Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Mansion That Has Appeared in Blade Runner, Twin Peaks & Countless Hollywood Films


There are more than a few of us who’d enjoy the oppor­tu­ni­ty to live in a house that appears in Blade Run­ner; there are rather few of us who would val­ue that oppor­tu­ni­ty at $23 mil­lion, the ask­ing price giv­en in the 2019 Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video on Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 Ennis House above. Yet even beyond the Wright pedi­gree and the Blade Run­ner pres­tige, the house has also appeared in a host of oth­er films, a screen résumé that begins nine years after its con­struc­tion, when it made its screen debut as the man­sion of a lady auto tycoon in Michael Cur­tiz’s Female.

In the decades that fol­lowed, it went on to pro­vide set­tings for pic­tures — usu­al­ly genre pic­tures — like The House on Haunt­ed Hill, The Day of the Locust, The Replace­ment Killers, and Rush Hour. “The Ennis house appar­ent­ly tran­scends space and time,” says the nar­ra­tion of Thom Ander­sen’s doc­u­men­tary Los Ange­les Plays Itself. ” It could be fic­tion­al­ly locat­ed in Wash­ing­ton or Osa­ka. It could play an ancient vil­la, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry haunt­ed house, a con­tem­po­rary man­sion, a twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry apart­ment build­ing, or a twen­ty-sixth-cen­tu­ry sci­ence lab where Klaus Kin­s­ki invents time trav­el.”

The Ennis House soon became visu­al short­hand for the home of wealthy, flam­boy­ant­ly sin­is­ter B‑movie vil­lains. That makes all the more notable its use in Blade Run­ner (a film that made sev­er­al clichéd Los Ange­les loca­tions fresh again), which turns it into the tow­er where Deckard lives. Even the set-built inte­ri­or of his apart­ment uses the same Mayan-motif tiles as the house­’s famous con­crete-block exte­ri­or. But the real rooms of the Ennis House have also received plen­ty of screen time, not just in the movies but also on tele­vi­sion — and even tele­vi­sion-with­in-tele­vi­sion, in the case of Twin Peaks’  fic­tion­al soap opera Invi­ta­tion to Love.

As the last of Wright’s Mayan Revival hous­es, the Ennis House marks the end of his attempt to break into south­ern Cal­i­for­nia. The archi­tect him­self lat­er admit­ted that it had exceed­ed rea­son­able scale: “That’s what you do, you know, after you get going, and get going so far, that you get out of bounds,” he said. “I think the Ennis House was out of bounds for a con­crete-block house.” Like much of Wright’s work, it also proved bet­ter to pho­to­graph than inhab­it; despite its most recent and ambi­tious ren­o­va­tion being com­plet­ed just a few years ear­li­er, it end­ed up sell­ing for $5 mil­lion below ask­ing price. I appre­ci­ate Blade Run­ner as much as any­one, but $18 mil­lion is still more than I’d pay for a 40-minute walk to the sub­way.

Relat­ed con­tent:

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Dog­house, His Small­est Archi­tec­tur­al Cre­ation (1956)

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.





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