North of Montana, Santa Monica

Why you should experience North of Montana in Los Angeles, California.

North of Montana is a residential enclave where Santa Monica's coastal character meets early twentieth-century estate building, expansive garden parcels and tree-lined streets extending from the Pacific bluff toward the city's eastern boundary.

Positioned between Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, and Wilshire Montana, the neighborhood occupies Santa Monica's northern residential tier, rising gently from the Pacific bluff before reaching the canyon-cut terrain along its northern edge and the inland streets approaching Centinela Avenue. Broad avenues, deep setbacks, mature tree canopies and substantial detached houses create an unusually open physical composition, with denser apartment buildings concentrated along selected corridors and increasingly irregular parcels near Santa Monica Canyon. San Vicente Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a broad landscaped axis whose central median and mature coral trees carry the district eastward from Ocean Avenue across long residential blocks. Smaller streets extending north and south create a secondary passage through quieter terrain where gardens, hedges and varied setbacks break the regularity of the underlying grid as elevation increases toward the canyon. The result is a neighborhood whose unusually generous land pattern and architectural range preserve more than a century of Santa Monica residential development within a coastal district distinctly separated from the commercial city to the south.

What you should know about North of Montana.

North of Montana is best known for containing Gillette's Regent Square, the 153-acre residential tract opened in 1913 by King C. Gillette after the safety-razor inventor left his company and directed part of his fortune into Southern California real estate. Gillette worked with the L. D. Loomis Company on an unusually elaborate sales campaign that brought prospective buyers to the opening aboard six sightseeing automobiles, three Pacific Electric trains and twenty-five private touring cars. More than 1,500 people attended the opening, and purchases surpassed $230,000 during the first week. The tract extended between San Vicente Boulevard and Montana Avenue from 17th Street to 21st Place, placing its new residential blocks beside electric transportation and the boulevard network linking Santa Monica with greater Los Angeles. Standard parcels measured 60 by 149 feet, with larger sites at corners, giving the subdivision dimensions generous enough for substantial detached houses and gardens. Automobile access shaped the original subdivision directly, with streets serving parcels from the front and alleys omitted from the plan. Joseph Smith III, former president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, became one of its early purchasers when he acquired half a block on 17th Street. Gillette's venture consequently captured a decisive stage in Santa Monica's transition from seaside resort toward year-round residential city, pairing electric transportation and automobile access with unusually large suburban parcels.

The Palisades Tract developed a separate architectural chapter closer to the ocean, occupying ground bounded by Ocean Avenue, Georgina Avenue, 7th Street and Palisades Avenue and becoming the largest subdivision created within Santa Monica. Georgina Avenue accumulated an exceptional sequence of early houses, including the 1910 Henry Weyse/Charles Morris House by Robert D. Farquhar, whose American Colonial composition uses curving porch bays and long canted wood shingles. Farquhar designed his own French Beaux-Arts Period Revival residence in 1911, creating another architecturally ambitious property tied directly to the family of Santa Monica co-founder John P. Jones through Farquhar's marriage to Jones's daughter. A.W. Morgan commissioned a Craftsman residence on Georgina Avenue in 1913, among the street's pioneering houses, with an English Arts and Crafts character distinct from the California Craftsman form prevalent elsewhere in the region. Edla Muir added a later generation in 1942 through a Monterey Revival residence created as she was opening her independent architectural practice after years working with John Byers. Muir had advanced from clerical work in Byers's office to architectural practice and partnership by 1934 before developing a career that later extended into midcentury ranch houses. Adelaide Drive carries the district's architectural history onto the edge of Santa Monica Canyon through houses commissioned by early civic and business families, including Robert Farquhar's 1907 Second Roy Jones House and the 1925 French Norman Revival Boehm House. These successive commissions turned the northern residential quarter into an unusually concentrated chronology of Santa Monica domestic architecture spanning Craftsman, Beaux-Arts, Colonial, Monterey and French Norman traditions.

How to fold North of Montana into your trip.

North of Montana works as the anchor for an outing connecting a surviving fragment of Santa Monica's Gold Coast, a Case Study House created by two central figures of American modern design and a museum modeled on an ancient Roman villa above the Pacific.

Begin at Annenberg Community Beach House, occupying ground developed during the 1920s as the oceanfront estate of actress Marion Davies and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Architect Julia Morgan designed the original 110-room mansion, which became a celebrated gathering place for Davies, Hearst, Hollywood figures and international dignitaries during the height of Santa Monica's Gold Coast era. Demolition removed the mansion in 1956, yet the surviving guesthouse and tiled swimming pool retained major physical elements of the estate; those structures later became central components of the public beach complex that opened in 2009 with support from the Annenberg Foundation. Continue to Eames House, designed in 1945 and completed in 1949 as Case Study House 8 for Charles and Ray Eames. John Entenza had launched the Case Study House program through Arts & Architecture in 1945 to investigate modern residential construction for the postwar United States, and the Eameses initially developed a steel-framed Bridge House with Eero Saarinen before reconsidering its placement. Years spent visiting the site led Charles and Ray to preserve its meadow, producing a revised residence and studio positioned along the edge of the property. Steel frames for both structures rose in only a day and a half in March 1949, and the couple moved into the completed house on Christmas Eve, living and working there for the remainder of their lives. Conclude at Getty Villa Museum, where J. Paul Getty transformed the expansion of his antiquities collection into an architectural reconstruction rooted in the ancient Mediterranean. Getty began acquiring antiquities in Rome in 1939 and opened galleries at his Malibu ranch house to the public in 1954, but continued collecting demanded substantially greater space. In 1968 he chose to create a new museum modeled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, the Roman residence buried by Vesuvius in AD 79 and rediscovered during the eighteenth century with sculptures, wall paintings and more than one thousand carbonized papyrus scrolls. The museum opened in 1974, two years before Getty died without ever seeing the completed building in person. The progression moves from Morgan's vanished Gold Coast mansion and surviving oceanfront structures through the Eameses' postwar reinvention of domestic modernism and culminates in Getty's reconstruction of an ancient Roman villa, connecting three radically different conceptions of architecture along the northern Santa Monica Bay.

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