Brentwood Park, Los Angeles

Why you should experience Brentwood Park in Los Angeles, California.

Brentwood Park is a verdant enclave where the Westside's early residential expansion meets estate-scale lots, mature tree cover and a street plan conceived as a country retreat within reach of Central Los Angeles.

Positioned between Brentwood Heights, Santa Monica, and Brentwood Village, the neighborhood occupies a broad residential tract extending north from San Vicente Boulevard through Bristol Avenue, Rockingham Avenue and Cliffwood Avenue toward Sunset Boulevard. Large parcels, deep front gardens and dense canopies of sycamores, palms, peppers and live oaks give the interior streets an unusually spacious scale, with houses frequently receding behind hedges and long approaches. Movement through Brentwood Park follows gently bending avenues whose width and setbacks preserve the dimensions of the original country-estate concept even where later construction has replaced early residences. Surviving traffic circles and elongated planted islands interrupt the street grid at selected intersections, retaining fragments of an original plan that once distributed landscaped islands throughout the tract. The result is a neighborhood whose broad lots, mature planting, surviving traffic islands and secluded residential streets preserve the physical ambitions of one of the Westside's earliest purpose-built suburban communities.

What you should know about Brentwood Park.

Brentwood Park is best known for originating in 1906 when the Western Pacific Development Company purchased 350 acres from the Santa Monica Land and Water Company and announced a residential tract between the National Soldiers' Home and the Pacific. William Lynton Brent, president of Merchants Trust Company Bank, joined the promoters whose development supplied the Brentwood name later adopted across the surrounding district. Access arrived through the Westgate Line, an electric railway built down the center of San Vicente Boulevard that connected with the Santa Monica Main Line and placed the emerging subdivision within about twenty-five minutes of Central Los Angeles. The original tract incorporated more than thirty landscaped traffic circles at intersections and a similar number of elongated islands between them, with streets bending across the terrain and reaching widths between 75 and 180 feet. Most lots carried a minimum frontage of 100 feet, creating the generous parcel dimensions that distinguished Brentwood Park from denser subdivisions spreading elsewhere across the city. John McLaren, associated with the transformation of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, supervised a planting campaign credited with 87,000 trees and shrubs across the new community. Western Pacific invested heavily in the concept, yet the financial panic of 1907 disrupted the first development campaign and sales remained slow through the following years. Dr. Herman Janss acquired a substantial interest after encountering the area during the Santa Monica Road Race, bringing the Braly-Janss Company into a tract where only about one-quarter of the property had sold by 1916. The delayed start proved consequential: Brentwood Park entered its principal residential building period after Los Angeles architecture had moved decisively toward elaborate Period Revival houses, giving the neighborhood a built character different from the simpler early suburb initially envisioned in 1906.

A renewed sales campaign in 1922 finally converted much of the remaining acreage into the residential community its first promoters had imagined sixteen years earlier. Shipley, Harrell and Trapp acquired the unsold three-quarters of Brentwood Park, erected a large tent near San Vicente Boulevard and Bristol Avenue and brought prospective buyers from across Los Angeles for motor tours, lunches and property auctions. Construction accelerated as architects working in Spanish Colonial Revival, American Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival and other period styles received commissions across the tract. John Byers became especially important to this architectural chapter after Harry and Olivia Johnson enlisted him during construction of their adobe residence on Rockingham Avenue in 1919. Byers was then teaching Spanish and French at Santa Monica High School, yet his involvement with the Johnson house redirected his career toward architecture and building; he later developed a practice centered heavily on residences across Brentwood, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. Film wealth entered the neighborhood during the same decades, extending the connection between large Westside estates and an entertainment industry expanding far beyond Hollywood. Producer Jesse Lasky maintained a Brentwood estate on Saltair Avenue, and child star Shirley Temple lived with her family on Rockingham Avenue from age seven until her marriage at seventeen, encompassing the most productive period of her film career. Temple's 1936 estate spread across three lots and included a separate playhouse, placing one of the era's most recognizable performers inside a residential district whose large parcels readily accommodated the compound-style houses favored by entertainment figures. Paul R. Williams contributed another significant residence nearby through the Georgian Revival house associated with actress ZaSu Pitts, adding his work to a neighborhood already shaped by architects including Byers and F.P. Burnham. Brentwood Park consequently matured not through a single building surge but through the convergence of a revived 1920s sales campaign, ambitious domestic architecture and entertainment-industry patronage that turned a struggling 1906 subdivision into one of the defining residential environments of the Westside.

How to fold Brentwood Park into your trip.

Brentwood Park works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting Richard Meier's hilltop cultural complex, Charles and Ray Eames's postwar architectural experiment and Will Rogers's former ranch across the western edge of Los Angeles.

Begin at Getty Center, whose origins on the Brentwood hillside date to the J. Paul Getty Trust's purchase of the site in 1982 as its expanding museum and institutional operations required a new home. Thirty-three architects entered the initial selection process before Richard Meier received the commission in 1984, beginning a project that consumed fifteen years of planning, design and construction before opening in December 1997. The complex occupies a 110-acre hilltop and unites the J. Paul Getty Museum with the Getty Research Institute, Getty Foundation and Getty Conservation Institute across a campus of travertine-clad buildings, courtyards and terraces. Robert Irwin received the Central Garden commission in 1992 and developed a 134,000-square-foot work containing more than 500 plant varieties, adding an artist-designed landscape to Meier's architectural composition. Construction survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake before completion, and intense public interest made advance parking reservations necessary during the center's first years. Continue west to Eames House, conceived within Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza's Case Study House Program as Case Study House #8. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen developed the first 1945 scheme as a steel-framed Bridge House spanning a meadow above the Pacific, but wartime shortages delayed deli of its prefabricated steel until late 1948. During the delay Charles and Ray Eames developed a deeper attachment to the meadow and reworked the project, using nearly the same industrial components to place a residence and studio against the hillside behind an existing row of eucalyptus trees. Construction began in 1949, the steel frames rose with extraordinary speed and the Eameses moved into the completed house on Christmas Eve. The residence subsequently became inseparable from their work in furniture, film, graphics and industrial design, with the interior accumulating folk art, textiles, paintings, found objects and Eames-designed furnishings across nearly four decades. Its 2006 designation as a National Historic Landmark recognized a house whose experimental postwar origins developed into international architectural significance. Conclude at Will Rogers State Historic Park, the former ranch assembled during the 1920s by the vaudeville performer, columnist, radio personality and film star who became one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors during the early 1930s. Rogers expanded his holdings above the Pacific into hundreds of acres devoted to family life, horsemanship and polo, creating a property that eventually included a 31-room ranch house, stables, corrals, a riding ring, roping grounds and a polo field. His career had begun with trick roping before moving through vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies into newspapers, radio and motion pictures, making the ranch the private counterpart to an unusually broad public career. Rogers died with aviator Wiley Post in an Alaska plane crash in 1935, and his widow Betty transferred the ranch to California after her death in 1944 so the property would remain associated with his life.

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