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  • Built in 1929 on a parcel comprised of Lots 270 and 271 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: wholesale hardware executive Byron J. Badham Sr.
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On June 17, 1929, the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit to B. J. Badham for a 20-room house with integral garage at 351 North June Street
  • Born in Shenandoah, Iowa, on January 12, 1879, Byron James Badham came west when his English-born father, an elder in the Mormon church, became an L.D.S. missionary in Los Angeles in the years leading up to the Boom of the '80s. James Richison Badham was listed as a "drummer" employed by a music store in the 1883 city directory and had become a deputy tax assessor for the city and county before he died in 1888 as the Boom deflated. Byron, his mother, and his siblings remained in Southern California, Byron becoming a school teacher and principal at the Hewitt Street School, which was in today's Arts District. He married six-months-older, Iowa-born Jessie Maud Hoffman in the rear parlor of her parents' house on West Jefferson Street on July 22, 1902; Byron Jr., to be called Jack, arrived on the 16th of the following June. Edward Dick Badham (to be known as Dick) was born on August 12, 1906, with Kleva Allene trailing on January 9, 1914. By 1905 Byron had found room at the top when he was given a position as bookkeeper at his father-in-law's Hoffman Hardware Company, the wholesale firm having been incorporated by Edward A. Hoffman in 1900 after a decade in the business locally


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on November 24, 1929


  • Among the residences of Byron and Jessie Badham was one at 1286 West 29th Street facing north up Ellendale Place in the University district, next door to his mother. From there they moved a few blocks west to 1350 West Jefferson Street, built in the Hoffman Tract, developed by Jessie's father, who lived a block west at 1400 West Jefferson. The University neighborhoods, part of the larger West Adams district, became among the finest residential tracts in Los Angeles after the Boom of the '80s. In the 1920s, as the city's population was more than doubling and older West Adams houses became antiquated and expensive to maintain, more valuable as apartments and rooming houses (and in some cases fraternities and sororities), long-time residents began to look elsewhere in the open spaces of the geographically expanding city for lots in less dense regions—such as, eventually, Hancock Park. The Badhams made their initial break from West Adams by building a house at 446 South St. Andrews Place, north of Wilshire Boulevard and west of Western Avenue, in 1911. They later rented a house on Elmwood Avenue seven blocks north in the Larchmont district; in 1922 they bought the house being built at 238 Lorraine Boulevard in New Windsor Square by Sanson M. Cooper, builder of many new residences in what was then called the "West End" of the city. In terms of cachet, Hancock Park, sales of which began in September 1919, would eclipse all new residential tracts that had been developing in the Wilshire corridor, and a double lot there, such the Badhams would find on North June Street, would provide for even more of a sprawling statement house
  • Edward A. Hoffman died at the age of 73 at his Sierra Madre home on August 30, 1926. Byron Badham Sr. succeeded him as president of Hoffman Hardware. Jessie Hoffman's only sibling had died at the age of six; their mother had died in 1911. Left with considerable capital, the Badhams would soon be seeking out Ray J. Kieffer to design 351 North June Street. After being graduated from Stanford, Jack Badham married Bess Kissinger, whose family lived on North Wilton Place, in June 1925; he became secretary of Hoffman Hardware, before long rising to the vice-presidency with his brother succeeding him as secretary. Pomona College graduate Dick Badham married Marlborough girl Virginia Dabney of South Irving Boulevard in May 1929. On June 27, 1935, Kleva, who had been graduated from Marlborough and U.S.C., married Earl H. Hardage Jr.; he was in the advertising department of Hoffman Hardware. The Times reported that 1,000 guests were asked to their evening ceremony at the Wilshire Methodist Church, though just half that number were invited to the reception held afterward at 351 North June
  • While Jack Badham and his family chose to live in Beverly Hills and the Hardages in Brentwood, Dick Badham and his family remained near and in Hancock Park, occupying 124 North Citrus Avenue a few blocks west of his parents before moving in with them by 1956 as Byron and Jessie aged. Jessie Badham died at 79 on January 29, 1958. Her obituary in the Times noted that she had been a resident of Los Angeles for 72 years
  • On August 16, 1959, the Times reported that B. J. Badham had recently sold "a $90,000 estate at 351 N. June St." to attorney Charles T. Munger, a billionaire in the making later called Warren Buffett's right-hand man, who, with plans to build two new houses, had already been issued—the document is dated June 1, 1959—a demolition permit for the 30-year-old Badham house. The parcel comprised of Lots 270 and 271 in Tract 8320 was divided to accommodate residences designed by architect Edla Muir. Munger sold Lot 270, apparently with Edla Muir's plans, to Muriel Philp, widow of Broadway Department Store executive Harry G. R. Philp. Assigned the new address of 341 North June Street, a permit for it was issued by the Department of Building and Safety to Mrs. Philp on May 6, 1960. (The house is now considerably altered; Mrs. Philp was moving from the house her husband and his first wife had built in 1923 at 676 South Hobart Boulevard in Pellissier Square, a neighborhood quickly eclipsed socially by westerly subdivisions such as Hancock Park; 676 was demolished in 1966.) A permit for Muir's design for a new 351 North June Street on Lot 271, to become Charles Munger's own home, was issued on December 29, 1959


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT