It Changed Hands -- and Hearts

After eloping with his high school sweetheart, Delamer Hillman Jr. went looking for a house.

A just-built, stuccoed two-bedroom of about 1,300 square feet in West Hollywood seemed the perfect place to raise a family -- far from the bustle of downtown Los Angeles, but not far from the shops and restaurants of Sunset Boulevard.

And at about $6,200, it fit the budget of the 22-year-old car salesman nicely.

So began, in 1927, the story of 9019 Dorrington Ave., a house that has been called home by 10 other owners in the 78 years since Delamer and Mildred Hillman moved in, planted a garden and raised sons Robert and Richard.

The succession of owners at 9019 Dorrington -- including an immigrant who fled Communist Russia, a gay couple looking for a welcoming neighborhood and a young movie producer hoping to spark a new romance -- reflect the changing face of Southern California and illustrate the crucial role a simple house and a small patch of dirt play in building personal wealth.

All but one of the owners of 9019 Dorrington made money selling the house -- combined, the others walked away with more than $1 million. Last year, the modest home where the Hillmans raised a few chickens in the backyard sold for $1.2 million, nearly 200 times its first sale price. It was one of 7,826 homes in Los Angeles County to sell for more than $1 million last year, a record.

In today’s housing market, appreciation is more often discussed in economic, rather than sentimental, terms. But 9019 Dorrington -- with its dark wood floors, tile courtyard and bay window -- enriched its tenants with more than dollars.

Long after the money goes, the memories linger.

Robert Hillman, now 70, still recalls the Victory Garden his parents planted during World War II. And the life partner of John N. Martines so loved the backyard pepper tree that the two moved rather than chop it down for a swimming pool.

“I’m thrilled with it,” said current owner John P. Roberts, a 39-year-old entertainment executive who bought the house last year. “I walked in and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’ I was blown away by the backyard.” He called his agent to report that he’d found his dream home: “ ‘We’re done: Whatever it takes, let’s get this house.’ ”

Just as 9019 Dorrington begins a new chapter in Roberts’ life, so does he begin a new chapter in the story of the house.

A house’s history

When builder Paul Jones pounded the final nail in the Spanish-style cottage on about an eighth of an acre, the surrounding area was emerging as a tidy suburb of a sprawling Los Angeles.

Born as a railroad town in the 1880s, the working class community of Sherman was still a fairly quiet patchwork of single-story bungalows when people started to call it West Hollywood.

Shortly after the turn of the century, Victorian and Mediterranean-style homes had sprouted along Sunset Boulevard. Fancy apartment towers and lush, tiled garden courts followed, catering to the free-spending movie industry crowd. By the 1920s, nightclubs like the Cafe La Boheme gave birth to the Sunset Strip.

The house Hillman bought in 1927 only superficially resembled the one now swaddled in aromatic rosemary and wisteria. It didn’t have central air conditioning or a garage, for instance, let alone the built-in wine cellar in the kitchen.

Hillman worked in his brother’s downtown Los Angeles auto sales and rental business. Delamer and his sweetheart at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School, Mildred, had eloped in 1926 and were married at a minister’s house.

In the backyard, the family raised chickens that provided fresh eggs and sometimes became dinner, recalled Robert Hillman, who now lives in Hacienda Heights.

At the outset of the Great Depression in 1930, the assessed value of the house that originally cost about $6,200 was reduced to $2,100.

His father always seemed to be at work, Robert Hillman said, especially during World War II when he stayed on the job nights to help manufacture small aircraft parts in a shop at his brother’s car business. At home on Dorrington, the family grew vegetables in a Victory Garden. And Mildred served as president of the West Hollywood Elementary School PTA.

The Hillmans sold the house in 1948, when the family moved to a bigger house on 59th Place in Los Angeles to be with Mildred’s elderly mother. Even though they owned it for more than two decades, the Hillmans didn’t significantly profit from appreciation. With the economy improving in the postwar boom, the next owner became the first to feel a pang of regret that he didn’t hang on longer.

Russian immigrant Lee Zhito bought the house from the Hillmans for $13,000. He gave it to his mother, Elizabeth, a widow who had fled Kiev in the 1920s after the Communist revolution.

“She always wore a babushka and was very, very proud of it,” recalled her granddaughter and Lee’s daughter Nina, a freelance photographer who lives in Marin County.

Indeed, the Zhitos called the matriarch “Babu,” said Lisa, Nina’s sister.

Lee Zhito had emigrated with his family from Russia to Paris, Canada, and then St. Louis, where he grew up and attended the University of Missouri. He joined the music industry magazine Billboard as a reporter in 1945; he rose through the ranks and became publisher of Billboard in 1974, and died in 1995 at the age of 77 after being struck by a car while crossing a street in Santa Monica.

Nina remembers driving her father by the Dorrington house the year he died; her mother was being treated in nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a severe stroke. “He was worried about her escalating medical bills and how he was going to pay them,” Nina said. “Daddy joked that he never should have sold it.”

Zhito sold the house in late 1953 for $15,000 to a woman named Merwin Fawkes, who added a sewing room in 1961, enlarging the house slightly to 1,338 square feet. Five years later, she sold it to Earnest and Beatrice Bruck, for $30,000, according to a title search by First American Real Estate Solutions.

In 1984, Martines of Haverhill, Mass., bought the house at a probate sale for $168,000 from Mrs. Bruck’s estate. He and his life partner, Scott Pryde, liked the neighborhood and knew they could entertain clients of Martines’ fledgling West Hollywood accounting firm in the home’s domed living room and secluded backyard.

They enjoyed walking to restaurants and to Carl’s, a specialty grocery store at Doheny and Santa Monica boulevards. “You felt like you were in the city but you still had your own little neighborhood,” said Martines. “The neighbors would watch out for you. It was as if you had your parents all around you.”

By then, West Hollywood had become the largest gay enclave south of San Francisco. The same year Martines and Pryde moved in, West Hollywood became a city and quickly passed an ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals.

Martines and Pryde redid the kitchen and the small master bath, installing new plumbing, a new electrical system and an alarm. They also added decking and a spa in the backyard, where a very old pepper tree made a natural umbrella.

Three years later, Pryde and Martines decided to sell. They wanted a swimming pool, and Pryde couldn’t bear to cut down the pepper tree to make room for one, so they planned a move to the Miracle Mile district.

Their timing was auspicious. After years of little or no price gains in the early 1980s, the Los Angeles market was in the midst of a run-up. Annual gains of up to 14% were common as the region basked in the afterglow of the successful 1984 Olympics and reveled in its status as a major trade hub of the Pacific Rim. West Hollywood prospered too, with the opening of several trendy stores and restaurants not far from Dorrington Avenue. The working-class rough edges that remained in the city’s commercial heart on Santa Monica and Sunset boulevards began to disappear.

In the summer of 1987 they snagged $300,000 for the property, a record for Dorrington Avenue and nearly double what they had paid for it three years earlier.

“I’m sorry we ever sold the house,” said Martines, who now runs a Hancock Park consulting firm for homeowners who want advice on renovation. “I would move back there now.”

The buyers were actor Michael Pare and his wife, Marisa.

After training as a sous chef and working as a model, Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Pare made a splash as Eddie in the 1983 movie “Eddie and the Cruisers.” He played the lead in the musical fantasy “Streets of Fire” in 1984 and from 1987 to 1988 was one of two leads in “Houston Knights,” a buddy cop show on CBS.

Marisa picked out the Dorrington house because she liked the neighborhood and it was fairly convenient for Pare to commute to Burbank for filming, he said. The couple refinished the floors and installed a central air conditioning system. Pare didn’t share Pryde’s affection for the backyard foliage.

“I wish I had chopped down that pepper tree,” said Pare, who now lives in Ventura and continues to act. “It dropped leaves all year round, into the hot tub, and brought a lot of spiders.”

Marisa Pare couldn’t be reached for comment. According to court records, the couple separated in 1988 and divorced the following year. Michael sold the house to television producer Mark Wolper for $435,000 -- 45% more than he paid for it -- in December 1989, near the peak of the last residential real estate boom.

Wolper, who was then 30, spent $153,000 remaking the house into what he envisioned as a Greek island retreat, with rough plaster walls and a new garden with a tile fountain.

“I tried to make it artistically appetizing,” said Wolper, who produced several television shows including the TV movie “Dillinger” and “Heaven & Hell: North & South, Book III,” a mini-series about the Civil War. “I knew the thing that impressed women was not having a home that looks like a bachelor pad.”

Wolper said he used to wonder about who had lived in the house before him, and what they’d hoped for in life. For Wolper and his wife, it became a cocoon.

“Our favorite room was the second bedroom because we turned it into a TV lounge way before TV lounges were popular,” said Wolper. “We had wine tastings while watching TV.”

They loved the house, he said, but didn’t think it was large enough for the family they planned. The Wolpers moved to a bigger property in Encino where they would have enough room for their three children. They rented the Dorrington house for a few years to the daughter of a Texas politician who paid “astronomically high” rent, said Wolper, who is the son of producer David L. Wolper.

He was reluctant to sell the house because he knew he would take a big loss. Southern California’s housing market had imploded in the early 1990s recession. The region was particularly hard-hit by a reduction in defense spending prompted by the end of the Cold War.

Wolper finally put the house on the market in 1998. Beverly Hills yacht broker Richard Heath bought it for $462,000 -- $126,000 less than what Wolper had invested in it.

Heath impressed Wolper as the first potential owner to recognize that the decorating theme was Greek island, not Mexican.

“He was very artistically minded,” said Wolper. “He dealt with people who had a lot of money and he saw the house as his little place to fix up.”

Wolper is the only owner of 9019 Dorrington to have lost money on the house.

“I was too far ahead of the market,” he said.

As it turns out, just one year made a big difference. Heath sold his company and the house in 1999, and died soon after, according to business associates. The new owner was music video producer Skot Bradford, who paid $550,000, a 19% mark-up. Bradford, who has produced videos for artists such as Jennifer Lopez, TLC and Beyonce, didn’t respond to requests to talk about the property.

In February 2002, he sold the house to Christopher “C.J.” Bowden and his wife, Melissa, who paid $650,000, or 18% more than Bradford. Both are in sales for high-tech companies; he at Yahoo, she at InteliWireless.

The house “was charming,” said C.J., though he felt it needed work. The Bowdens took out a second mortgage and invested some of their savings in more than $200,000 of improvements, including the addition of weathered-looking terra cotta tiling in much of the front and back yards. They also overhauled the kitchen, installing new appliances, turned the carport into a garage and added a closet. For almost a year, they lived with construction dust and paper on the floors.

“We wanted to breathe new life into the house,” said C.J. “Our idea was to do it right but not go over the top.”

With a new baby boy in the family, and with the real estate market hitting record highs every month last year, the Bowdens decided to sell.

In late April, almost 200 people came to the open house, even though it was listed at $1.1 million, said their agent, Victoria Silver. The 1927 abode, still 2 bedrooms and 1,338 square feet, sold in less than a week.

The Bowdens negotiated to stay in the house for several more weeks so they could find a rental house in Brentwood. Roberts moved in in July.

When Wolper learned how much the house he owned in the 1980s had fetched, he responded with a burst of profanity.

“I really regret selling that home,” he said.

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If these walls could talk

Here’s the history of the house at 9019 Dorrington Ave.:

1927: Newlyweds Mildred and Delamer Hillman are the first owners, buying the house for about $6,200.

1948: Billboard publisher Lee Zhito buys the house for his Russian immigrant mother, Elizabeth, for $13,000.

1953: Merwin Fawkes, a single woman who adds a sewing room, buys it for $15,000.

1966: Earnest and Beatrice Bruck pay $30,000.

1984: John Martines pays $168,000 for the house, where he and his life partner entertain clients of Martines’ accounting business.

1987: Actor Michael Pare, who purchases it for $300,000, lives there while starring in the “Houston Knights” television show.

1989: Television producer Mark Wolper acquires it as a bachelor pad for $435,000.

1998: Beverly Hills yacht broker Richard Heath pays $462,000.

1999: It sells to music video producer Skot Bradford for $550,000.

2002: Yahoo sales representative Christopher Bowden buys it for $650,000.

2004: It fetches $1.2 million from entertainment executive John P. Roberts.

Sources: First American Real Estate Solutions, Los Angeles Times research