Diane Keaton: actress, director, and restorer of two Lloyd Wright houses

There’s hardly any need to recall how Diane Keaton managed to define entire eras, leaving her unmistakable, enduring mark across countless creative fields. But it’s worth remembering that this extends to architecture as well.
The star of Annie Hall, The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give, was also the director of the music video for Heaven Is a Place on Earth – an 80s glitter-pop classic – as well as an episode of Twin Peaks. She produced Elephant, a pivotal film about school shootings in the U.S. She championed styles that became iconic, masculine tailored suits as well as oversized hats.

And she was also a resident – and restorer – of more than one Los Angeles home designed by Lloyd Wright.

Nearly sharing a name with his historically cumbersome father, Lloyd Wright was the son of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of Fallingwater. A near contemporary of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, Lloyd inherited and reinterpreted much of his father’s architectural language throughout his career.

The perfect example is his 1928 Samuel-Novarro House in Los Feliz. Wright designed it for Louis Samuel, manager of Hollywood star Ramon Novarro, who soon discovered the house had been built through misappropriated funds, reclaimed it, and then quickly sold it. Over time, the home passed through many illustrious hands, from Leonard Bernstein in postwar years to Christina Ricci in the 2000s. But it was in 1988 that Keaton purchased and restored it with architect Josh Schweitzer. Quoting features from Wright-the-father’s “Mayan Revival” period, the Samuel-Novarro House embodies a dense, idiosyncratic Deco vocabulary rich with pre-colonial references: an atmosphere that Keaton and Schweitzer sought to revive, carefully reconstructing interiors that had been lost through decades of change.

After leaving Los Feliz in the mid-1990s, Keaton returned to Wright in 2007, this time acquiring another of his houses, designed in the 1950s in Rustic Canyon, within the Pacific Palisades: an area threatened by the wildfires of early 2025, the neighborhood is also home to several Case Study Houses, including the legendary Eames House. Originally built for composer Alfred Newman, this residence reinterprets more themes of Wright senior: the asymmetrical brick fireplace anchoring the living space recalls the cores of early 20th-century Prairie Houses, themselves echoes of Japanese tokonoma. Corner windows punctuate the rooms, while a continuous ribbon window on the upper floor frames the master suite that Keaton developed in the loft.

The Pacific Palisades house – another subtle link between Keaton and David Lynch, who also lived in a Lloyd Wright villa – returned to the market in mid-2025. Yet it would be wrong to call it “her last home”. Keaton never stopped experimenting with the spaces she inhabited: from her first apartment on New York’s Upper West Side during the Annie Hall years, to her Los Angeles house curated through her own Pinterest boards, to the desert experience of her home in Phoenix’s Barrio Viejo. An eclecticism long rooted in Los Angeles, and in that volcanic creative energy best captured, in the words of Keaton’s unforgettable alter ego: “La dee dah. La La.”

Opening image: Lloyd Wright's Samuel-Novarro House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. Photo By Stilfehler - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons