from the top of a nearby hill where Millard had originally intended to build. To more closely associate the house with its site, Wright added a pond next to the house, within the arroyo.
Architecture
The Millard House or La Miniatura is one of eight buildings that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Storer House, 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, a rare-book dealing widow and a failed doctor." 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. In his later life, Wright sometimes referred to La Miniatura as his first Usonian house. One of Wright's biographers, Brendan Gill, wrote that the house's design was similar to contemporary designs by Le Corbusier.As built, the house has two entrances: a vehicular entrance from Prospect Crescent and a pedestrian entrance from Rosemont Avenue. The house occupies the far east side of the lot, where the arroyo slopes upward, to provide easier views of the house from Rosemont Avenue and vice versa. As such, Wright designed the house to cling to the lot's steep ravine, nestled among the trees. The main entrance is underneath the footbridge connecting the main house and a detached garage. A series of terraces outside the house descend into the ravine, and there is a garden and pool within the ravine. Next to the original building is a rectangular wood-frame gallery building, connected to La Miniatura by a footbridge. Originally known as the Doll's House, it was designed by Wright's son Lloyd Wright.
Exterior
The water table of the facade is made of stucco, while the rest of the house is clad in textile blocks. An early plan had also called for larger blocks measuring, which would have made them substantially heavier. Wright fabricated the house's concrete blocks using sand, gravel and minerals found on the property. By using roughly textured, earth-toned blocks, Wright sought to blend the house with the color and form of the trees and hillside, saying that the Millard House "belonged to the ground on which it stood". The textile blocks differ from those used in Wright's later textile-block houses. Whereas the other houses have steel reinforcing bars, the Millard House lacked such a feature; instead, the tiles were interlocked together. Steel bars are still used in the joints between each block. Another difference is that Wright reinforced the blocks using conventional mortar, while in the other houses, the blocks are fastened together using steel loops. The blocks on the house are laid in an undulating pattern.Many of the blocks are square units measuring across, but there are variants that measure one-half or one-quarter that size. Some of the half-sized blocks, measuring, are used around window and door openings, and some blocks of each type are perforated. An early plan had also called for larger blocks measuring, which would have made them substantially heavier. The blocks were created in wooden molds with patterns on the outside and smooth on the inside. The blocks feature a symmetrical cruciform pattern, with squares in each corner of a cross; this motif creates an interwoven pattern whenever several of the blocks are placed next to each other. Almost all of the blocks on the facade contain the cruciform motif; according to the historian Robert Sweeney, this served to de-emphasize the design details. It is not clear why this specific pattern was selected, although the Los Angeles Times cites a curator at Los Angeles County Museum of Art as saying that the motif may be an allusion to a pre-Columbian compass rose.
Compared with Wright's other work, the Millard House emphasized more of its vertical design details. According to the National Park Service, the emphasis on vertical details may have been an allusion to Alice Millard's occupation as a book dealer. The original plan called for perforated concrete blocks to be installed atop a window on the eastern elevation of the facade, but this was removed in the final design. Double-paned glass windows are installed between concrete piers on the facade. There are also stained glass windows created by the textile artist William Morris—a friend of Millard's—and the designer Edward Burne-Jones. The house includes a concrete frame for further reinforcement.
Interior
La Miniatura has an interior floor area of. The Los Angeles County website and some sources cite the residence as having three bedrooms and three bathrooms, while The Wall Street Journal cites it as having four bedrooms and four bathrooms. The house is three stories high, being arranged around a central core; including the roof terrace, the house has four levels. The floor plan is shaped roughly like two overlapping squares, which intersect in the core, and are placed along a grid of squares measuring 16 inches across, with joists hidden under the floor beams. Wood, plaster, and concrete are used as decorations throughout the house. Unlike Wright's other houses, in which he designed most or all of the furniture inside, Wright did not design much of La Miniatura's furniture, except for some living-room bookshelves.The house's garage and entrance are located on the eastern side of the building, facing Prospect Crescent. Due to the slope of the site, the main entrance is through the second floor, where the double-height living room is located. This arrangement is similar to the palazzo-style layout that Millard had admired, where the main rooms were on a piano nobile above the ground level. The second floor is accessed by a narrow entrance hall with a concrete floor, a plaster ceiling, and textile-block walls. The living room walls are composed of both plain and decorated textile blocks. The western wall has a screen of perforated blocks, facing the ravine; the perforations are infilled with small glass shards to keep water out. The living room is designed with a fireplace and balcony, the latter of which rests on a set of concrete beams supported by patterned textile-block piers. The ceiling spans high and is made of redwood beams. A pair of glass doors leads from the living room to a terrace, and there are glass transom windows above these doors. A sitting room leads off the living room.
On the first floor, there is a kitchen and a dining room opening onto a terrace. The dining room has a low ceiling and overlooks the pond next to it. The bedrooms are stacked on top of one another and are in the western section of the building, facing the ravine. There is one bedroom on all three floors; the bedroom on the first floor was initially intended for servants, while the second-floor bedroom was used as a guest room. The third floor contained Millard's bedroom with a balcony overlooking the living room and outdoor terrace. Millard's bedroom faces east and has a double-height ceiling, with a small balcony overlooking the room, similarly to the living room. The narrowest section of Millard's bedroom has a tall window facing the ravine to the west.