Hollyhock House

The hollyhock is everywhere once you start looking: pressed into decorative art stone, worked into stained glass, carried through textiles and furniture. It was Aline Barnsdall’s favourite flower, and Frank Lloyd Wright turned it into the house’s repeated signature rather than a simple ornament.

Designed for Barnsdall in Barnsdall Art Park, Hollyhock House is one of Wright’s most revealing California works. Its guided interiors let you get close to original Wright-designed fixtures, art glass and the central garden court that organises the house, showing how he adapted his ideas to Southern California rather than simply importing a Prairie-style template. That regional shift helped catalyse modern California architecture, with R.M. Schindler and Lloyd Wright among the collaborators who supervised completion.

Barnsdall donated the house and surrounding land to the City of Los Angeles in 1927. In July 2019, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of eight seminal works in “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright”.