I recently visited the Lummis House and brought a tripod so I could take some bracketed exposures to create HDR composite images using natural light in the interior. While much of the original contents of the house are gone, the current caretakers have tried to make the interior space have the familiar feel of walking into someone’s house without having to cordon off everything to the public. There is a sense of being in a living house with a table set for meals, a reading nook with a chair that looks inviting, and a piano with sheet music.
Charles Lummis built his house along the banks of the Arroyo Seco just north of downtown Los Angeles over a hundred years ago. The exterior walls are all made of rounded river stones from the nearby Arroyo Seco which adds the the rustic beauty of the American Craftsman design of the house. The remaining parcel of land the house is on has a portion of the sycamore tree grove that gave the house its name, El Alisal, for the trees it was built amongst.
The Lummis House is in Northeast Los Angeles along the Arroyo Seco river wash in the Mt. Washington and Highland Park neighborhoods. The Southwest Museum of the American Indian that Charles Lummis built is also nearby and easily reached from the 110 freeway and Metro Gold Line (there is a Southwest Museum station).
Timothy Dahlum 