Welcome home. Not your home. Probably not a place you’d even want to be your home.
But welcome to some of the Houses of Los Angeles — notorious, historic and just plain fabulous. So many superb and significant houses have slipped through L.A.
’s civic fingers and into the steel scoop of a bulldozer, yet the city has just chosen to make a stand in Brentwood, preserving in perpetuity as a cultural-historic monument an otherwise undistinguished 1929 Spanish-style house that actress Marilyn Monroe bought in 1962, lived in for six months, and died in. It’s on 5th Helena Drive. There are 25 Helena Drives in Brentwood, each a cul-de-sac preceded by a different ordinal number — 7th, 19th, etc.
It’s the handiwork of a 1920s developer, Richard Peter Shea, a poor man who made good and who also built Shea’s Castle , a grandiose Irish confection in the Lancaster desert. He may have named the cul-de-sacs for his daughter, Helena. In December 1932, two months after Shea’s wife, Jane, died, Shea’s body washed up in the surf near Venice.
In his pocket was a glum note, and around his neck was a container holding Jane’s ashes. How’s that for a little excursion down the research rabbit hole? You already know three kinds of L.A.
houses: expensive, ridiculously expensive, and get-the-eff-outta-here expensive. So now, let’s have a lookie-loo tour of houses of another three kinds. Here in Southern California, some of the greatest 20th century architectural talents devoted them.
