Montecito Apartments

The Montecito Apartments is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Marcus P. Miller and built between 1930 and 1931, for a reported $1.00 million dollars, in Los Angeles, CA.

Its precise street address is 6650 Franklin Avenue, Los Angeles, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The Montecito Apartments is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Los Angeles and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Montecito Apartments was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on July 18^th 1985.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1984.

Marcus P. Miller was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

Marcus P. Miller was in charge of the architectural design, however, architecture is a complex discipline, which usually involves many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Montecito Apartments a reality:

• S.M. Baruch Corporation as the Main Contractor
• Cherokee Properties, Ltd as the Main Developer

The Montecito Apartments can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Montecito Apartments was completed in 1931, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Montecito Apartments uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is non-load bearing either, as it is common in frame structure type buildings.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features rustic concrete panels placed between vertical pillars of the same material and flat metal windows. At the height of the second floor, large decorative panels with Maya motifs, made of cast and molded concrete, are attached to each pillar. The main entrance, at ground level, is clad with black granite slabs .

Other materials found at the Montecito Apartments include, bronze, used for the double front door, cast iron, used in the canopy located above the entrance door and adorned with large lamps, copper, found in the roof of the penthouse, plaster, is used in interior walls and ceilings, and decorative tiles, used in bathroom floors.