Spanish stucco and common dreams
I'M thinking of a dark wood dining table, highly polished, adorned with a bowl of gleaming fruit. Outside the bright sun glares, but the room itself is cool and dim; the fruit appears to float in twilight. More...
Our very own Camelot
THANK goodness for real estate. How could Southern Californians manage without it? More...
The Hottest Property
1880s More...
What were they thinking?
Urban sprawl is an L.A. concept. We should've trademarked it. Supersized housing? Ditto. Forget the scant skylines of downtown, Century City and the few pockets of verticality scattered about, the architecture of Los Angeles lies low and long. More...
Vanishing points
Los Angeles is famously a city of today and tomorrow. Even though preservationists have been busy since 1894, the city tends to let go of its past. Dusty spaces are paved, wooden Victorians are turned to splinters, childhood haunts become mini-malls and whole neighborhoods disappear in the sweep of our freeways. Progress leaves little room for nostalgia, and often we don't know what's been lost until we stumble upon an old photograph. More...
Three degrees of separation
10100 Sunset Boulevard, Holmby Hills More...
Watching L.A. grow
HER gray hair is piled primly atop her head. She wears a simple print dress, clutches a basket of avocados and demurely casts her eyes away from the camera as if she doesn't know what to do with the attention. More...
The view from 30,000 feet
"An amazing triumph of will, engineering and greed, the horizontal version of New York's skyline, with its own kind of power and beauty, framed by the mountains and ocean." More...
Los Angeles' literary landscape
In "Ramona," her 1884 novel of Southern California, Helen Hunt Jackson did more than tell the story of the illicit romance between a mestizo orphan and an Indian sheepherder. Caught in the pages of her famous melodrama is a picture of the land that is perhaps more timeless than the tale itself. More...
Still standing, like the rest of the city
MY mother was born in 1928 on an orange grove in Covina. She was proud of the fruit — Florida, bah. Yet in her dying days, as she recalled that farm, it wasn't the oranges and lemons and limes that she talked about. It was the oak tree at the end of the farm drive. More...
Step right in ...
Chalk it up to climate or to pride of ownership, but Southern California has exceptionally vibrant home, garden and architecture tours. At movie palaces in downtown Los Angeles as well as wildflower patches in our farthest-flung suburbs, doors and gates are open for visitors' admiration and critiques. More...
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