Mike Kobeissi on Reading a Myron Hunt House

Mike Kobeissi’s October 2026 essay on his Blogger channel argues that a Myron Hunt house should be judged by its plan and by how it meets its land, and that an owner should guard those two things ahead of any original fixture.

The author starts just inside the door of an older Flintridge house and stays put for a minute before examining any detail. His point is that the sequence of rooms reveals more about a Hunt design than tile or hinges can, and that visitors who hurry toward the kitchen miss what matters. As evidence, the essay cites the Occidental College campus plan and the Rose Bowl. The Los Angeles Conservancy records that Hunt modeled the stadium on classical Greek and Roman theaters, that it opened in 1922, and that it became a National Historic Landmark in 1987.² His Occidental drawings still draw researchers: a choreographer who studied them in the college’s Special Collections built an outdoor performance that moved through the quad, a hillside theater and a fountain.⁴

The walk through the house

Indoors, the author hunts for one unbroken sightline that carries the eye past the principal rooms toward planting, paving or a framed patch of hillside. Living and dining rooms flank that axis, with the staircase placed in view yet clear of it. A partition added decades later, a doorway made narrower or a family room laid across the back garden each cuts the axis Hunt intended.

Then he heads back out to retrace the arrival: the street, the bend in the driveway, the climb to the entrance. On a sloping lot, the strongest houses of the period step down with the grade, their terraces extending the ground floor out level with the garden. A swimming pool sunk in the wrong spot, a raised second story or a broadened driveway can undo that fit within months. Inside again, he notes that living rooms were set for late sun and sleeping rooms for early light, and that an oddly placed window usually answers to something outside. French doors and loggias tend to be the earliest casualties of later owners.

Attribution and what to keep

The essay holds that a house counts as Hunt’s work when original plans, permit files or a named archive document it, and it warns that famous names drift onto houses they never touched. Such archives exist. The Hunt and Chambers records at UC Santa Barbara hold photographs, drawings, contracts and correspondence from the firm Hunt formed with Harold Chambers in 1920,¹ including its photographs of the Flintridge Biltmore Hotel, dated 1926 to 1927.³ When presenting such a house, the author says he claims nothing the documents cannot back, since a buyer who catches one inflated claim doubts everything else.

He grants that restoration purists may disagree, yet he ranks the plan and the bond between house and land above surviving hardware, because a craftsman can copy a fixture while an enclosed terrace or a walled view seldom returns. Before any remodel he suggests walking the house as it was meant to be walked, and he sends owners to their own design professionals for decisions about a particular property. His closing lines set the two layers side by side, with the fixtures dating the latest update and the plan recording the house its architect had in mind.