L.A. Story

An eclectic 1930s house wasn’t what these homeowners were looking for—but it ended up being just what they wanted.

- David Masello

Jim McClintock is good with numbers. By the time the retired marketing executive and his partner, Richard Graves, found this French Eclectic– style house in Los Angeles’s Toluca Lake neighborhood, he tallied they had visited some 252 properties. “This house was the happy ending to our sixteen-month search,” Jim says.

But while the couple loved the 1939 three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house the moment they saw it, it was not at all what they had set out to find. “In our mind’s eye, we kept seeing that typical L.A. Spanish-style house: red-tile roof, bougainvillea and a palm tree in the yard, situated on a hillside,” says Jim, who now works as a yoga teacher and is a trustee of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. “But then we saw this and recognized its potential.”

One of the features that captured the couple’s imagination on their first walk-through was the one-story house’s level yard, with a pool in the back, which would allow them to easily meld indoor and outdoor living. “So many hillside houses we saw required having to go down a flight of stairs to get outside,” says Richard, a website developer. “We wanted a home where you could be outdoors immediately, with no effort.” Once theirs, “the series of dark, choppy spaces with small windows” would require a lot of work—in two phases, over eight years—to fulfill that goal.