Wright Chat

Is Ennis the first owner -followed by Brown, then Nesbitt? What is the history behind it? thanks

Ennis commissioned the work, John Nesbitt purchased the home in the late 30s - Lloyd supervised renovations for Nesbitt that included adding the swimming pool, Gus Brown was the final owner/caretaker. Nesbitt also commissioned an unbuilt project with Wright meant for the Pebble Beach/17 Mile Drive area of the Monterey peninsula.

Neighbors recommend that the Ennis House be sold to a private owner:

http://www.archpaper.com/news/2008_0317.htm

Thanks for the info. Bummer....I was hoping to Tour it when I go to CA sometime this year.

From the archpaper article:

"Originally under private ownership, the house was donated to the public in 1980 by its eighth owner, Gus Brown. . ."

This is incorrect, then ?

SDR

I was priviledged to tour the house in May 2007, just before the renovations were finished. Still the magnificence of the spaces rang true.
I believe the provenance of the house is Ennis, Nesbitt, Brown. I think it would be a shame if the house was to return to private hands. The elegance of Mr. Wright's design has already been compromised with the alterations by all of the owners. For example, a charming Japanese garden has been planted off of the bedroom wing-but Mr. Wright's intent seems to have been a level terrace, continuing the flooring in the hall and making the statement of the inside continuing outside and visa-versa. So little is known about this house and the other California projects. There was talk of starting the tours at the Hollyhock house just across the valley. This would seem to be able to respect the Ennis house neighbors, with the ability to provide scholarly access. I hope we all can see and learn more about the Ennis house.

The story of Ennis is long and difficult. It could fill a tome. Just itemizing the ways in which the original clients (most specifically Mabel Ennis, for whom FLW had some choice comments) altered the plans egregiously would break your heart. I wish someone like Joel Silver could be found to buy and restore it, but the cost of that would be prohibitive. As to the provenance, Ennis, Nesbitt and Brown were the only owners who did anything significant to the house, but there were owners between them. Nesbit was, I believe, the fourth, Gus the eighth.

I had the opportunity and privilege to photograph the house extensively, inside and out, Saturday. It will take time to prepare a piece for wrightinracine.com, but I will let you know when it is posted.

Mark Hertzberg

We visited Ennis several years ago when in LA and enjoyed the home! A lot of the photos make it look like a bank or dentist's office, i.e. rather institutional, and while it does have a monumental quality it's a very interesting house. It's one of those Wright houses that makes you think "I could live here!"

Hollyhock tours resumed. We were last in LA in October and the tours were up and running. They were only doing two tours a day, and it was hard to get accurate information about days and times, but the tour was great! We also did the tour several years ago; this one was more detailed, and much better. It's also quite a house!

We thought both houses were hard to photograph and much more delightful than we'd expected from other people's pictures. It's so great to have houses open to the public!

Public Tours of Hollyhock House
No reservation required.

Wednesday through Sunday
12:30, 1:30, 2:30 & 3:30 PM (Pacific)

$7 - General audiences
$3 - Students & Seniors
Free - Children under 12 (when accompanied by adult)
Tickets for tours can be purchased at the Municipal Art Gallery.
Closed on all major holidays
No photography is allowed during tours

There is no information on the Ennis House website to indicate whether tours are available at this time.

I went to see the Ennis house some years ago and arrived on a day when a movie was being shot. With a professional-looking camera around my neck, I had the run of the place for as long as I wanted.

I was simply astounded at the spatial qualities of this fantastic house. It has had bad press for years, starting at least from "In the Nature of Materials" which calls it "rather undomestic" if I recall. Don't believe it for a minute - it is one of the best!

Even with all the errors that were made at Mabel Ennis' insistence, it is a spatial masterpiece that takes your breathe away.

To hell with the NIMBYs – they knew this building was there when they bought their houses.

Grant Hildebrand waxes poetic when describing the Ennis interior spacial experience. He draws a comparison to the Coonley plan, while seeing more spacial variety (and unity) and an emphasis on diagonal views, including up-and-down ones, in Ennis. Tomorrow I'll post some of his text, and the section drawings that are unique to his book "The Wright Space."

SDR

Here is Mr Hildebrand's analysis of the Ennis house. I have omitted the photos which support the author's points in "The Wright Space"; the
reader here will instead exercise the imagination and (for those who have visited the house) memory, aided by reference to the plan and sections
from the book. "The Wright Space," ©1991 by the University of Washington Press. Architect and delineator William Hook created the illustrations.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Charles Ennis house is often considered the most overpowering of the California group. Certainly the blockwork, inside and out, is deployed with
an overwhelmingly elaborate textural richness, while the absence of eaves, one of the strongest symbols of protective haven, leaves it devoid
of that clue to domesticity. Yet the Ennis house is a building of enormous importance, one of the key buildings of Wright's career. It deserves a
more detailed spatial analysis than it has yet received.

Some moves have been made to offer exterior prospect conditions: both corners of the dining room have been opened with butted glazing like that
of the Freeman house; the french doors from the living room swing outward to a small balcony with a magnificent panoramic view; and the
loggia, a glazed reinterpretation of that of the Martin house of 1906, is a wonderfully open phenomenon with splendid views both north and south.

The manipulation of the interior, however, is the really creative aspect of the Ennis house. If we can shift our attention from the richness of the
solids to the configuration of the voids -- and admittedly, this is not easy -- we find that this house reintroduces Wright's mastery of the open plan
and interior prospect, and does so with a stunning virtuosity that includes the mature deployment of a powerful and heretofore unexplored spatial
characteristic.

Typically in Wright's houses after 1904 the entry has been architecturally suppressed -- hidden from immediate view, with a small, plain door
opening into a low, plain vestibule. At the Ennis house the whole entry configuration is so understated that it seems out of key. One enters via a
low and unimpressive door into a low and unimpressive entry hall, only 6 feet 8 inches from floor to ceiling. This hall offers no clue to the grandiose
scheme beyond it. To the left is a stair. Lacking other options, and drawn by the light above, one ascends it, turns right at the top (again for lack of
options), ascends two more steps and moves forward into the main floor spaces of the Ennis interior. Brendan Gill has described the entry
sequence to the Cheney house as "transforming the simple act of entering a building into a complex rite, with overtones of the sacred."20 This is
even more true of the Ennis house. The sense of sanctity is palpable, but the mood is primordial, recalling Rachel Levy's description of entries to
the Aurignacian caves:

... These defenses of twisting, often very narrow, always slippery corridors, along which the intruders groped their way, clinging to curtains
of stalactite, descending into chasms ... whose dimensions their tiny lamps could never have revealed ... and beyond these to desired recesses ...
to the painted hall with its rock-cut "throne," "a mystery desired and sought" as its discoverers describe it, "in an arcanum forbidden to the
profane." [1]

The entry to the Ennis house is as close to this experience as one can come in a twentieth-century American house on a sun-drenched California
hillside.






One arrives, then, at the main floor, and enters the stalactite-curtained richness of the loggia, which, as the plan reveals, is the conceptual basis
of the entire scheme, the river of space and light from which the other spaces, like eddying pools, depend. To left and right the loggia extends
for all of nineteen bays. So powerful is this space that one feels the need to step out of its velocity into one of those eddies; the first one available
is the living room.

This living room is fully 21 feet in height. [2] The moment one steps into it, the simple but enormously powerful axial prospect of the loggia is
replaced by something much more complicated.

To the west the living room opens to the dining space via the wonderful transition of the stair and the screen of columns. At the southeast corner
of the living room is the deep recess leading to Mrs. Ennis's bedroom suite; the upper part of the living room continues as a kind of deep
minstrel gallery over the bathroom of this suite. To the north is the rich opening through the colonnade into the loggia, with its complex vistas to
northeast and northwest, to sky, stairs, and the terminals of the loggia itself. The dining space shares all these vistas and looks back to and
across the entry stair as well, whose fenestration mirrors and is on axis with that of the dining space. This is some of the most splendid interior
prospect in Wright's career, perhaps in all architecture.

The living room fireplace, then, is not really in the living room but in the loggia, perhaps because this was the only location which could have given
it a lower ceiling. (Although at its present height of 13 feet 4 inches the ceiling is hardly low by Wright's usual standards, his original drawings of
this area show a very low ceiling indeed, at the height of the present loggia ceiling to east and west). Another reason for the odd fireplace
location may have been to encourage an understanding of the loggia as being a part of the living room. In this it is not very successful; the tall
intervening piers keep both fireplace and loggia distinct from the living room proper. (The early drawings convey the impression that the
relationship would have been more successful with the original lower ceiling, making the fireplace seem to lie within a more typically Wrightian
alcove.) But the fireplace succeeds in calling attention to fhe importance that the loggia seems to have had in Wright's mind -- for the loggia is the
key to the openness of the plan, and to almost all of its vista richness. Its open relationship to the major spaces is what determines many of the
vistas and a majority of the most interesting ones.


Living Room above, Dining Room below -- looking east


The loggia is also the key to a characteristic in these vista conditions that differentiates them from Wright's previous work. The plan arrangement of
the Ennis house is similar to Coonley. The important difference is that at the Coonley house the hallway was separate from the major spaces, while
at the Ennis house the hallway (loggia) and the major spaces are joined. This condition alone yields considerable spatial enrichment -- but more
can be said of it. Since the loggia lies to one side of the spaces it serves, views into or from it are on diagonal axes. Thus while at the Coonley
house there were tentative inferences of diagonal vistas, at Ennis these diagonal vistas are paramount. They are reinforced by the elevated floor
of the dining space, which yields upward and downward views rather than horizontal ones, and by the unprecedented variety of ceiling heights. The
high glazing in the loggia north and south of the fireplace has a similar effect, as does the upward view to the "minstrel gallery" of the living
room.

The diagonal vistas of the Ennis house also increase the characteristic of complexity, since vistas open not only in orthogonal directions but in all
directions, thereby teasing our tendencies to seek further variations of experience stimuli. And this leads to a consideration of other complexities
of the Ennis house: the changing floor and ceiling elevations, much more varied than is usual even for Wright; the changing textures of the blocks;
and above all the ever-shifting quality of the light, from the brilliance of the loggia to the gloom of the entry stair and the kitchen hall. All this is
held in control by ordering elements of enormous power. Most obvious of these is the reiterated and absolute module of the blocks themselves,
which ensures modular relationships of all other surfaces. The piers of the loggia also establish a forceful rhythm, and since the loggia opens to all
contiguous spaces, that rhythm informs them as well. And the exotic Mayan-Palladian window motif, a large central panel of leaded glass
flanked by lower narrow panels, is repeated at five key locations: dining space, living space, entry hall, and both main floor bedrooms. The dining
and entry windows, furthermore, lie exactly on axis with one another and each is visible from the other through the open stair colonnade. These
characteristics speak to our fundamental predilections for ordered complexity.

The spatial organization of the Ennis house marks another development, for it introduces yet another condition of fundamental human appeal that
of mystery.

In Wright's work generally, there is a sense that spaces lie beyond spaces. This is true even as early as the Heurtley house, since the entry
stair and dining room are both visible through, but set off by, the screen of columns that articulates the seam between them. At the Cheney house
this same phenomenon occurs through a similar instance of interior prospect: one sees spaces beyond spaces.

At the Coonley house, largely because of its horizontal extension, this characteristic is exaggerated, but is also slightly different. For there, in a
modest way, the zigzags of the corridor system create a condition in which one is aware that there is a more distant space, but unlike the
Heurtley and Cheney houses, one cannot precisely see into it without moving toward and into it. Thus, if more information about that sensed but
unseen space is sought, it cannot be had without investigation.

_____________________________________________________________

[1] Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 11.

[2] The present ceilings throughout are flat with a dark exposed wood structure. Wright's original draswings show sloped ceilings not unlike
those of Hollyhock House, which would jhave yielded a quite different mood. Virginia Ernst Kazor believes Mr Ennis ordered the change against
Wright's wishes. [The author] is grateful to her for this and much other information on the California group [of Wright's houses].

Wonder if anyone knows how to contact the Ennis House "caretakers?"
In response to the NIMBYs, I wonder if it would be practical to install a tram, ala the Getty, to take visitors up the hillside rather that have them drive or be bused up the road?