“A Charleston mantel from the 1700s, vanities from a British country house, the Waldorf’s crystal. Somebody built this out of other houses and left no seams.”
- Claire O'Connor
1162
N Wetherly Dr
Los Angeles
Bedrooms
5
Bathrooms
7
Total Area
5,300 Sq. FT
Lot Size
10,166 Sq. FT
Price
$9,250,000
The Georgian Skylight Argument
Gated off Lower Doheny and built in 1937, this house is rare for reasons that have nothing to do with its address. Tim Barber & Associates took it on with interiors by Sean Leffers, and the ambition was never cosmetic: upper-floor ceilings raised, five dormers introduced, and a leaded Georgian skylight set above the central stair hall. Those three moves changed the quality of light in every room beneath them, which is the hardest thing to alter in a period house without the period walking out the door. The exterior was finished in smooth stucco under a new slate roof, and the classical moldings were redrawn rather than simply reproduced. Years of work, and the point of all of it was daylight.
Listed by: Benjamin Bacal and Rachael Williams, Revel Real Estate
Inside
The French doors were rebuilt to slimmer proportions with handmade brass fittings, which sounds like a footnote until you notice how much more glass and how much less frame each opening carries. In the primary bath, a marble steam shower pulls borrowed light deep into a room that in 1937 would have been the darkest one on the floor. The primary itself works as a separate retreat with a double barrel-vaulted sitting room and a dressing room that lends some ceremony to the start and end of the day. What keeps none of it from feeling newly minted is the salvage: an early eighteenth-century Charleston mantelpiece, nineteenth-century vanities from a British country house, objects carrying two hundred years of prior arrangements. The house reads as though it was always intended this way, which took several years and considerable restraint to pull off.
Outside
For much of the year the French doors off the breakfast room and library simply stay open, and the brick terrace stops being outside in any meaningful sense. A long swimming pool runs through palms, ginger, and ferns planted thickly enough that the tropical intention convinces rather than decorates. The pool house sits apart, so the garden keeps its own hours instead of borrowing the main house’s. Street to street, one of the few such lots in Lower Doheny, with gated entrances from both Wetherly Drive and Catherine Lane. Privacy at this level is usually a hedge and a camera, and here it is a second address.
The O' Factor
After sunset the argument reverses itself. The skylight and dormers go quiet, and the rooms are handed over to antique chandeliers, brass picture lights, and crystal fixtures salvaged out of New York’s Waldorf Astoria, so spaces that ran on daylight all afternoon turn smaller, warmer, and more conspiratorial by eight. Most restorations of this scale get one of those two houses right and treat the other as an afterthought with dimmers. Getting both means somebody sat in these rooms at different hours, over years, and kept adjusting. It is a house for a person who has stopped being impressed by scale and started noticing what a room does at six o’clock.
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The Homes we Represent,
Represent Us.
Every home has a soul. Every human has a place they were meant to be. Our instinct is knowing when the two finally meet. We honor architecture, preserve great design and celebrate the match. Welcome to O’Connor Estates. We’ve been waiting for you.
Proof is in the Properties
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$8,250,000
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“Closed in under two weeks at $250,000 over asking, after multiple offers.”
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“Sold for $1,514 per square foot.”
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“Closed off-market for $250,000 over asking.”
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“Sold for $1,619 per square foot.”
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“Sold off-market for $1,249 per square foot.”
SOLD
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“Sold for $1,227 per square foot.”
