In January 1923, Frank Lloyd Wright moved into an office at 8228 Fountain Ave in what is now West Hollywood. He had finished one house in Los Angeles, for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. He would soon be working on four more, as well as an ambitious project called Doheny Ranch, a subdivision of 25 houses in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Los Angeles was booming; the city's population, 577,000 in 1920, would reach 1.2 million by the end of the decade. At 55, Wright – a man whose life and career had been intimately bound up with the American Midwest, and Chicago in particular – was ready to reinvent himself as a West Coast architect.

MCT