The Ennis House, located on Glendower Ave in the Los Feliz neighborhood, was designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1924 by his son, being the last and largest of Wright’s four “textile block” houses in the Los Angeles area. These houses are known for their stamped and perforated concrete blocks, which give a unique textural appearance both outside and inside.
Charles Ennis died in 1928, just a few years after the house was completed, and Mabel Ennis sold the property in 1936. The house went through several owners, including radio personality John Nesbitt, who hired Wright to renovate the property in 1940. Lloyd Wright converted a basement storage room into a billiard room and designed a pool for the north terrace.
By 2005, poor maintenance, earthquakes, and heavy rains had taken their toll on the Ennis House. The foundations and walls had begun to deteriorate, and the situation became so serious that the National Trust for Historic Preservation included the house on its 2005 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places. Work to stabilize and restore the house began in 2006, earning a Conservation Award in 2008.
Originally built for merchant Charles Ennis and his wife Mabel, the house and its annexes span over 6,000 square feet. They are constructed with more than 27,000 hand-made concrete blocks, using decomposed granite extracted from the site itself. The house’s unique appearance has made it a popular filming location for television and movies, including ‘The House on Haunted Hill‘ (1959), ‘Karate Kid III‘ (1989), the TV series ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘, ‘Black Rain‘ (1990), ‘The Thirteenth Floor‘ (1999), and ‘Blade Runner‘ (1982), where the house gained significant attention as the residence of Rick Deckard.
Impressed by the building’s exoticism, filmmakers recreated original elements of the Ennis House in the studio or drew inspiration from them in movies like ‘Predator 2‘ (1990) and several episodes of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation‘. After shooting the exterior scene on location for Blade Runner, the interior of Deckard’s apartment was created at Warner Studios. For ‘The Rocketeer‘ (1991), sections of the Ennis House were recreated in great detail on a studio set. On a smaller scale, molds of the relief ornamentation blocks’ tiles were used for the door frame of the Club Silencio in ‘Mulholland Drive‘ (2001). David Lynch also used the interiors of the Ennis House for some segments of the soap opera that appeared in ‘Twin Peaks‘.
The house was listed as one of the top ten houses of all time by the Los Angeles Times. It is currently a private residence and can only be viewed from the outside. Even so, its unique architecture can be appreciated from the outside.
