Ennis House

The Ennis House stands in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Charles and Mabel Ennis and completed in 1924 as the last and largest of four Los Angeles houses Wright built using his experimental textile-block construction system, in which patterned, precast concrete blocks were knit together with steel reinforcing rods to form both the structural walls and their decorative surface. The house's massive, fortress-like walls and repeated geometric block patterns drew comparisons to Maya and other pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture, an association Wright himself encouraged, and the building has since appeared in numerous films and television productions, including Blade Runner and House on Haunted Hill, often cast as an eerie or otherworldly setting. Decades of water intrusion through the porous concrete blocks, compounded by earthquake damage, brought the house to a state of serious structural distress by the early twenty-first century, prompting an extensive multi-year restoration funded partly through private philanthropy. It was included in 2019 among the eight Frank Lloyd Wright buildings inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.