Louis DuPuget Millar, Architect [1877-1945]
Louis DuPuget Millar [†] was born in Monkstown in Ireland. His father was a successful architect in Dublin and sent his son to private schools and then to Trinity College from which Louis was graduated with a degree in engineering. In the then usual British manner he gained his architectural education as an apprentice in this case in his father's office.
After his marriage in 1906, he and his wife immigrated to the United States first settling in Riverside and then Los Angeles. He joined the Los Angeles firm of Jeffrey and Van Trees and became a registered architect in 1908. In 1911 he moved to Pasadena and opened his own office in partnership with George A. Clark, a local haberdasher turned architect. He also seems to have worked for the contractors Austin and Grable.
His first house in Pasadena was for E.J. Cheesewright, an interior designer and fellow-Britisher. It was vaguely Cotswold in design with rolled eaves edging a roof with shingles that imitated thatch. The interior of the house was thoroughly Arts and Crafts except that, unlike other Pasadena houses in that mode, it had no wainscoting. The walls were of painted plaster. The rooms were therefore brighter than most local Arts and Crafts work.
Millar had a real sense of style and with Clark and others, designed houses with a distinctly British look and often on or near the banks of the Arroyo Seco. He also remodeled a number of Victorian houses, the one at 535 Fremont Drive being a residence on an old pig farm in the Arroyo. Like other Millar designs it and its out-buildings have simulated thatched roofs.
† Lauren Bricker, Robert Winter, and Janet Tearnan, Single-Family Residential Architecture of the Arts and Crafts Period in Pasadena, 1895-1918, nomination document, 1998, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Washington, D.C.