Product Description

Los Angeles Houses, 1920-1935 brings together house and garden plans with over 300 archival photographs of downtown residences and mountainside estates built by Hollywood celebrities and Los Angeles innovators including movie starts Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Marion Davies, David O. Selznick, Packard dealer Earle C. Anthony, Union Bank Chairman Ben R. Meyer and pioneer American Indian and Chinese art dealer Grace Nicholson.

The Los Angeles tradition of architectural innovation and unimagined luxuries private air fields, golf courses, beaches and water gardens continued with revivalist and modern residential designs evolving simultaneously. Gordon B. Kaufmann, Wallace Neff, and Roland E. Coate developed the contemporary Mediterranean villa and California adobe as Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra explored new building techniques and established Los Angeles as the center of American modernism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82928 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Released on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 396 pages

Review
Houses of Los Angeles documents many of the great heartbreak homes magnificent architecture and gardens built to blend with extraordinary natural settings, all destroyed by developers, city governments and an assortment of tycoons. --Los Angeles Times

In this two-volume set, Sam Watters documents a half-century of residential architecture - and a city emerging... Watters, who teaches at the University of Southern California, know his stuff... The Irving Thallberg house, Pickfair, the Joseph von Sternberg house are happily, ready for their close-ups. --Veranda

This beautiful double volume is an invaluable addition to the history of residential architecture in America, especially as it includes interior decorating details of the period, representative landscaping, and many fascinating architectural details. It is full of ideas for landscape designers, architects and decorators who are interested in how these imposing houses were furnished and how people once lived in them. --1stdibs.com

About the Author
Sam Watters was educated at Yale University, the University of Marseilles, and the Royal Herbarium at Kew. He is the editor of American Gardens, 1885-1935, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest Regions (Acanthus Press, 2006). He teaches at the architecture school of the University of Southern California.

Customer Reviews

CALIFORNIA DREAMING
As with all the books Acanthus Press puts out this one is fantastic. The images are crisp and beautifully executed and the text is well layed out and flows well. Los Angeles is graced with many elegant pre war mansions and this book showcases some of the best, although some of the houses picked are perplexing, and some omissions were shocking, like the Warner estate; but Greystone, Green Acres, and the Paley house are included and they are probably the most famous houses in L.A...I had wished to see more of Paul Williams work, I loved his California Regency houses, they are the very definition of the L.A. mansion, I guess his house for the Paley's will have to suffice. If you have an interest in Los Angeles, grand residental architecture, or just appreciate fine books, then I can't imagine you not loving this book. Yes, these books are expensive, but if any book is worth this amount of money, it's this one.

Houses of Los Angeles 1920-1935
This volume completes the two volume set. It is a superb book showing the golden age if residential architecture in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was an emerging meca in paradise during those years and architect had free reign to design structures in any style that had ever existed, plus creating some new and bold styles of their own. These books are a must for all architects, interior designers, landscape designers, historians and anyone interested in architecture and life style.

Well done
I bought the book for my husband for Christmas. He loves it. He is a native of Pasadena, California and has always loved the houses of this era. The history of each home is well done as well as the photography. Would love to see more books like this one to even include smaller, post WWII housing. They all have a unique style.