North Hills, Los Angeles

Why you should experience North Hills in Los Angeles, California.

North Hills is a layered enclave where the North San Fernando Valley's suburban character meets remnants of acre-lot agriculture, postwar residential expansion and streets carrying the imprint of a community once known as Mission Acres and Sepulveda.

Positioned between Mission Hills, Northridge, and Panorama City, the neighborhood occupies level valley ground extending through Sepulveda Boulevard, Nordhoff Street and Roscoe Boulevard across the central northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley. Detached houses dominate broad sections west of the Interstate 405 corridor, where deeper parcels and mature trees preserve a lower residential scale, with denser housing and commercial frontage becoming more prominent farther east. Movement through North Hills follows a rectilinear network of long valley streets whose regular geometry is interrupted by postwar tracts, cul-de-sacs and properties retaining dimensions inherited from earlier agricultural subdivision. Sepulveda Boulevard forms the principal north-south spine, concentrating businesses and larger buildings along a corridor that contrasts sharply with the quieter residential interiors extending toward neighboring communities. The result is a neighborhood whose large residential parcels, postwar subdivisions, commercial corridors and surviving traces of semi-rural development retain the physical sequence through which the northern valley became metropolitan Los Angeles.

What you should know about North Hills.

North Hills is best known for beginning as Mission Acres, an early twentieth-century settlement built around one-acre properties intended to combine modest houses with small-scale agriculture. Development began during the 1910s, and a surviving 1914 residence on Plummer Street belongs to the earliest phase of permanent construction in the community. Promotional activity accelerated by 1918, when Mission Acres supported chicken ranches alongside sugar beets, beans, walnuts, wheat, alfalfa, fruit and vegetable cultivation. Irrigated water reached the district that year, broadening the agricultural possibilities of properties originally settled before a complete distribution system served the area. The Mission Acres Improvement Association had helped create more than twelve miles of graded roads by 1921 as scattered farms and residences accumulated across the flat valley ground. Residents adopted the Sepulveda name in 1927, ending a formative period during which the community had developed as a semi-rural settlement of small agricultural holdings. Population increased strongly from the 1930s through the 1950s, and housing gradually displaced the chicken ranches, rabbit farms, orchards and vegetable plots that had characterized the earlier community. North Hills consequently carries an unusually clear sequence from acre-lot colonization through irrigated agriculture into metropolitan residential development, with surviving deep parcels preserving portions of that earlier scale.

Postwar construction produced a separate architectural chapter as the former agricultural community became embedded within the rapidly expanding San Fernando Valley. One of its most distinctive buildings emerged after a Unitarian Universalist congregation founded in 1943 acquired a five-acre former ranch property during the early 1960s and sought an architect for a new sanctuary. Frank Ehrenthal, a Universalist who had studied under Richard Neutra in Europe, spent time observing the congregation before conceiving a circular room in which members faced one another across a common interior. Completed in 1964, the structure used glue-laminated timber beams curving upward from the foundation toward a flattened roof peak, producing the bulbous profile that earned it the nickname The Onion. Its religious function soon extended into the political culture of the period as the congregation opposed the Vietnam War and the sanctuary hosted speakers including attorney William Kunstler in 1970. The building also became associated with the counterculture after Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters staged an Acid Test there in February 1966. Los Angeles recognized the sanctuary for its Mid-Century Modern architectural significance in 2010, preserving an unusual artifact from the period when North Hills was moving decisively beyond its agricultural origins.

How to fold North Hills into your trip.

North Hills works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting an automobile collection assembled through concours-level restoration, a vast archive of San Fernando Valley popular culture and a Japanese strolling garden conceived by one of the leading Japanese garden designers working in twentieth-century America.

Begin at The Nethercutt Collection, whose origins reach to J. B. and Dorothy Nethercutt's acquisition of two automobiles requiring extensive restoration in 1956. J. B. paid $500 for a 1930 DuPont Town Car and directed a nineteen-month restoration costing more than $65,000. The finished automobile captured Best of Show at Pebble Beach in 1958, initiating a collecting program that eventually gave Nethercutt a record six victories at the prestigious concours. The collection founded in 1971 expanded beyond automobiles into mechanical musical instruments, antique furniture and railroad equipment, with more than 250 American and European vehicles representing several generations of automotive engineering and coachbuilding. Continue to Valley Relics Museum, where the San Fernando Valley's commercial and popular culture survives through objects that disappeared as roadside businesses, restaurants and entertainment venues changed or closed. Its holdings include vintage neon signs, photographs, postcards, yearbooks, clothing, automobiles, BMX bicycles, restaurant ephemera and other artifacts accumulated from communities across the Valley. The museum now occupies two aircraft hangars at Van Nuys Airport, placing its collection of twentieth-century regional culture inside one of the Valley's enduring aviation settings. Conclude at The Japanese Garden, where designer Koichi Kawana created SuihoEn between 1980 and 1983 before its dedication on June 14, 1984. Born in Hokkaido, Kawana arrived in the United States in 1953 and later taught Japanese architecture and landscape design at UCLA, eventually designing more than a dozen major Japanese gardens across the country. His 6.5-acre Van Nuys composition follows the Chisen-Kaiyushiki tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century strolling gardens, moving through a dry meditation garden into ponds, waterfalls, streams and a tea house. Kawana adapted traditional Japanese principles to Southern California conditions and incorporated regional plants into his American commissions, an approach that became central to his career. Progressive Architecture honored the design, adding professional recognition to a body of work that also included major gardens in St. Louis, Chicago, Denver, Memphis and San Diego. The progression moves from Nethercutt's obsessive reconstruction of historic automobiles through a museum preserving the Valley's disappearing popular culture and culminates within Kawana's synthesis of Japanese landscape tradition and Southern California conditions.

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