Sic transit

I ran across this old street footage of eastbound Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills on YouTube recently, complete with (original or fake?) puttering soundtrack.



I wish the film had continued down the Miracle Mile and into Mid-Wilshire, Westlake, and downtown Los Angeles. (I'll have to concoct the missing footage in my dreams—no problem for a dedicated sleeper like me!)

Note the intersection of Wilshire and Robertson (at approximately 1:46 to 1:52), where this lovely corner building, its shutters deployed against the midday sun, gracefully enhances the gently curving streetscape:



Not remembering having ever seen this building on Wilshire, I did a search of Google Earth and found that the lovely Spanish-style structure was replaced at some point by this piece of vapid, featureless junk:

Sick transit, indeed.

A jazz legacy in Beverly Hills

The Ella Fitzgerald estate on North Whitter Drive has just been listed at $14.995 million.

908 N. Whittier Drive, Beverly Hills.

Expect higher quality photos of the 5-bedroom 1929 Spanish revival house when the agent, Westside Estate Agency, adds the listing to its website.





After spending an afternoon in the backyard listening to birds, the First Lady of Jazz passed away here on June 15, 1996, at the age of 78.

Crime of the Week

Let me tell you about the nouveaux riches. They are different from you and me.

811 N. Linden Drive, Beverly Hills

I've driven by this 1988 "Tuscan-style" house in Beverly Hills many times and, admittedly, admired its commanding situation, on the raised triangular intersection of Linden and Whittier Drives.

Commanding position: the knoll at Linden and Whittier Drives.

But now that it's on the market (for $6.495 million—the listing is here), I've had a chance to see how its affluent owners (or tenants?) have been living. It's not pretty.

For starters, the entry hall is a crude, disproportionate affair that, with its tawdry furnishings, immediately sets an amateur, DIY tone and makes me suspect that the owners designed the place themselves with no input from a trained architect, much less any real knowledge of architectural precedent.

The carpeted staircase is fit for a suburban townhouse condo, and the cheap white glazed tile continues throughout major sections of the ground floor.

Drama-less DIY.

The downstairs space is confusingly laid out and contains rooms of dubious utility, not to mention appalling ugliness.

Bookless library? Knick-knack storage area? Stand-by-the-fireplace room?

Sooner or later, we run into this mysterious timber-ceilinged lair, the purpose of which can only be to further vex and annoy anyone with a love of architecture or interior design:

Office? Art studio? Torture chamber?

Continuing upstairs, the master bedroom is a vacant, ill-proportioned shell of a room with oppressively high ceilings made worse by the lack of crown molding—perhaps the most uncozy sleeping quarters I've ever seen. (I will spare you the several children's chambers.)

Wha happunnn?

And the façade, for all its imposing symmetry, is hardly more than an anemic affectation of a Tuscan villa.

Villa Pretensiosa.

Oranges and pomegranates in Beverly Hills

Stewart and Lynda Resnick are improving their splendid and historic estate at 9481 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

9481 Sunset Boulevard from the air.

Among other details, the project involved buying the two lots adjacent to their 1929 Beaux Arts mansion (already a done deal) and installing an extensive grove of mature orange trees as well as moving the entry gates. Landscape architect Mark Rios, partner at Rios Clementi Hale Studios and A. C. Martin Visiting Professor in Architectural Design at USC, is in charge of the landscaping.

The 16,000-plus-square-foot mansion, which looks a full generation older than its official 1928 date and could be by McKim, Mead and White, was designed by architect Francis Xavier Lourdou* for Dionicio Botiller and his wife, Francisca Bernard Botiller. Francisca was the daughter of Swiss immigrant businessman Jean Bernard and Susana Machado de Bernard (as a widow, Susana built the mansion at 845 South Lake Street in the West Adams district); Dionicio was a land-owner and (later) tax collector for Beverly Hills, according to his great-great-granddaughter. (I'm still piecing together the history of this estate, so any further info would be appreciated.)

The Resnick mansion with two adjacent properties, now part of the estate.

The Resnicks recently petitioned the Beverly Hills Planning Commission for a variance that would allow them to fence the entire property with new above-code (i.e. over six-foot) fencing replicating the existing historic fence, and to bring the new fence up to the property line instead of conforming to the mandated 36-inch setback.

The original fence will be replicated and extended across the entire streetfront.

The existing 17-foot gate posts will be removed to either end of the new, expanded estate, which measures a whopping 535 feet of prime Sunset Boulevard streetfront, and will be offset into the property to allow for "stacking" of automobiles entering and leaving the property so as not to block traffic. Happily, the house will remain open to view from the street, unlike so many foliage-shrouded Beverly Hills mansions.

New west-side driveway already poured.

The variance was granted by a thrilling 3-to-1 vote (some watch college football; I watch Planning Commission hearings). The complete blow-by-blow of the November 19 session includes an appearance by the formidable and forthright Lynda Resnick (allow time to load; it's item no. 3 on the agenda).

East-side driveway under construction.

So, you're may be asking, where did the money come from?

West façade.

The Resnicks, through their holding company, Roll International, are owners of Telefora florist delivery service, the Franklin Mint, Neptune Pacific shipping line, Fiji Water, and POM pomegranate juice, among other business interests. (See this interesting story on POM from The Guardian.)



Stewart Resnick, who worked his way through UCLA by washing windows, also owns major tracts of corporate farmland in California's Central Valley, including pistachios, almonds, lemons, oranges, and—of course—pomegranates.

The couple, near billionaires who have a liberal bent in both politics and charity, have donated tens of millions to philanthropic causes, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the Renzo Piano–designed Resnick Pavilion) and funds for a psychiatric hospital at UCLA and an energy institute at Cal Tech. Lynda is an occasional blogger on The Huffington Post.

A glimpse of elegance in the orange grove.

I have been in love with this house since I first saw it, 15 years ago. I would be quite content living in the stylish penthouse with its chic black awnings.

Best little penthouse in Beverly Hills.

*Not François Debeur-Voideau as originally reported.

Here's to recidivism

Like many of you, I've been following the interminable construction of the two rival mansions on Sunset Boulevard between Alpine and Rexford in Beverly Hills. They built the Empire State Building in 13 months (also in a Depression). What gives?

In poking around about the westernmost of these behemoths, the Wehba house, I found this curious press release from SCI-Arc, Downtown L.A's (literally) cutting-edge architecture school:

SCI-Arc Alumnus Brian Biglin Building a Versailles-inspired Project

The future Wehba residence, if he lives long enough.

If there are two words I never imagined seeing in the same sentence, it's "SCI-Arc" and "Versailles." SCI-Arc alums are better noted for their contributions to a makeshift architecture of last resort, like these two structures, by Jennifer Siegal and Armen Hogtanian, respectively:

Deconstructed double-wide, anyone?

"AIA citation."

The latter of these two, I was happy to discover, was slapped with an "AIA citation" . . . oh, wait, I guess that's good thing?

Although his work on Sunset Boulevard has far more in common with the American Beaux Arts tradition of McKim, Mead and White than it does with Versailles, Brian Biglin has returned to the real roots of architecture with the Wehba house.

And I notice from his bio, that he eschews any mention of his SCI-Arc past. Don't blame him much.