Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today’s bike club ride was yet another architecture tour. I’d gotten a link to an article on Zillow about modern-style houses that are for sale, and one of them was a house in Altadena that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. I’d heard of other houses he’d built in the L.A. area, so I looked up where they were, and we had a theme for the ride. We’ve done the “Five Wrights” route before, so this is sort of a companion piece to that.

The route was basically a combination of the old Toluca Lake route and the Mt Hollywood route through Griffith Park. We rode out by way of South Pasadena, then over the L.A. River and into Los Feliz. The first house was the Farrell House on Lowry Rd. We’d been by there before, but never noticed it. So we stopped and had a look. It had some stylistic elements that were reminiscent of the “textile block” houses that Frank Lloyd Wright designed.

The second house was the Sowden House on Franklin Ave. We’ve seen this one before, but never looked at it in any detail. This one looks like a Mayan temple, much like the famous Ennis House.

After that, we rode up into Griffith Park and stopped for snacks at The Trails. We found a table in the sun, and it was quite pleasant. Then we continued on up the hill and down the other side of the park. We rode past Travel Town and then across Glendale.

One the way up the long hill on Verdugo Rd, we passed a group of trees that someone decorates every year. Then we rode up our old favorite, Hospital Hill. At the top, I noticed the sign on the cross street. When you wish upon a hill…

We rode down through La Cañada and into Altadena. The last house was the Dorlan House, and like the others, it’s right by where we’ve ridden by a hundred times, but we’d never noticed it before. It had a nice modern and sleek style to it. And it turned out that when Carla was house-hunting, she’d been to an open house there, so she was able to describe the inside to us.

All in all, it was a good architecture-geek ride.

45 miles.