Why you should experience Westwood in Los Angeles, California.
Westwood is an academic enclave where West Los Angeles's metropolitan character meets a university-driven commercial center, interwar residential development and one of the city's most concentrated collections of Mediterranean-inspired civic architecture.
Positioned between Brentwood, Holmby Hills, and Century City, the neighborhood occupies a broad section of the Westside where Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards cross a finer residential and commercial grid extending north toward the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Low-rise apartment streets, single-family blocks and denser commercial corridors create pronounced changes in scale, with mature residential sections giving way to the tightly organized blocks of Westwood Village and the taller Wilshire corridor. Westwood Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through a long north-south axis whose gradual transition from neighborhood commerce to the Village concentrates pedestrian activity as the street approaches the northern end of the district. Wilshire Boulevard creates a secondary passage through a markedly larger architectural scale, where office and residential towers form an urban edge distinct from the lower streets extending behind them. The result is a neighborhood whose unusually legible shifts between residential fabric, commercial concentration and metropolitan boulevard reveal how coordinated development reshaped a former ranch landscape into a major Westside center.
What you should know about Westwood.
Westwood is best known for emerging from the vast former Rancho San José de Buenos Ayres through one of the most consequential privately directed development campaigns in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Department-store entrepreneur Arthur Letts purchased 3,296 acres of ranchland for $2 million in 1919 and entrusted development to the Janss Investment Company, whose principals Edwin and Harold Janss began subdividing Westwood during the opening 1920s. The first subdivision took shape between Santa Monica and Pico boulevards in 1922, followed by additional tracts as the Janss company constructed houses and commercial buildings to accelerate settlement. William Fox acquired 99 acres along Santa Monica Boulevard in 1924 for a studio property that expanded substantially during the following two decades, giving the southern portion an early connection with the motion-picture industry. Selection of nearby land for the University of California's new Los Angeles campus in 1925 radically strengthened demand across the district, and Janss development advanced northward around the future institution. Harland Bartholomew and L. Deming Tilton prepared the commercial plan for Westwood Village with angled streets, irregular blocks and Mediterranean-inspired buildings whose towers were positioned as visual beacons for motorists. The Village launched in 1929 with 34 establishments, and the Janss Investment Corporation transferred its headquarters there in 1931 as the company shifted its attention toward the growing commercial center. By 1934 the Village contained 172 businesses, rising to 225 two years later and 452 offices and stores by 1939. More than 1,700 people worked there by the close of that first decade, turning a newly developed section of former ranchland into a major commercial district during the same period that Los Angeles expanded decisively westward.
Percy Parke Lewis gave the emerging commercial center its dominant vertical marker when the Fox Westwood Village Theatre opened in 1931, two years after William Fox announced plans for a cinema serving the rapidly growing university district. Lewis used Mediterranean Revival architecture for the building and raised an elaborate tower above Broxton Avenue, with chimera figures facing outward from its upper stages and decorative lighting incorporating UCLA blue and gold. The theater's original stage curtain carried images of college students in classical dance and athletic scenes, making the relationship between the commercial district and its neighboring university explicit inside the auditorium. S. Charles Lee supplied a striking architectural counterpoint across Broxton Avenue with the Bruin Theatre in 1937, using Streamline Moderne forms and prominent neon to address motorists moving through an increasingly automobile-oriented district. The Janss headquarters nearby had already given Westwood Boulevard another major focal point through Allison & Allison's octagonal 1929 building, whose tower and corner placement reinforced the commercial plan's strategy of placing visually distinctive architecture at important intersections. These buildings turned theaters, shops and company offices into architectural markers within a coordinated street composition, giving Westwood Village a visual coherence uncommon among Los Angeles commercial districts assembled incrementally across separate parcels.
How to fold Westwood into your trip.
Westwood works as the anchor for an outing connecting a theatrical fantasy transplanted from a film studio, an early Beverly Hills estate shaped through decades of horticultural experimentation and an immense oil-fortune residence overlooking the Los Angeles Basin.
Begin at The Witch's House, designed by Hollywood art director Harry Oliver in 1921 as a movie set and office for Irvin V. Willat Productions in Culver City. Oliver conceived the steep-roofed structure as an exaggerated English cottage, applying the theatrical distortion of film-set architecture to a building whose irregular roofline and storybook proportions later became closely associated with the emerging Storybook style. The structure was subsequently moved to Walden Drive in Beverly Hills, converting a piece of early motion-picture production design into permanent residential architecture and preserving a direct physical connection between the Westside and the film colony developing nearby. Continue to Virginia Robinson Gardens, where Harry and Virginia Robinson occupied Nathaniel Dryden's 1911 residence and began converting surrounding chaparral hillsides into seven distinct garden areas. Their landscape eventually encompassed the Great Lawn, Italian Terrace Garden, Palm Forest, rose gardens and a pool terrace, with Mediterranean fountains and water features drawing upon objects and ideas gathered during international travel. Virginia Robinson later directed substantial philanthropic activity toward Los Angeles cultural institutions and transferred the estate, together with a $1 million endowment, to Los Angeles County in 1974; botanical experimentation followed under Francis Ching of the Los Angeles Arboretum. Conclude at Greystone Mansion & Gardens, created after oil entrepreneur Edward L. Doheny gave his son Ned Doheny 12.58 acres in 1926. Gordon B. Kaufmann designed the residence and Paul Thiene developed its landscape, with construction beginning in February 1927 and the Doheny family moving into the house in September 1928. The completed estate cost $3,166,578.12, including $1,238,378.76 for the mansion, whose steel-reinforced concrete structure was faced in Indiana limestone beneath Welsh slate. Fifty-five livable rooms occupied 46,054 square feet, and the entertainment wing incorporated a motion-picture theater, bowling alley and billiard room. Beverly Hills acquired the surviving property in 1965 and dedicated the 18.3-acre estate as a public park in 1971. The progression moves from a film designer's theatrical cottage through the Robinsons' horticultural estate and culminates in Kaufmann's vast Doheny commission, tracing three radically different forms of private design across the affluent districts surrounding Westwood.
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