Crime of the Week

This current listing on the Coldwell Banker site speaks for itself.


If anyone is interested in "This Beautiful House" in East L.A., the complete listing can be found here.

Lovely to look at

Just three doors west of the horror on Holly Mont that I blogged about a few days ago, this 4-bedroom 1928 Mediterranean is the nicest house on the block by far. And it's for sale. The current asking price is $1.687 million and from what I can see from the street, it's worth every penny.

6235 Holly Mont Drive, Hollywood

If the owner of the blighted manse down the street wants a lesson in upkeep, let him unchain his front gate and take a short walk west to study how it's properly done.

Responsible upkeep in action

I don't know the present owners or the circumstances of the sale (the house last changed hands in February 2007 for $1.547 million), but kudos are due to them for maintaining this piece of old Hollywood with the love and care it deserves.

Crime of the Week

This rambling Spanish Revival house at 6215 Holly Mont Drive in Hollywood is said to be the former home of Barbara Stanwyck. Since Stanwyck's residency, the place has taken quite a tumble.

An old pile on Holly Mont Drive, Hollywood

The house could be quite charming, even spectacular, if brought back to its original standards. Alas, it is currently a shambles, and the present owner—an international concert pianist, former child prodigy, spiritual recluse, and ping pong enthusiast (I'm not joking, folks)—seems bent on even further vulgarization.

Vulgarization in progress

In addition to various masts, flags, aerials, strings of lights, untrimmed palms, grates, chains, padlocks, metal fences, grass windscreens, and makeshift rooftop cabanas, he has recently installed a haphazard hodge-podge of cheap knock-off statues in front of the once-proud house. One expects self-indulgent follies in Hollywood, but this mess is completely without style.

"Sculpture garden"

The owner was also contemplating adding a water feature, requiring the removal of massive amounts of soil from the hillside, thereby potentially threatening the stability of the entire foundation.

A padlocked gate keeps the ghosts in.

Of course, the homeowner may have some excuse, considering that the house was reported to be haunted by a tenant who lived there in the 1970s.

Crime of the Week

There's generic ugly, and then there's very special ugly. Stop-the-car-and-take-a-picture ugly. This house on the Westside is that kind of ugly.

Just what were they thinking?

But am I more aghast at its ugliness or at its pretension to elegance and style? There is much to abhor here: those gigantic, misshapen "eyebrows" that burden the elevation; the paneless (and painful) windows that seem destined never to be opened; the half-round columns that support nothing, added in a vain attempt to lend some authenticity to the proceedings; the garage door that mars an already crudely conceived façade; the blotched (and botched) faux-patina of the paint job; the pathetic garden "bridge to nowhere"; the Beaux Arts lamppost stranded in the midst of a desert xeriscape.

What I most abhor, however, is the utter lack of historical—or, for that matter, futuristic—tradition in this monstrosity. It is a very sad building of breathtaking naïveté.

I can't offer the the architect (if indeed one was involved) an education, but I can at least point the perpetrator to the book What Not To Build (see link to the right), before he or she commits another crime of this nature.