“A restoration is a very expensive opinion about what a house used to be. This is just what the house is.”
- Claire O'Connor
344
S Cliffwood Ave
Los Angeles
Bedrooms
5
Bathrooms
4.5
Total Area
4,167 Sq. FT
Lot Size
26,136 Sq. FT
Price
$9,950,000
It has never been on the market. That's not a figure of speech.
In 1960 a UCLA cardiologist named Raymond Borun and his wife Ruth commissioned a house in Brentwood Park from Benton & Park, brought in Garrett Eckbo to do the garden, and then did the most radical thing anyone can do with good architecture, which is nothing. Sixty six years. One family. Ray’s father Harry and his uncle Robert had founded Thrifty Drug Stores, which is to say the Boruns are a large part of why Los Angeles knows what a cylindrical scoop of ice cream looks like. Ray died this year, at 107. What’s left is the house they finished in 1960, still finished in 1960.
Listed by Alexandra Soriano and Linda May, Carolwood Estates
Inside
It’s a single story with a flat roof and eaves deep enough to do actual work in July, clad in vertical wood siding and tan Norman brick, which is the long thin brick, the one that makes a wall read as a horizontal line instead of a stack. You come in through recessed double doors, and then it’s walnut everywhere it counts: a walnut clad fireplace holds down the living room, walnut cabinetry runs between the living and dining rooms with a bar hidden inside it, and floor to ceiling glass does what glass did in 1960, before anyone thought to call it a feature. The ceilings go up. The furniture is Sam Maloof, custom, which is not a sentence we get to write often. The primary has a corner window that turns the garden into two walls of the room, and it might be our favorite thing here. The original details run all the way down, and nobody in six decades decided they knew better.
Outside
The garden is Garrett Eckbo, which is why the word Garden sits in the name of the house. It runs street to street on a gentle slope, terracing as it goes, with brick paths that wander instead of arrive, trellises, koi ponds, and patios in more than one place, because Eckbo understood that people want to sit somewhere different at four than they did at ten. The pool holds the center and behaves like part of the composition rather than an amenity that showed up later. The plantings are mature, which is the polite term for trees that were here before you were. There’s a guest house as well, with its own gated driveway. This is Brentwood Park, where the lots run big and the streets stay quiet, and the Country Mart has been up the road since 1948.
The O' Factor
Almost every great mid century house in Los Angeles has a rescue story. Somebody bought it, somebody ruined it, and somebody else spent a fortune putting it back. This one doesn’t have that story. It went from Benton & Park’s drawings to the Boruns and stayed there, and the reason every original detail survived isn’t preservation, it’s that nobody ever undid them in the first place. There was nothing to put back. That’s a different kind of pedigree than the restored houses carry, and we’d argue it’s the better one, because a restoration is only ever a very expensive opinion about what a house used to be, and this house has never needed anybody’s. The garden is the part no budget reaches at all. You can put a house back together, but a garden either got tended for sixty six years or it’s gone, and there’s no writing a check for a single season, let alone all of them. Eckbo drew this one and somebody watered it every year since. Nobody rescued this house. Nobody ever had to.
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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
SOLD
Closed $200K over asking
SOLD
Closed for $1,589/sq ft
SOLD
Closed $250k over asking
