“In July 2028 the Olympics show up next door. Honestly, that’s the fourth most interesting thing about this house.”
- Sam O'Connor
900
Napoli Dr
Pacific Palisades
Bedrooms
5
Bathrooms
7
Total Area
7,167 Sq. FT
Lot Size
28,750 Sq. FT
Price
$24,995,000
A Wuesthoff that survived its own renovation.
We don’t play golf. We’re saying that up front, because every word ever written about this address opens with the fairways, and we already know how the next two years of that are going to go. In July 2028, when the Olympics arrive on the other side of the fence, it will get louder still, and we’d put that about fourth on the list of interesting things here. Paul Wuesthoff drew this house in 1963, in the stretch when he was moving between custom residences and some of the best modern cinemas in Southern California, and he knew how to build a room around the thing you’re supposed to be looking at. He was also unusually good at siting, which is a quiet skill nobody hands out awards for, and it’s why this one sits exactly where it does on the rim above Riviera. The view is the part anyone would have found, and the rooms are the part only he could have drawn.
Listed by Aaron Kirman, Christie’s International Real Estate SoCal
Inside
The ceilings are tongue and groove and they go up instead of across, and the clerestory windows riding above the glass catch the light high and move it through the house all day instead of letting it park in one spot until four o’clock. Floor to ceiling glass runs through nearly every room, and most of those rooms open onto a deck or a patio of their own, which is less a feature than a habit, because the house keeps offering you the door. The floors are solid chevron hardwood across the whole plan, and the three wood burning fireplaces are doing real work rather than decorative work. The kitchen and family room came back as one room, with a serious appliance list and no interest in showing it to you. Then there’s the elevator, a round glass cab that descends through the branches of a redwood and sets you down in a dark, plush media room. We have seen a lot of elevators, and this is the only one we would ride for fun.
Outside
You don’t arrive here so much as get let in, through an auto gate and into a motor court where the water starts immediately: the first and highest of five waterfalls drops into a koi pond, which feeds a stream that wanders the rest of the property and falls four more times on its way down. We counted, and it really is five. The grounds are by Eckbo, Dean, Austin & Williams, which is roughly the landscape equivalent of finding a signature on the back of the canvas, and they hold eighteen redwoods, Canary Island pines, and enough green in between that the yard doesn’t end so much as hand itself off to the course, head on to the 4th and the 5th. The part you’d actually live in is all out here too, between the pool, the hot tub, the cabana, an outdoor fireplace, a fire pit, a built in BBQ, and a slice of the Pacific if you stand in the right spot. There’s a guest house as well, sitting in its own pocket of forest with a view of its own. Napoli Drive was named for Naples by people trying to describe a place where the mountains come down to the water.
The O' Factor
We spend a lot of time arguing about what makes a house rare, and it always comes down to the same split: the things money can order, and the things money can only wait for. Almost everything you touch here was ordered, and it was ordered well, from the new systems to the new kitchen to the new surfaces to a budget that clearly didn’t flinch. What money couldn’t order is the shape of the rooms. The ceiling planes, the run of the glass, and the proportions Wuesthoff worked out before any of us were paying attention are all still exactly his, and the rebuild had the discipline to spend a fortune without correcting one of them. The architecture didn’t get preserved. It got believed. The trees sit on the other half of that split, because redwoods don’t hurry, and when Eckbo’s firm put a landscape in the ground six decades happened to it, and there’s no version of a checkbook that skips that part. What’s left is a house nobody could commission now standing in a garden nobody could rush, and the only reason both are still this good is that the last people through knew exactly what not to touch.
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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
