Paul R. Williams

Paul Revere Williams was born on the eighteenth of February 1894 at Los Angeles, the son of Chester Stanley Williams — a fruit seller of the Los Angeles produce market — and Lila Wright Williams. He was orphaned at four — both parents died of tuberculosis between 1896 and 1898 — and raised by foster parents at the Black district of late-nineteenth-century Los Angeles.

He was placed at the Polytechnic High School of Los Angeles, where the head of the architectural drawing department, Arthur Reardon, advised him not to enter architecture because no white client would hire a Black architect to design their home. Williams disregarded the advice and enrolled in 1912 at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and the Los Angeles branch of the New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, completing the Beaux-Arts certificate in 1915.

He took employment from 1916 to 1921 in the Los Angeles offices of Reginald Davis Johnson and John C. Austin — among the principal Los Angeles residential firms of the early-twentieth century. He passed the California architectural registration examination in 1921 — among the first Black licensed architects in the state — and opened his own Los Angeles practice in 1922.

He was elected in 1923 the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, and in 1957 the first African American fellow of the Institute.

He designed across the following fifty years over two thousand structures — including the homes of Lon Chaney (1928), Frank Sinatra (1956), Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (1953), Tyrone Power (1936), Bert Lahr, Bill Robinson and over thirty other principal motion-picture-industry figures of the Hollywood Golden Age — the West Beverly Hills mansion of Bert Lahr (1936), the Beverly Hills Hotel additions (1947), the Saks Fifth Avenue Beverly Hills (1938), and the Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport (1961, in collaboration with the firms of Pereira & Luckman and Welton Becket).

He was a registered architect of California, Tennessee, Washington, Nevada, and the District of Columbia at the time of his retirement in 1973.

He died at Los Angeles on the twenty-third of January 1980 of complications of diabetes, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the architect to the stars of the Hollywood Golden Age.