“A 1930s Spanish usually gets restored into a beige version of itself. Somebody here had the nerve to keep the color.”
- Sam O'Connor
2351
Canyon Dr
Los Angeles
Bedrooms
4
Bathrooms
3
Total Area
2,142 Sq. FT
Lot Size
5,232 Sq. FT
Price
$2,599,000
A Spanish With an Opinion
Canyon Drive runs north off Franklin and keeps climbing until it stops being a street and turns into a trailhead. This house was built along it in 1930, Spanish, and it spent most of a century as the kind of home this stretch of the hills produces quietly and often. Then Carlos Mota took it on. Mota has never been interested in a quiet room, and Architectural Digest featured the result, which is not a sentence that gets written about many four-bedroom houses at this number. The 1930 architecture is all still legible in the archways, the proportion, the ceiling heights. What changed is the temperature.
Listed by: Anthony Stellini and Sherri Rogers
Inside
The living room does the convincing, and it does it with height. The ceiling climbs well past what a 2,142 square foot house has any right to, and a Juliet balcony looks down into it, which in most homes would be ornament and here works as a second vantage point on the same room. The dining room is wrapped in hand-painted wallpaper, the sort of commitment nobody undoes on a Saturday. In the kitchen, tile work carries the pattern forward and a run of arches leads to the breakfast nook, so the smallest room in the house arrives with the most architecture. Upstairs, the primary opens through tall French doors into a bath with a freestanding tub. Mota layers color, pattern, and texture over 1930 bones, and the bones never once disappear underneath him.
Outside
The lot runs 5,232 square feet and the backyard is private the way hillside lots tend to be, held in by grade and planting rather than by anything anyone had to build. There is room to set a long table and room to do nothing at all, which are two different requirements that yards this size usually make you choose between. The bonus space at the back is the piece that changes how the house actually lives: guest room, office, gym, studio, whichever fourth need you show up with. Keep going north and Canyon Drive ends at the Brush Canyon trailhead in Griffith Park, close enough to walk to. Parking is a single space, which is the honest tax on a street laid out in 1930.
The O' Factor
Restoration in Los Angeles almost always means subtraction. Strip it back, quiet it down, let the arches speak for themselves, and what you get is a house that photographs well and says nothing. This one makes the opposite argument. Mota treated a 1930 Spanish as something with taste of its own and then added to it, using hand-painted paper, tile, and color as structure rather than as accent. That takes more nerve than restraint does, because color commits and beige never has to answer for anything. Architectural Digest came for the interiors, which matters mostly because it means someone outside the transaction thought this was worth recording. It is a house for a person who has no interest in being the most interesting thing in the room they walk into.
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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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“Closed in under two weeks at $250,000 over asking, after multiple offers.”
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“Sold off-market for $1,249 per square foot.”
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