Houses of Los Angeles

TITLES

Urban Domestic Architecture

Houses of Los Angeles, 1885–1919

By Sam Watters

9 x 12 inches, 368 p.p.,

Over 400 color and duotone photographs, landscape and floor plans,

3 double gatefolds

Cloth, dust jacket.

ISBN-10: 0-926494-30-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-926494-30-5 •$89.00

October 2007

Independent in spirit and rich in natural beauty, Los Angeles has defied the American imagination since the 1880s. Built to fulfill the American dream that everyone is entitled to a house of their own, Los Angeles developed as a city of residential, single-family neighborhoods spreading from the orange groves of Pasadena to the beaches of Malibu, interconnected by world-famous boulevards—Santa Monica, Wilshire, Sunset and Olympic.

With houses ranging from the woodsy bungalows of Greene & Greene to the shining glass pavilions of Richard Neutra—with private golf courses, riding rinks, zoos and observatories—Los Angeles has become a city whose houses reflect the broad diversity of its 10 million citizens.

Houses of Los Angeles, 1885-1919, the first of two volumes, profiles 38 of the early Los Angeles houses with over 400 archival color and duotone photographs and landscape and floor plans. Here are the Moorish villas, French Chateaux and Japanese palaces of the city's founders—Arthur Letts, Leslie C. Brand, William Andrews Clark Jr., Henry E. Huntington—who first defined "home" in a landscape of Mexican ranchos and Spanish Missions.

"Sam Watters shows L.A.'s architectural history in all its resplendent, unhinged opulence...from the first moguls' Moorish villas, French chateaux and emperor's palaces, to the beginnings of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills." —Black Book

"... a must-have for Angelenos..." —House Beautiful

"Sam Watters... pulled together contemporary photographs and floor plans into a fascinating series of narratives."

— Palm Beach Post