Just Silver Lake: a love letter to the hills around the water

Silver Lake is a neighborhood built around a reservoir and folded into hills. Streets climb, switch back and sometimes simply give up and become public stairways. Houses perch on slopes that look across the water or down toward Sunset Boulevard, and on a clear day the San Gabriel Mountains sit on the horizon. It has been a home for artists, filmmakers, activists and architects for more than a century, and it still feels like a place people choose on purpose.

This is Tongva land, part of the Los Angeles basin the Tongva have lived in for thousands of years. In the early twentieth century the canyon here was known as Ivanhoe. William Mulholland built the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 1906 and the larger Silver Lake Reservoir in 1907 as emergency storage for a fast-growing city. The lake was named for Herman Silver, a former City Councilman and water commissioner who helped secure the land and the funding, not for the color of the water.

The movies arrived almost as early. In 1926 Walt Disney moved his studio to Hyperion Avenue, where Mickey Mouse was born and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was made; the studio buildings are long gone and a shopping center stands on the site. A few blocks away, Laurel and Hardy hauled a piano up the long public stairway off Vendome Street for The Music Box (1932), which won the first Academy Award for a live action comedy short. The steps are still there. On Sunset Boulevard near Sunset Junction, the Black Cat was the site of a February 1967 demonstration against police raids on gay bars, more than two years before Stonewall. It is now a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Above all, Silver Lake is an architecture town, one of the richest in Los Angeles for twentieth-century modern houses. Rudolph Schindler built the How House on Silver Ridge Avenue in 1925. Richard Neutra built his own home and studio, the VDL Research House, on Silver Lake Boulevard in 1932, and after a 1963 fire rebuilt it with his son Dion; it is now a National Historic Landmark. Around it on the east shore stands the cluster of Neutra houses known as the Neutra Colony. Raphael Soriano’s first house, the Lipetz House on Dillon Street, was finished in 1936. Harwell Hamilton Harris built the Hawk House in 1939, Gregory Ain designed the Avenel cooperative houses in 1947, and John Lautner’s Silvertop, designed in 1956, still crowns a hilltop above the water. Older houses tell another story, from the 1923 Canfield-Moreno Estate in the Moreno Highlands to the Spanish Revival and Craftsman homes along the hillside streets.

If you love the outdoors, there is the walking path around the reservoir, the Silver Lake Meadow that opened along its shore in 2011, the Silver Lake Recreation Center, and the neighborhood’s public stairways. If you love old and modern houses, there are few better places in Los Angeles to look, and many of them are still lived in and loved.

Just Silver Lake is where the record lives: the architects, the streets and the houses, so that when you’re ready to buy or sell, you already know the story. For neighboring Los Feliz, see Los Feliz Living; for Echo Park, Just Echo Park; and for Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Atwater Village and the rest of Northeast LA, Just NELA.

840 miles: a love letter to California

California isn’t a state so much as a state of mind, and after 24 years of helping people find their place in it, Debbie Pisaro loves it more now than the day she started. From the fog-soaked headlands of Mendocino to the palm-lined beaches of the south coast, across 840 miles of coastline and everything that unfolds inland, this is a place that rewards curiosity and invites reinvention. It’s where the redwoods meet the Pacific, where the desert blooms after winter rain, where snow-capped Sierra peaks look down on valleys of vineyards and orange groves. No single landscape defines it, and that’s exactly the point.

California has always been a place people come to become. The surfers and the screenwriters, the farmers and the founders, the artists and the architects, everyone who’s ever stood at the edge of this country and decided to stay. You can eat a Santa Barbara strawberry in the morning, hike through a Joshua Tree sunset that evening, and fall asleep to the sound of the ocean in Malibu. You can walk Ojai’s quiet streets at golden hour, lose an afternoon in a Healdsburg tasting room, or wander the Mission Revival courtyards of Santa Barbara and feel the whole long, layered history of the place.

Its cities are their own small countries. San Francisco’s fog and hills, Los Angeles’s sprawling creative engine, Sacramento’s historic rhythm, and the countless small towns in between, Cambria, Cayucos, Carmel, Mendocino, Idyllwild, each with its own accent, its own pace, its own light. And always, always, that light. The California light is a thing unto itself, the kind that’s drawn painters and cinematographers here for a hundred years and never stopped giving.

That is why Debbie named her company Coastline 840, for the 840 miles that hold all of it together. Whether the search is for a modernist house in Silver Lake, a Spanish Revival in Los Feliz, a mid-century in Studio City, a retreat in Ojai, or an architect-designed home anywhere along the coast, there’s a California waiting. Her architectural homes practice is at debbiepisaro.com, and her statewide work is at Coastline 840.