Samuel Freeman House

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.

The Freeman House is located at 1962 Glencoe Way, a dead-end street in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the house is placed on the side of a hill. It occupies an irregular land lot sloping south toward the intersection of Franklin and Highland avenues, near Hollywood Boulevard. Wright's nearly-contemporary John Storer House and Ennis House were also built on hilltop sites; the writer Robert C. Twombly wrote that this made the houses look "seemingly impenetrable" from the street. The lot covers a total of 6,802 square feet (631.9 m²); the house occupies the northern corner of the lot.

Immediately to the south is the Hollywood United Methodist Church and the Villa Bonita apartment building. Additionally, Magic Castle and the Yamashiro Villa are located slightly farther to the west, and the Highland Towers Apartments is located to the east across Highland Avenue. The surrounding neighborhood also has houses designed by architects such as Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler (both proteges of Frank Lloyd Wright). The segment of Glencoe Way abutting the house was established in 1922, several years after the neighborhood was subdivided and just before the house was built. The street had not been paved when construction started.

The Freeman House is one of eight buildings that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles, alongside houses like the Millard House (La Miniatura), the Hollyhock House, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. The Ennis, Freeman, Millard, and Storer houses were the only textile block houses he designed in Los Angeles. According to the writer Hugh Hart, "Wright saw his Textile Block Method approach as an utterly modern, and democratic, expression of his organic architecture ideal." Few of his clients ended up commissioning textile-block designs, given the novelty of the construction method. As The New York Times later said: "Aside from the free-spirited oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, whom he fought with constantly, his motley clients included a jewelry salesman [Samuel Freeman], a rare-book dealing widow [Alice Millard] and a failed doctor [John Storer]."

The Freeman House's style has been characterized as a blend of Islamic and Maya architecture. After designing the four textile-block houses, Wright went on to design various concrete-block buildings across the U.S., including Usonian houses made of "Usonian Automatic" blocks. The architect Jeffrey Chusid stated that the house's design had to encapsulate "the clearest, most efficient expression of [Wright's] ideas" due to the limited space available.

The house's massing consists of a detached garage and an L-shaped house, the latter of which has a largely cubic form with mostly-square floor slabs. An open-air loggia originally connected the house and garage, though it was enclosed in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The exterior is made of 12,000 concrete textile blocks. The blocks are made of materials taken from the site, such as sand, which may have been the source of the blocks' buff-colored tint. The typical block has square faces measuring 16 by 16 inches (410 mm × 410 mm) across. Although each block is 4 inches (100 mm) deep, the interiors of the blocks are hollow, meaning that the layer of concrete in each block is at most 2 inches (51 mm) thick. Mortar joints are placed between the blocks, which are fastened to each other using loops of steel; the blocks also contain steel rods. The "textile block" name is derived by the fact that the steel rods are integrated with the blocks to give the facade a knitted-together appearance.