Frank Lloyd Wright’s House on Haunted Hill

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Temple, the Ennis House, stands high on a ridge in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. The house was designed for Charles Ennis, a wealthy LA clothier. It's a unique structure, entirely built with interlocking pre-cast blocks of decomposed granite (from the building site) mixed with concrete and tied together with with steel rods and mortar. Completed in 1924, the building began to immediately fall apart - The lower sections of the structure cracked and buckled under the intense weight of the top heavy structure and the masonry began to crumble. Lloyd Wright's belief that "...a building should be of the hill" was happening in real time before everyone's eyes. In his defense, the great architect had wanted to pre-coat the interior of the blocks with tar pitch, but in the face of escalating costs and delays, that idea and many others were nixed by Ennis. Before it's completion, FLW walked off the project. His son, Lloyd Wright finished it. The crumbling blocks posed the biggest problem. An ill conceived sealant applied in the 30's would worsen matters - In an attempt to seal the masonry with a protective coating, the process instead allowed moisture to be trapped within the blocks thus speeding their decay. In spite of all the problems, the house remained liveable - it's overall look striking and through successive decades, never dated. In 1959, schlock movie producer/director William Castle used the Ennis House exterior to great effect in his film, The House On Haunted Hill. It was also used in (among others) Blade Runner, The Rocketeer and Twin Peaks. Among many bits of trivia associated with this house, it was reported that doomed 60's rock icon Jim Morrison, a great admirer of FLW, wanted to buy it.