1962 Glencoe Way, Los Angeles, California. County/parish: Los Angeles.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places October 14, 1971. NRIS 71000146.
1 contributing building.
The Samuel Freeman House (also known as the Samuel and Harriet Freeman House) is a house at 1962 Glencoe Way in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles in California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright with a mixture of Islamic and Maya architectural elements, it was completed in 1925 for the jewelry salesman Sam Freeman and his wife Harriet, a teacher. The house is the smallest of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, the others being La Miniatura, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. The Freeman House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and California Historical Landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Freeman House consists of an L-shaped structure with a detached garage, which sit on the slope of a hill. The exterior is built of 12,000 concrete textile blocks, which are alternately plain in design or decorated with engraved patterns. There are double-story corner windows and various terraces, including a rooftop terrace. Inside, the house has at least 2,500 square feet (230 m2) of space, split across two levels. It has an inverted floor plan, with a kitchen and a living–dining room on the upper level, as well as two bedrooms on the lower level. Wright's protege Rudolph Schindler designed most of the furniture, while Wright himself created some pieces. The house lacks a traditional foundation, instead being supported on textile-block retaining walls; the southern part of the house hangs above the hillside.
Sam and Harriet Freeman may have commissioned Wright to design the house after hearing about him through Harriet's sister. A new-building permit was issued in April 1924, and the structure was substantially completed in March 1925. The Freemans lived in the house for over a half-century, using it for avant-garde salons. After Sam died, Harriet donated the house in 1984 to the University of Southern California (USC), which tried to renovate it over the next four decades. The house had deteriorated over the years and was damaged further during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and restoration efforts proceeded slowly during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. USC sold the house in 2022 to the real-estate developer Richard Weintraub.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123859125