Be the Third-Ever Owner of Frank Sinatra's Elaborate Rat Pack Retreat in Palm Desert
[Frank Sinatra via Getty Images]
Commissioned by Old Blue Eyes himself in 1967, this Palm Desert compound was built to entertain Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack pals and other celebs, with a lighted pool/spa, tennis courts, parking for up to 24 cars, and a helipad. The exterior of the main house on the five-acre property is a mix of native stone and shingles, while the interior is due for a light update (just rip up that baby-food-green carpet and everything will be fine), but it really nails the country lodge feel, incorporating five stone fireplaces, hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, and a first-floor deck protected by the cabin's massive eaves.
This Video Tour of an Abandoned Asylum Looks Straight Out of a Horror Film
Screenshot via Vimeo
Ruin porn goes cinematic in Project Senium, a debut release from a group of filmmakers determined to preserve the experience of incredible abandoned spaces through elaborate short films. This video, just under 10 minutes, takes you through the ruins of a massive asylum that's been left to decay for nearly 20 years. Compared to similar projects documenting an abandoned seminary or an entire city, Project Senium involves a more dramatic soundtrack and more panic-inducing fast-forwarded shots, plus a haunting narrative voiceover.
Watts is Working on a Huge, Neighborhood-Wide Makeover
For many, Watts is synonymous with the folk art towers of the same name and the mass civil unrest that engulfed the neighborhood 50 years ago this summer, but the South LA neighborhood is now after a new claim to fame: it's looking to remake itself into a "national example of sustainable development." A new partnership steered by Watts-based Grant EDC (a nonprofit connected to the Grant AME Church) and the Natural Resources Defense Council's Urban Solutions program, and in collaboration with several other local organizations, seeks to revitalize the neighborhood and strengthen the community by remaking its buildings and streetscapes so that they're more inviting to pedestrians and more connected to parks, green spaces, and transit. The ambitious goal is to turn Watts into "a thriving neighborhood that its residents deserve."
The project is called Watts Re:Imagined and it will pick up where the community redevelopment agencies—local governmental organizations that encouraged development in areas that needed it, before the governor dissolved them all—left off, pushing forward a unified vision of transit-oriented, green-minded, community-focuseddevelopment, says a release for Watts Re:Imagined's official launch this week.
Downtown Los Angeles Has Completely Run Out of New Condos
If you want to buy a condo in Downtown Los Angeles, you're going to have to wait until 2016 or—ewwwww—settle for one someone has already lived in. Downtown is now fresh out of new for-sale units, following the sale earlier this month of the last penthouse at the Evo-South tower in South Park (the second to last penthouse sold in March). Unit 2303, opened way back in 2008, measuring just shy of 4,000 square feet, with three bedrooms, became something of a landmark when it sold last week for $3.4 million: it was the last condo of the pre-recession development boom. The recession stopped new construction dead in the neighborhood, but it's picked up again in the past few years; DTLA is now full of cranes, but there won't be any condos arriving until South Park megaproject Metropolis opens its first residences in 2016.
One Guy Has Been Working for Free For Six Years to Keep the Venice Skate Park Pristine
Former pro skater Jesse Martinez has spent the last six years getting up every day before the sun rises to go to the Venice Skate Park and clean it up. The biggest battle is with graffiti, says The Argonaut, but he does an impeccable job: though the concrete is vandalized every night, "there's not a single tag on the 16,000-square-foot park." That's because Martinez has decided not to let it happen: "If you tag it, I guarantee you that by eight in the morning it will be gone," he says. This is not officially his job; though he's been at it since the skate park opened in 2009, Martinez has never been paid a cent to work there.
Case Study House #18, On National Register, For Sale as Possible Teardown
Rodney Walker is one of the lesser-known architects who participated in Arts & Architecture's groundbreaking Case Study House program, which introduced Mid-Century Modern to the masses, but over his career he created scads of strikingly lovely houses around Southern California. One of those is his Case Study House #18, aka the West House, which sits on a bluff in Pacific Palisades and, along with several other Case Study Houses, on the National Register of Historic Places. But that doesn't mean it can't be demolished. The 1948 house has just come up for sale and the listing gently hints that a new owner might want to tear it down.
CSH #18 is still quite well-preserved, with two bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a garden room, glass walls, "pristine white galley kitchen," and a double-sided fireplace, all on a little more than half an acre overlooking the ocean. (It faces the Pacific, but is set back from the cliff a bit to reduce noise; according to its Arts & Architecture feature, "the privacy of the open south and east exposures of Case Study House No. 18 can be threatened only by an occasional sea-gull.")
37-Story Condo Tower Planned For Twelfth and Grand in Booming South Park
Back in February, a Shanghai-based developer dropped $26 million on a lot at the southwest corner of Twelfth and Grand in Downtown's booming South Park. Though condos were expected to rise on the site, the land wasn't zoned for that (yet), and at $585 a square foot, the transaction was the most money anyone in Downtown had paid for a site that wasn't even prepped for "dense development." Now the prepping process has begun and the City Planning Commission got a sneak peek yesterday of what's planned for the lot, says the LA Times.
Study: Actually, Los Angeles Isn't Very Suburban at All
Despite Los Angeles's sprawly reputation and lingering love of single-family houses, the stats shows that it's actually pretty damn urban and not very suburban at all. Economist Jed Kolko, writing at FiveThirtyEight, points out that much of the data about cities in the US is gathered in a way that makes it hard to figure out quite how city-like they really are. So to get a better idea of which places are actually just giant clusters of car-dependent, single-family neighborhoods and which are urban in the "high-rise-and-subways, 'Sesame Street' sense," Kolko conducted his own nationwide survey.
Jonas Brothers' Family Home in Toluca Lake Sells for $1.8M
Though the former Disney Channel boy band The Jonas Brothers did not grow up in this house, their parents did here from 2012 until just recently and it looks much as one might expect the family home of a super-chaste, bubblegum pop music group composed of actual brothers to look. According to the LA Times, the 1938 Traditional (of course!) is separated from the rest of the neighborhood by an ivy-covered front fence; inside the fence is a sizable front lawn and an expansive backyard big enough for a sweet fort, a gazebo, and a patio. Inside, there are hardwood floors, white carpet, and marble kitchen counters. The master bathroom features lots of marble and a separate shower and tub. Last sold to the Jonases in 2012 for $1.3 million, it just sold again for $1.8 million.
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1912 South Pas Mansion by G. Lawrence Stimson Asking $1.8M
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This 1912 house in South Pasadena's historic Oaklawn District was designed by architect and builder G. Lawrence Stimson, who also designed Pasadena's incredible Wrigley Mansion (aka the Rose Parade Tournament House) and many other houses in the area, but this five-bedroom estate was also Stimson's personal residence for a time, says the listing. Now it seems the house is something of a restoration opportunity, but the bones are so, so good. Beyond the classically lovely entry, there is all the right kind of molding everywhere—rose motif in the formal dining room!—huge double-hung windows, wonderful wood floors, and a circular staircase.
How Much Does It End Up Costing When a House Lingers on the Market in Los Angeles?
Please welcome real estate appraiser, Curbed NY graph guru, blogger, newsletter writer, and columnist Jonathan Miller to Curbed LA. For his inaugural column, he looks at the connection between the length of time a listing stays on the market and the hit it'll take on its final sale price.
Since Los Angeles is all about relationships and you don't know me (yet), I thought I'd better get started on my first Three Cents Worth Column for Curbed LA. I've been compiling and analyzing data for Douglas Elliman's market report series for more than 20 years and one thing I've learned: there is nothing better than a good chart. For this column I thought I'd explore the relationship between days on marketand listing discount and how that is changing.
Grove Owner Rick Caruso Builds Malls Like He's Making Movies
Developer Rick Caruso gets a lot of flack for his fakey-old-town shopping centers (The Grove and the Americana at Brand), which replicate a place that never really existed. But if you consider these malls as a kind of set for a movie we're all background players in, there's something to be said for the film-director-level of control and calculation going on at The Grove and other Caruso properties. A recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Caruso approaches his shopping plazas a lot like a movie: starting with a story, trying to create something that people can connect with, and of course devoting himself to good lighting.
MacArthur Park Lake Will Be Filled With Thousands of Giant, Colorful Balls This Summer
This summer, MacArthur Park Lake will be filled with about 7,000 enormous, handpainted, inflatable spheres in a "one-of-a-kind floating artwork." The project comes from Portraits of Hope, which has also covered New York taxis and Los Angeles lifeguard towers in its signature graphic flowers. The Spheres at MacArthur Park were seven years in the works, according to an April story at CBS LA, but finally got approval this past December. The spheres, four to six feet in diameter, are being painted now, by thousands of kids and adults from the area, in "brightly colored floral and aquatic designs," with work expected to be done in late July or so. Once the spheres are in the lake, they'll bob for about four weeks.
Nobody Wants to Buy the Mansion from Scarface
The real life estate that played the role of a lifetime as Tony Montana's mansion in the 1983 movie Scarface hit the market last year asking $35 million, and was reportedly still asking that as of two months ago. The Neoclassical Santa Barbara (though the movie was set in Miami) El Fureidis ("Little Paradise") mansion has had no luck finding a buyer, however, and as Lighter Side of Real Estate points out, the listing just reappeared with a significantly reduced asking price, down to $17.8 million. Apparently, the owner, Russian billionaire Sergey Grishin, has lost faith in the property's cultural cache as a selling point. The listing doesn't even mention the movie anymore.
Norms Diner Where Matthew Weiner Wrote the First Notes For Mad Men Will Be Saved
The Jet-Age, Googie-style Norms diner on La Cienega has had a hell of a year, with a demolition scare, a temporary stay of execution, and the revelation that the diner inside the angular, mid-century building might not be a part of the owner's vision for a collection of high-end shops on the site. But now, at the very least, the shell of the 1957 building (designed by Googie kings Louis Armet and Eldon Davis) is safe, thanks to a unanimous vote by the LA City Council to make the building an LA Historic-Cultural Landmark, the LA Times reports.
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