Earlier this summer, we took a long overdue family vacation to visit my younger daughter in Los Angeles. We had not been to LaLa Land since December 2020, when our trip was abruptly cut short by a Covid infection among our ranks. Luckily, this visit, though short, was infection-free, and though our son-in-law was unable to join us, a wonderful time was had by all. Here’s what we did –
Where we stayed
The best VRBO – A 3 bedroom, 2 bath home in Venice Beach, complete with piano, amazing CD collection, cook’s kitchen and a pool! Our hosts were warm, welcoming and just the best. If you’re interested, contact me for details.
What We Did
Aside from hanging at the VRBO, cooking, talking, laughing, reading, listening to music, and hosting a barbecue, we did quite a bit !
The thing about visiting a city to see friends or family is that you get to experience life as a local, and not a tourist. So we did the things our daughter does, and visited the places she loves. Plus a thing or two we discovered on our own the day we dropped her off at work.
We played tennis in Griffith Park
Hands down, my favorite activity outside the house. We met up with a friend of my daughter’s who is graciously teaching her to play tennis, and spend the morning hitting balls in Vermont Canyon, one of the loveliest tennis settings I’ve ever seen. It was hard to pull my eyes off those hills and blue sky to focus on the ball. Parking was easy, prices cheap, bathrooms and water nearby. What a wonderful urban oasis!
We Visited the Original Farmer’s Market
At 3rd and Fairfax, this landmark open-air marketplace has been around since 1934. It’s no substitute for LA’s real farmers markets, but a fun conglomeration of food vendors similar to Philly’s Reading Terminal Market or Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Shop for fish, meats or cheese,
pick out a hot sauce,
try a flight of pickles,
and enjoy some great people watching.
My favorite store there is Monsieur Marcel, a French Gourmet market and bistro.
I adore all things French. It was hard to contain myself around the Jean Dubost Laguiole cutlery
and french linens,
but I did. However, there was no such restraint at the cheese counter, where we picked up appetizers for our backyard barbecue.
Schindler House
While my younger daughter was working, we visited two architectural sites. Not that we planned it that way, but serendipitously these two turned out to be a great pair of sites to visit, both having been either designed or influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, and within easy driving distance of one another. When you add in the Farmers Market breakfast and a soul food lunch, it was a pretty perfect Los Angeles day.
The Schindler House is hidden on Kings Road in West Hollywood in a very residential area – look for signs for MAK Center for Art and Architecture, a Vienna-based museum that runs the site. Designed and built in 1922 by Rudolph M Schindler, an Austrian-born protege of Frank Lloyd Wright, the home was a mini-commune designed to house Schindler, his wife Pauline, and their friends, Clyde and Marion Chace.
Each individual had their own studio space, they shared the kitchen, gardens and patios, and each couple had a sleeping porch on the roof. (You can see an open porch up there on the roof.) The house was one of the first built in the Modernist Style, on a concrete slab with tilt up concrete slab walls, and incorporates Japanese elements, such as sliding screens, throughout.
Like Wright, Schindler built much of the furniture in the house. Though at present the home is mostly empty, photos of the place in its prime reveal it to have been a warm, welcoming and beautiful space.
We were invited to tag along with a UCLA MFA class tour, and learned a lot from the docent and teacher. (Made me want to go back to school…)
I found myself fascinated with the history of the house and the couples who lived there. Like all Utopian experiments, this one did not last long in its original iteration, though the home remained communal as friends and family came and went over the years. Seems like fodder for a great mini-series…
Hollyhock House
Hollyhock House, built between 1919-21 by Frank Lloyd Wright for oil-heiress, single mom and feminist Aline Barnsdall as part of a planned 26-acre arts complex, was Wright’s first Los Angeles commission and astonishingly, never completed. The building of the house was actually overseen by Schindler and by Wright’s son, as Wright was occupied in Japan at the time. There were massive cost overruns, and the house, like other Wright structures, looked great but functioned poorly. Barnsdall apparently never liked the house, ultimately donating the home and surrounding acreage to the city of Los Angeles in 1927.
Today the home is the centerpiece of a sprawling complex comprised of a museum and community art space atop a beautiful hilltop with views of Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood sign.
My favorite part of the house is the water feature that never worked – an outdoor fountain flowing into the living room in front of the fireplace!
The kitchen was classic Wright, and I loved it.
I wish we could have joined a docent tour, as I suspect there are more stories to hear about the commission, but that will be for another time.
We went to the beach
No visit to LA is complete without a visit to the Pacific Ocean, which we accessed at Will Rogers State Beach, just north of Santa Monica. Despite it being a holiday weekend, we easily found parking and a prime spot away from the crowds, but not so far that we couldn’t access the facilities, which were quite nice, and included varied and what looked like delicious food options. The winds were quiet enough that the girls played a game of Spite and Malice on the blanket, and then we all napped in the late afternoon sun.
Stay tuned for Part 2 …
