Amazing Grace: The Architecture of Paul Revere Williams

From the 1920s to the early 1940s, post-Gold Rush and between the two World Wars, as the Great Migration pushed westward, California was developing its modern identity. Hollywood, as we know it today, was born, and rural areas and wilderness gave way to cities and industry. Nineteen-twenties Los Angeles was a boom town with a hunger for new and different kinds of buildings. Although it was an opportune time to launch an architectural practice there were many challenges for Williams to overcome as a young Black architect. Large well-established firms received the bulk of the city’s commercial commissions while most of the residential commissions were given to architects with social connections. However, working for Austin had not only provided the young architect with invaluable experience but proved to be fortuitous in other ways when in 1922 Austin passed along to him a $100,000 commission for a house in Hancock Park as a starter job.[i] Since Williams had never been in a home that cost more than $10,000 to build, Austin sent him to Montecito to visit some of the large homes he had designed there.

That Williams was a gentle, gracious man, well-liked by classmates, colleagues, and employers alike, is underscored not only by Austin’s referral but by a commission in 1922 from his former classmate Louis Cass, who was one of the original underwriters of the Automobile Club of Southern California, to design his house in the new community of Flintridge. In addition to these two projects, Williams had obtained over half a dozen residential commissions, including three other homes in Flintridge and one in West Los Angeles by the time he opened his own office.

The home Williams designed for Cass was in the English Tudor style complete with stucco and half-timbering and was characteristic of the architect’s early designs, which were traditional in nature. Williams had learned the importance of a carefully organized and functional floor plan from working with both Austin and Johnson and for the Cass residence he broke down the mass of the home by creating central halls and distributing the rooms off the halls in a picturesque manner. Williams knew that he couldn’t rely solely on his talent and became adept at networking and establishing social and business connections. Many of Williams’s early clients came to him on the recommendation of his former employers while others learned about him from a two-part 1923 article in California Southland about the John B. Browne house in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. The article, which referred to Williams as a “rising young architect,” reveals that Browne, on the recommendation of the real estate editor of the Los Angeles Times, approached the architect with ideas about the house he wanted to build on a hilltop site.[ii] Like the Cass House, the John B. Browne House was English in style and featured an artful yet functional floor plan.

By the end of the 1920s, Williams had established himself as skillful sophisticated designer of homes for the upper-middle class and the wealthy, which were mainly located in what were then suburbs of L.A., including Flintridge, Beverly Hills, the Pacific Palisades, and Pasadena. The influence of both the residential work of his former employer Johnson and of buildings he had been exposed to in his drawing classes at the Beaux-Arts Institute is evident in these early projects. Most of his clients wanted large homes and Williams took inspiration from the manor houses of the English countryside and the chateaux of France. While the massing and the materials he used—stucco, brick, stone, and half-timbering—are drawn from these European precedents, Williams frequently stripped away extraneous details on both exterior and interior, creating a simplified, more modern version of the traditional styles of the past.

He was also sensitive to his clients’ desire for privacy and sited his homes back from the street, with landscaped lawns and gardens in front. The rear facades of his buildings were more open and featured larger windows than the main facades and he often introducing splayed floor plans that embraced gardens and pools in the rear and provided the indoor-outdoor living that had become an integral part of the California lifestyle. Williams was talented at introducing light into interiors by using clerestories, French doors, and large windows that sat low to the floor. While his homes were large, they were never ostentatious, and his elegant interiors featured gracious entry halls that accommodated and welcomed the guests his clients would be entertaining. Williams accentuated his spacious foyers with what would become one of his signature design elements: a graceful, curved staircase that led to the second floor. His living rooms were often entered by descending a few steps off the entry hall and, while large, fireplaces lent them a comfortable, even cozy, feeling. It is remarkable that at such a relatively young age, Williams was designing homes that were so refined and resolved.

There was a lot of money and a lot of land in Los Angeles in the pre-war years, and Williams’s architect peers—his former employer Reginald Johnson, Wallace Neff, Roland Coate, and H. Roy Kelley—were also receiving commissions for homes in the growing city’s affluent neighborhoods. However, unlike his peers, Williams was designing homes for neighborhoods in which he, a Black man, could not live. The mid-city neighborhood of Hancock Park was established in the 1920s and although Williams received a series of commissions there, due to a restrictive covenant, like those governing other areas at the time, he couldn’t have built his own home there.

It is striking that these wealthy clients engaged a Black architect during this period and David Gebhard has suggested that they sought him out not only because they admired his work but possibly because hiring him would demonstrate their liberal values and support of racial equality.[iii] Ingalil Wahlroos-Ritter, a Los Angeles architect and former dean of the architecture school at Woodbury University, has pointed out that “it was the non-conformist strain of Hollywood, filled with creative, self-made people willing to take risks, [that] opened the door for Williams’s career.”[iv]

One such client was the actor Lon Chaney, Sr. Known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Chaney commissioned Williams to design two projects. The first was a cabin in the John Muir Wilderness, outside Big Pine, California (1929-30), and the second was a large home in Beverly Hills for him and his second wife Hazel in 1930. The Beverly Hills house, which hasn’t been written about but which I was recently fortunate enough to visit, is a rectangular volume clad in white-washed brick. Set back from the street, a red brick walkway steps up a gentle hill to the front door, which is inset in a pared-down Neoclassical stone frame. Williams employed other abstracted or stripped-down Neoclassical details on the home’s façade, including a frieze that runs the length of the main volume, delineating the home’s two stories. Although the home is large, Williams’s use of white-painted brick capped by a red tile roof lends it an air of modesty as do his simplified details. A low wall in white brick is capped with red brick to match the walkway and gives the house increased separation from the street below. The home’s entry hall, which has arched openings supported by Corinthian columns, is the grandest space in the house yet, as was typical with the architect’s work, it is neither ostentatious nor showy. The dark-paneled wood floor and beamed ceiling give it an almost rustic feeling. One of Williams’s beautiful staircases leads to the second floor. A wider archway to the right of the entry hall opens to the living room, which also has a beamed ceiling. Large windows punctuate the room’s side and front walls and French doors open to a covered outdoor terrace and the garden and pool beyond. A fireplace with a classical stone surround sits between the windows on the front wall.

Chaney was a very private man and he asked Williams to design a library/office for him off the entry hall. The room is cocoon-like, with hand-carved wood paneling wrapping around it. Its fireplace, capped by a triangular copper hood, adds to the cozy yet masculine feeling of the room. Because the house was built during Prohibition, Williams designed a bookcase that slides open to reveal a bar. To give the house a graceful open feeling, the architect used arched openings throughout. A shallow rounded arch encloses the tub in the master bathroom, which also features a faux window of five pieces of etched and reverse-painted glass, lit from reverse, that is set behind the tub. Sadly, Chaney passed away just before the home was completed and his widow was so grief-stricken that she put it up for sale immediately.

Fortunately, this beautiful home, and it should be noted that Williams referred to all his residential buildings as “homes” rather than “houses,” has a happy ending. In 1976, a young couple with several children moved into the home. Growing up there had a great impact on one of their daughters, who was ten years old when her parents bought the house. As an adult she knew that she wanted to live there again and when the house came on the market, she and her husband were able to buy it. They have since undertaken a major renovation, restoring the home’s original detailing, including replicating the wood paneling in the library, locating and restoring the fireplace’s copper hood to its rightful place, and stripping paint from the entry hall’s elegant columns. In a stroke of good luck, or genius, her mother had left the home’s original plans in a secret closet in the living room.

Entrepreneurial types, of which there were many in Los Angeles at the time, also gravitated to Williams when they needed an architect. E. L. Cord, an auto magnate, commissioned Williams to design a 32,000-square-foot home in Beverly Hills in 1930. Over time, the architect designed more than 300 homes and businesses in Beverly Hills. Early clients returned for larger homes or commercial buildings and the growth of Williams’s practice paralleled the fast-paced growth of Los Angeles. In 1932, ninety percent of Williams’s work was residential but by 1940, commercial projects accounted for sixty percent of his work.[v]

Because he was working with white clients, Williams developed several strategies to ensure that neither he nor they would be made uncomfortable when they were together. Most notably, he learned how to draw upside-down. This unusual skill enabled him to sketch ideas out for his clients who, because the norms of the day dictated that they not sit next to a Black man, sat opposite him at the desk or table. Not only was this a useful tool for Williams, but his clients found it most impressive. While on construction sites, Williams helped put clients and contractors at ease by walking with his hands clasped behind his back so that they wouldn’t be put in the awkward situation of wondering whether they should shake hands with him. While Williams developed these strategies out of necessity as a Black man operating in a white man’s world, they also demonstrate his sensitivity toward his clients, which was perhaps a greater factor in his success as an architect than any other attribute or skill he possessed.

Williams founded his practice on an approach that was client-driven and strongly believed that his success and value depended upon listening carefully to his clients and giving them what they wanted. He had to work without ego and could adapt to meet each client’s needs and demands. His respect for his clients, coupled with a shrewd business sense, meant that his practice was not limited in terms of either its range of clients or projects. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, before World War II, Williams received some of his most important non-residential commissions including the Music Corporation of America Building (1937), which he often cited as his favorite building, Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills (1939), and the Arrowhead Springs Hotel (1940).

[i] The project was likely the Frederick Leistikow House, completed by Williams in 1923. See Hudson, 19.

[ii] Ellen Leech, “Building for a California Hillside,” California Southland, October 1923, 23, and November 1923, 25; cited in David Gebhard, “Paul R. Williams and the Los Angeles Scene,” in Hudson, 21.

[iii] Gebhard in Hudson, 22.

[iv] Ingalil Wahlroos-Ritter, “Paul R. Williams: Beyond Style,” in Ireland, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, 125.

[v] Hudson, 14.