Why you should experience Wilshire Montana in Los Angeles, California.
Wilshire Montana is a refined enclave where the Westside's coastal character meets tree-lined residential streets, interwar apartment architecture and a neighborhood fabric descending gently toward the Pacific.
Positioned between North of Montana, Mid-City, and Downtown Santa Monica, the neighborhood occupies a broad coastal terrace extending through Wilshire Boulevard, Montana Avenue and California Avenue between the city's eastern boundary and the bluffs above the ocean. Long residential blocks run through a dense canopy of mature street trees, with detached houses giving way to duplexes, courtyard apartments and larger multifamily buildings as the terrain approaches the commercial corridors. Movement through Wilshire Montana alternates between quiet residential streets and active east-west avenues, creating a compact pattern in which housing from several twentieth-century periods sits within walking distance of shops and the coastline. Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival and Streamline Moderne buildings punctuate blocks subsequently filled by Mid-century and contemporary construction, leaving the district's architectural chronology unusually visible. The result is a neighborhood whose planted streets, varied housing scale, commercial edges and gently sloping coastal terrain preserve a concentrated portrait of Santa Monica's twentieth-century residential growth.
What you should know about Wilshire Montana.
Wilshire Montana is best known for residential growth tied to Santa Monica's expansion during the 1920s, when rapid population gains transformed open tracts north of Wilshire Boulevard into increasingly dense suburban neighborhoods. The city entered the decade with 15,252 residents and reached 37,146 by 1930, creating intense demand for new housing across the coastal terrace. Developers subdivided remaining parcels as detached houses, duplexes and apartment buildings spread outward from the older city center. Spanish Colonial Revival architecture became particularly prominent after the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego helped popularize the style across Southern California. Courtyard apartments translated that architectural movement into a housing form suited to Santa Monica's growing population, arranging multiple residences around landscaped common spaces behind street-facing gateways. Mediterranean Revival and Tudor Revival houses appeared alongside these complexes, giving individual blocks an architectural range associated with the city's interwar prosperity. The onset of the Great Depression slowed construction sharply after 1929, leaving many surviving 1920s buildings as a concentrated architectural layer within the neighborhood. Renewed building later filled vacant properties without erasing the earlier mixture of detached residences and multifamily housing that had emerged during Santa Monica's most consequential prewar expansion.
Apartment construction accelerated through a separate wave during the 1930s and 1940s as Santa Monica absorbed workers connected with the region's expanding aircraft economy. Streamline Moderne architecture became particularly visible during this period, translating the aerodynamic forms associated with ships, automobiles and aircraft into rounded corners, horizontal bands and smooth stucco surfaces. Santa Monica developed one of Southern California's notable concentrations of the style, with apartment houses becoming an important vehicle for its spread through residential districts. World War II intensified housing pressure as Douglas Aircraft expanded production dramatically and employment in Santa Monica reached tens of thousands of workers. Small apartment buildings and multifamily residences accommodated part of that population surge across established neighborhoods north of Wilshire Boulevard. Construction continued after the war as returning servicemen, defense workers and new households sustained demand for housing near the coast. The resulting blocks place 1920s revival architecture beside Moderne and postwar buildings, making changing ideas about metropolitan housing visible within individual streets. Wilshire Montana consequently carries the architectural imprint of two distinct growth periods, first through the resort city's interwar residential expansion and then through the industrial and demographic forces that remade Santa Monica during and after World War II.
How to fold Wilshire Montana into your trip.
Wilshire Montana works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a pioneering Modern residence assembled from industrial components, a cultural institution occupying an airport complex with deep aviation history and an extraordinary hilltop estate created by a newspaper publisher.
Begin at Eames House, designed by Charles and Ray Eames as their own residence and studio under the Case Study House program organized by Arts & Architecture magazine. The commission originated in 1945 as Case Study House 8, with Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen initially proposing a dramatically cantilevered structure for the Pacific Palisades property. Charles and Ray subsequently revised the scheme after recognizing the qualities of the meadow, placing the completed house against the hillside and preserving the open ground in front. Construction in 1949 used prefabricated steel components ordered through industrial catalogs, producing a modular exterior filled with transparent, translucent and colored panels. The Eameses occupied the property from Christmas Eve 1949, and its interiors accumulated furniture, textiles, folk objects, plants and prototypes associated with their work. The house became inseparable from the couple's broader experiments in architecture, furniture, film, exhibitions and industrial design. Continue to 18th Street Arts Center, founded in Santa Monica in 1988 by artist Susanna Bixby Dakin and a group of artists seeking a permanent environment for creative production and exchange. The organization developed one of Southern California's longest-running artist residency programs, bringing practitioners from the United States and abroad into sustained contact with Los Angeles. Its Airport Campus later extended that work into the Santa Monica Airport cultural district, occupying ground whose aviation history reaches to the early twentieth century and the Douglas Aircraft era. Exhibitions, studios and residency spaces place contemporary artistic production within a district once dominated by aircraft manufacturing and testing. Conclude at Greystone Mansion & Gardens, commissioned by oil heir Edward Laurence Doheny as a wedding gift for his son Edward Jr. Architect Gordon B. Kaufmann designed the Tudor Revival residence, completed in 1928 with fifty-five rooms across 46,000 square feet. Landscape architect Paul Thiene developed the grounds across the eighteen-acre estate, incorporating terraces, formal gardens, fountains and broad stairways into its hillside setting. Edward Doheny Jr. died there in February 1929, only months after moving into the completed house. Beverly Hills acquired the property in 1965, preserving one of the largest surviving private estates from Southern California's interwar period. The progression moves from the Eameses' experimental steel-and-glass home through an arts institution embedded in Santa Monica's former aviation district and culminates at Kaufmann's immense Tudor Revival estate above the Los Angeles Basin.
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