“Most of the 1960s in the Bird Streets got bulldozed. This one just got taken care of.”
- Sam O'Connor
9225
Nightingale Dr
Los Angeles
Bedrooms
5
Bathrooms
5
Total Area
3,978 Sq. FT
Lot Size
16,988.4 Sq. FT
Price
$6,795,000
The One That Stayed
The Bird Streets are a short list of narrow roads above the Sunset Strip where the lots were cut for the view and nothing else, and the houses have been trading on that decision since the sixties. This one dates to 1965 and sits on Nightingale on a little over a third of an acre, which is more ground than most of its neighbors ever got. Walls of glass run along the view side, so the light moves through the house all day rather than arriving in one dramatic hour, and the plan stays open behind them. What makes it worth the drive up is not that it is a midcentury house in the Bird Streets. It is that it is still a midcentury house in the Bird Streets, on a street where that sentence gets less true every year.
Representation by Aaron Kirman and Dalton Gomez, Christie’s International Real Estate SoCal
Inside
Just under 4,000 square feet, and the plan spends it on flow rather than on rooms nobody enters twice. The glass does the work on the view side, the walls behind it stay quiet, and the sightlines run through the house to the hills instead of stopping at a hallway. An open plan in 1965 meant something different than it does now: not a great room, but a house arranged so that you are always half outside. Five bedrooms and five bathrooms give it more capacity than the usual Bird Streets glass box, which tends to be a showpiece with one real bedroom and four places to put a guest you are hoping leaves. The house has been kept rather than gutted, which is the whole difference between a 1965 house and a 2026 house with a 1965 build date on the county record.
Outside
The pool sits where the land falls away, which in the Bird Streets is the entire program: water in the foreground, the basin behind it, and nothing in between to negotiate with. At 0.39 acres the lot gives the house a margin its neighbors mostly do not have, which means room to be outside without being on display to the road or to whoever is below. There is a $341 annual HOA, which at this price is the least consequential number on the sheet. The street is the other amenity and nobody lists it. Nightingale is quiet in a way that Sunset, four minutes down the hill, is not, and the drive home at night, hairpin by hairpin, is the reason people pay for this hillside twice.
The O' Factor
The Bird Streets have a math problem, and every original house up here is subject to it. The land is worth so much that the structure on it gets treated as an obstacle, which is why these streets keep filling with the same white box, and why a 1965 house surviving into 2026 with its proportions intact has become a scarce thing. Scarcity is easy to claim and hard to prove. Here you prove it by driving the street and counting. What is for sale is not a house with a view, because every house up here has a view. It is the last surviving version of an idea about how to live on a hillside, and it wants an owner who intends to keep it rather than improve it into the thing the neighbors already built.
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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
$10,557,516
1100
Rivas Canyon Rd
Pacific Palisades
Sold for $1,657 a square foot.
SOLD
$10,019,375
644
644 Amalfi Dr
Pacific Palisades
Sold for $1,880 a square foot.
SOLD
$8,250,000
11945
Lockridge Rd
Studio City
Closed in under two weeks at $250,000 over asking, after multiple offers.
SOLD
$7,775,000
12221
Benmore Ter
Los Angeles
Sold for $1,514 per square foot.
SOLD
$5,300,000
2525
Outpost Dr
Los Angeles
Closed off-market for $250,000 over asking.
SOLD
$5,140,000
708
N Kenter Ave
Los Angeles
Sold for $1,619 per square foot.
