Millard House

About this property

The Millard House, commonly known as La Miniatura, is a house at 645 Prospect Crescent in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, California, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it was completed in 1924 for the rare-book dealer Alice Millard. The house was the first of four concrete textile block houses that Wright designed in Greater Los Angeles in the 1920s, the others being the Samuel Freeman House, the Storer House, and the Ennis House. It was Wright's second design for Millard's family, after the George Madison Millard House in Illinois. La Miniatura is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a contributing property to the Prospect Historic District. The Millard House is a three-story structure with a detached garage, which sits on an arroyo with a ravine at the bottom. It has two entrances: a pedestrian entrance on the first story, facing Rosemont Avenue to the west, and a vehicular entrance on the second story, facing Prospect Crescent to the east. The water table of the facade is made of stucco, while the rest of the house is clad in concrete textile blocks, which are engraved with cross-shaped motifs. Inside, the house has 4,230 square feet (393 m2) of space, with a floor plan shaped like two overlapping squares. There is a dining room on the first floor, a living room on the second floor, and bedrooms on all three floors. Wood, plaster, and concrete are used as decorations throughout the house, and there are balconies in the living room and the topmost bedroom. Millard bought the site in 1923, several years after moving to Pasadena, and rehired Wright to design her new house. A. C. Parlee received the general contract to build the house in March 1923, but Parlee quit partway through construction, leaving Wright and Millard to complete the house themselves. The house was finished c. April 1924, and Millard used the house to sell and exhibit her collection of old books and other objects. Wright's son Lloyd designed a gallery to the north of La Miniatura in 1926, and Millard hosted various public exhibits in the gallery and her house over the next decade. After Millard died in 1938, the Daniels family owned the house for six decades. The television producer Barry Sloane bought the house in 1998 and renovated it for several million dollars. Sloane placed the house for sale in 2008, though it was not sold until 2015, when an anonymous Chinese couple bought it.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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