THE CREATION OF Trousdale Estates, an enclave of midcentury homes in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains in Beverly Hills, is a classic Los Angeles story. The 410-acre tract had once been the ranch of the self-made Jazz Age oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, one of the models for Daniel Day-Lewis’s character in “There Will Be Blood” (2007). With his son, Edward Jr., known as Ned, Doheny became ensnared in the Teapot Dome corruption scandal of the 1920s and, just as the trials were beginning, turned over all the land to Ned and his wife, Lucy, including the plot where Greystone, their enormous Tudor Revival mansion, would be built. Before the final verdict on his father was rendered (he would be acquitted), Ned died in a murder-suicide with his male secretary. In 1954, Lucy sold most of the land (minus the mansion, which is now a tourist attraction owned by the city of Beverly Hills) to a real estate developer named Paul Trousdale.
A Tennessee-born former gum salesman who got rich building tract homes in the San Fernando Valley and in Long Beach, Trousdale transformed the Doheny Ranch into more than 500 rectilinear, single-story homes designed by the new wave of American architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, A. Quincy Jones, Allen Siple and Harold Levitt. A veritable portfolio of the era’s design obsessions — Hollywood Regency, Hawaiian pavilion, organic modern — the houses had such innovations as open carports, sliding glass walls, sunken living rooms and indoor-outdoor floor plans with unobstructed views of the growing city below. Frank Sinatra moved in, as did Elvis Presley, the talent agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar and Dean Martin.
As the ’70s ended, though, midcentury swank felt anachronistic. By the time a new generation of Hollywood executives and actors became enamored of the enclave’s architectural legacy and incomparable sunsets, around 2000, most of the houses had been either torn down or stripped of their original details.
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