The Story
Aaron G. Green FAIA drew the Judge and Jeannie Anderson Residence in 1959, the last year of the decade he spent as Frank Lloyd Wright's West Coast representative and the year Wright died. The plan is a V under sharply gabled roofs that read as floating above the rooms, and it sorts the house cleanly. A deeply recessed entry puts the bedroom wing to the left and the living room, dining room and kitchen to the right. Two guest bedrooms and both baths face a Japanese garden. The primary takes the ocean instead, a wall of windows and two monumental glass doors beside a quarried stone fireplace. The kitchen was built as fine furniture and sits among the built-ins rather than apart from them. From the central dining area the floor steps down into a sunken living room that still carries its original built-in seating and Green's own furniture, a massive stone fireplace at one end and mitered corner glass at the other, which is to say no post at all between the room and the Pacific.
The land is the other half of the argument: nearly three and a half oceanfront acres, with the Pacific, Abalone Cove and Catalina in view. House Beautiful published the house in October 1963 with text by Curtis Besinger, and Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank's grandson, oversaw the 2003 bath and pool work. The listing calls it one of Green's finest works and an almost entirely intact example of his Organic Modernism, which is the harder claim to make and the one worth checking on the walk through: sixty-seven years on, the house is essentially what he drew.
