Starting to Shine

The house is finally starting to shine. When we started work last Monday, there was one truck and a half of junk lying around, there were cobwebs in almost every corner of the house, one could barely see out the windows, and the floors hadn’t been scrubbed in years. We have not really begun, and it feels like the Calori House has taken its first deep breath in 30 years.

Here are a couple pictures of the living room, the windows, and my favorite part of the house, the gable window precipitating down the tile stairway.

The Alice Millard House

Some weeks ago, as I was doing research for the Calori House Project, I had the unique and singular pleasure of spending an afternoon, by myself, at one of the most important pieces of Modern Architecture ever built. That is, the Alice Millard House.

Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to build this house for Alice Millard, a famed book dealer of the time,  in 1924. At this time, FLW began experiencing with textile block houses, a style that would characterize his work in Southern California for the years to come. The idea behind the textile block (which are the brick-like mayan blocks that make up the house) was to use and integrate the materials naturally found in the plot of land to build the structure of the house. Namely, they would pull the sand from the ground, make the blocks on-site, and then use them to build the house. This eliminated the need to bring expensive materials from other locations that were not only not sustainable, but not native to the region; a very avant-guard concept for the time.

Frank Lloyd Wright had a very special affection for this little house… hence, he gave her the moniker, “La Miniatura” which directly translates to “the little thing” in Spanish. The name has been with the house ever since…

As an interesting piece of curiosa, La Miniatura was originally built for a little over $20,000, which at the time was considered a small fortune. A few years after the completion of the main house, Lloyd Wright Jr. was hired by Mrs Millard to build a studio addition to the house. Lloyd Wright integrated the same textile block pattern of his father into the annex, as well an open interaction between the natural beauty of the landscape and the interior of the living spaces.

This could be quite an overstatement, but The Alice Millard House very well may be one of the best preserved pieces of Modernism the world over. Here, some pictures I took during my visit.