Why Calabasas Highlands matters.
Calabasas Highlands is a secluded enclave where the Santa Monica Mountains' canyon character meets a 1920s hillside subdivision, compact mountain parcels and residential streets climbing through chaparral-covered terrain above Mulholland Highway.
Positioned between Old Topanga, Mountain Park, and Greater Mulwood, the neighborhood occupies a steep northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains where residential streets rise from the Mulholland Highway corridor toward ridgelines overlooking the western San Fernando Valley. Rectilinear blocks imposed across sharply changing elevations produce an unusual contrast between standardized parcels and rugged terrain, with houses stepping above narrow roads amid mature ornamental planting and native vegetation. Canyon Drive and Poppy Drive supply the primary encounter through ascending residential streets that expose successive views across folds in the surrounding mountains. Smaller hillside roads terminate against open slopes and mountain land, placing compact residential blocks directly beside a much larger expanse of oak woodland, chaparral and undeveloped ridgelines. The result is a neighborhood whose small-parcel street plan and mountain setting preserve an early form of rural residential development that connected Calabasas physically and architecturally with neighboring Topanga.
What defines Calabasas Highlands.
Calabasas Highlands is best known for originating as two 1924 subdivisions laid across difficult Santa Monica Mountains terrain decades before large-scale residential growth reached Calabasas. Samuel Cooper Jr. created Tracts 9435 and 8550 off Mulholland Highway, establishing the community during the same decade that several rural retreats and experimental residential projects appeared across the surrounding mountains. Cooper imposed rectilinear streets on an undulating site and divided the hillside into standardized parcels measuring 60 by 85 feet, creating a striking mismatch between conventional subdivision geometry and steep natural topography. The project emerged alongside another 1924 subdivision on Topanga Canyon Road, where Andrew Valdez partnered with brothers Lippe and Faidorus Colodny to divide 114 lots, placing the Highlands within a broader wave of small mountain communities forming between Calabasas and Topanga. Calabasas remained constrained by unreliable water supplies through much of the first half of the twentieth century, limiting the scale of settlement across the surrounding hills. The Highlands remained sparsely built for decades after Cooper established its street and parcel pattern. Calabasas entered a different growth period after a dependable regional water supply arrived in 1958, yet the Highlands retained the compact lots and mountain-road geometry created during its much earlier subdivision era. Its 1924 plan survives as a physical artifact of the period when Calabasas first began shifting from scattered ranches and weekend retreats toward permanent residential communities.
Early houses introduced a distinctive architectural layer long before the principal construction wave of the 1960s filled the surrounding lots. Period Revival residences appeared beside modest traditional houses and Ranch designs, generally using single-story forms, pitched roofs and wood siding suited to the community's small parcels. Construction proceeded house by house across several decades, preventing the uniform architectural composition associated with later master-planned sections of Calabasas. The prolonged buildout also linked the Highlands visually with Topanga, where individualized houses, irregular construction periods and mountain parcels produced a similarly informal residential landscape. Midcentury growth brought the Ranch house into wider use across Calabasas, including California Ranch variants with traditional or Western detailing and Modern Ranch designs distinguished by horizontal massing, broad glazing and restrained ornament. Development accelerated across the Highlands during the 1960s, finally occupying substantial portions of the subdivision that Cooper had established four decades earlier. Calabasas itself did not incorporate until 1991, leaving the Highlands older than the municipality that eventually enclosed it by nearly seven decades. The surviving mixture of early revival houses, Ranch forms and later custom residences turns the neighborhood into a compressed architectural chronology of mountain settlement across twentieth-century Calabasas.
How Calabasas Highlands fits.
Calabasas Highlands works as the anchor for an outing connecting a nineteenth-century adobe ranch house, Wallace Neff's estate for a razor magnate and a Hollywood movie ranch whose mountain landscapes represented distant places on screen.
Begin at Leonis Adobe Museum, where an adobe structure dating to the 1840s became the home of Miguel Leonis and Espiritu Chijulla during the 1870s. Leonis, a French Basque immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles in 1854, accumulated more than 18,000 acres across Southern California and expanded the earlier adobe into a two-story Monterey-style residence with a wraparound veranda and Victorian elements. Espiritu, whose father Odon was among the Native recipients of Rancho El Escorpion in 1845, remained in the house after Leonis died in 1889 and spent sixteen years pursuing a share of his estate before prevailing. A campaign launched after the property faced demolition in 1960 led to its designation in 1962 as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1, preserving a rare surviving residence from nineteenth-century Calabasas. Continue to King Gillette Ranch, a 588-acre property where King C. Gillette commissioned architect Wallace Neff during the 1920s to create a Spanish Colonial Revival country estate within the Malibu Creek watershed. Neff's architecture formed part of a larger composition incorporating a long tree-lined allée, grand entrance, constructed pond, formal courtyard, terraces and bridges amid meadows and low ridgelines. The property later belonged to filmmaker Clarence Brown before passing through additional owners, and a partnership of public agencies and private donors acquired the ranch from Soka University in 2005. Its broad valley floor and surviving Neff buildings preserve the private-estate phase of Santa Monica Mountains development at a scale radically different from the compact hillside parcels of the Highlands. Conclude at Paramount Ranch, where Paramount Pictures acquired 2,700 acres in 1927 to create an outdoor production complex capable of representing settings far beyond Southern California. The studio built barns, corrals, prop sheds and production facilities across terrain used as the American West, colonial Massachusetts, ancient China, Africa, Europe and the South Seas, completing more than 130 films there between 1927 and 1943. Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, W.C. Fields and Bob Hope worked on productions across the property during the studio era, and filmmaking continued under later owners after Paramount sold the ranch. The National Park Service acquired the site in 1980, preserving the only place within the National Park System devoted specifically to the history of American filmmaking. The progression moves from the Leonis family's nineteenth-century rancho world through Gillette and Neff's private mountain estate and culminates at Paramount's immense production landscape, tracing three successive ways in which the Santa Monica Mountains became home, retreat and cinematic terrain.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
