Handsome in Hancock Park

This fine house was designed by Webber, Staunton & Spaulding—the architects of Harold Lloyd's Greenaces—and completed in 1927. Beautifully aged like a fine wine, it's currently listed at $5,999,999.

I predict a major price chop before it sells, but had I just won Mega Millions I'd pay the asking price in cash tomorrow for one of the most handsome manses in Hancock Park. (I wonder if they would take an even 6 mil?)

Ladies and gentlemen . . . architecture.

The three-story mansion has four bedrooms and baths upstairs, plus two maids' rooms downstairs. The third floor has a kitchenette and bath (income unit!!), and there's a guest apartment above the three-car garage (ditto!!!).

Its L shape means that it's significantly larger than the streetside façade implies, almost justifying the listing agent's description of it as a "French Chateau" (her overly exuberant capitalization).

"French Chateau" . . . almost.

The interior, while fine (but not exquisite) architecturally, needs some drastic design consideration, having, it seems, last been decorated in the same era in which Jackie Kennedy fired Sister Parish from the White House re-do for telling Caroline to get her saddle oxfords off the upholstery. The overdone faux-gilding in the living room, for example, has got to go.

Louie the Whoie?

I'd love to turn Michael Smith, Joe Nye or that D.C.-area Wonder Woman Mona Hajj loose on this place and see what they could come up with.

A rare groove indeed

In this post, Curbed.com mentions that architect Barbara Bestor of Bestor Architecture recently spoke to KCRW DJ Garth Trinidad on the air about her work, one example of which is below:

Does anyone else spy an unhappy hipster in the window?

Quoth La Bestor in the interview: "I try to get the rare groove that’s going to last, so that thing will work for like 20 years no matter what people will do to it."

"Like 20 years"??

Is two measly decades the longest we can expect our buildings to last and be serviceable in their originally designed form? Shouldn't architects—and their clients—set their expectations several magnitudes higher than this?

A few older Los Angeles architects seem to have understood the value of designing buildings that would last indefinitely:

Chateau Elysee, 1928: 82 years old and going strong

Mission San Fernando, 1797: 213 years old and still functioning as a church

Why do we settle for throw-away buildings? Why do architecture schools teach that buildings should have a shelf life, like mayonnaise? Just wondering . . .

The mysterious Villa Carlotta

Having lived within a few blocks of this old pile for more than a decade now, I have developed a fascination with its decrepitude, its history and its unapologetically ungentrified charm.

I have both daytime and oneiric fantasies of living in one of its 50 once-glamorous apartments, which were previously home to such royalty as William Randolph Hearst (he reportedly built the place to be near his paramour, Mrs. Thomas Ince, who later built the Chateau Elysee, now the Scientology Celebrity Centre, across the street), Edward G. Robinson, and George Cukor.

Louella Parsons lived at Villa Carlotta and her Hollywood gossip column was penned from these premises. Celebrated Southern California architect Wallace Neff moved into a studio apartment here after his divorce and had an office across the street, in the building that now houses The Bourgeois Pig coffee shop and Birds.

My great friend Steve Silberman, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, visited L.A. recently and managed, through his usual serendipitous luck, to get a glimpse of the lobby and courtyard of this faded Franklin Avenue dowager.

His photos, below, were taken with an iPhone app that imitates the broad spectrum of HDRI photography.



















For more on Steve and his multifarious pursuits—which include the Grateful Dead, Buddhism, psychedelia, neurology, and autism—see his website at www.stevesilberman.com.

Crime of the Week

Booty call on Figueroa.

Best shape Maillol never sculpted.

I'm not sure what the juridical crime was, but the esthetic crime is more an amusing misdemeanor than a jail-worthy felony. I sincerely hope the perp got off with a paper citation and a few smiles.

Standing bottomless on one of L.A.'s few remaining pay phones could be a statement about the growing lack of publicly accessible telecommunications devices in Southern California, or it could just be an excuse to get nekkid on a warm spring day.

The insouciant and shapely pose, reminiscent of that of Michelangelo's David, got me thinking . . . what if?

Hmmmm . . . .

Then again, no.

A better Best Western Hollywood Hills

Hollywood's much-loved Best Western Hollywood Hills Motel—home of fabu '60s throwback Warner Ebbink–designed 101 Coffee Shop—is getting a facelift.

Best Western Hollywood Hills plan (used by permission of KoningEizenberg Architects).

Architects KoningEizenberg have submitted plans for the refurb, which largely deals with redirecting traffic flow in the hotel's parking lots and some associated landscaping, but also includes non-structural updates to the hotel's exterior (awnings!) and some cool streetscaping that will make it a better neighbor for the new La Belle at Hollywood Tower apartments right across the street.

Best Western Hollywood Hills plan (used by permission of KoningEizenberg Architects).

One salient point in the plan is to retain the noted "Last Cappuccino Before the 101" mural on the east side of the building as part of the new exterior design. This sign is now considered "iconic and part of what gives some character to the neighborhood," according to KoningEizenberg and the environmental graphics firm attached to the project; neighbors tend to agree. Other existing murals will be deleted.

Best Western Hollywood Hills plan (used by permission of KoningEizenberg Architects).

The hearing for the project's Conditional Use Permit before the Planning Commission is coming up on April 6 at 10 am at City Hall, Room 1020. Neighborhood groups have already endorsed the improvements wholeheartedly, but further letters of support are encouraged.

The hotel, first built in 1927, has been owned and operated by the Adler family since 1948. And by the way, 101 Coffee Shop addicts, don't worry: the restaurant and its stellar jukebox will remain unchanged.

Best Western Hollywood Hills plan (used by permission of KoningEizenberg Architects).

Full drawings as submitted to the Planning Commission have been posted here and here in PDF format (large files).

The vintage L.A. duplex

The meaning of "duplex" changes radically depending on locale.

In Manhattan, a duplex is a two-story dwelling within an apartment building—preferably pre-WWII, and even more desirable if designed by Rosario Candela or Emery Roth. It has a cachet just slightly below that of a "maisonette."

960 Fifth Avenue duplex.

In the Middle America west of the Hudson and east of the Golden Gate, a duplex is a house split down the middle—or "divided against itself," in the words of Abraham Lincoln. It is presumably home to two honest working class families. The English euphemistically call it a "semi-detached house."

"Ye Suburban Duplexe."

The Los Angeles duplex falls somewhere between the two extremes. It is neither for the filthy rich nor for the boorishly unglamorous. Instead, it's a charming, preferably Spanish-revival apartment building in which one family (however "family" might be defined on the West Coast) lives above the other.

Here are a few examples from current Craigslist posts.

1100 S. Wooster.

1609 S. Ellesmere.


124 S. Carson.

Manning Avenue.

915 S. Shenandoah.

"Heart of BH. Not BH adjacent."

Celebrated Los Angeles interior design maven Barbara Barry once lived in a duplex on 6th Street in the Miracle Mile district, the locus classicus of Los Angeles duplexity. And Shelley Winters, even after achieving success as an actress, famously lived with her mother in a Beverly Hills duplex.