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  • Built in 1924 on Lot 15 in Tract 3668 (later redesignated Lot 3 in Tract 6748)
  • Original commissioner: per the original bulding permit, building contractor Thomas C. Marlowe
  • Architect: Robert D. Farquhar
  • Thomas C. Marlowe is designated as "owner" on the original building permit for 243 Muirifeld Road, which was indicated on that document with an initial designation of 235 Muirfield Road; Marlowe was a nominal stand-in for the actual owner, cement-company executive Norman Macbeth. A longtime collaborator of Robert D. Farquhar, Marlowe also operated independently as a contractor on such projects as the relocation of the I. N. Van Nuys house to 357 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square in 1915. Independently, Farquhar had also just completed 212 Muirfield Road nearby for Eva Fudger, who had Roland E. Coate Sr. design 211 Muirfield Road two years later. Farquhar and Marlowe collaborated on 255 Muirfield Road in 1925
  • The adjacent 243 and 247 Murfield Road were projects for two executives of the Riverside Portland Cement Company, Norman Macbeth, the firm's sales manager, and John Garfield Treanor, Riverside Portland's manager. As they were planning 243 Muirfield Road, Marlowe and Farquhar were completing 247 Muirfield next door on Lots 16 and 17 of Tract 3668, the original building permit for which also carried Thomas C. Marlowe's name as nominal owner; the actual first owner was Treanor. The Treanor house, now lost, was reached along with 243 via a shared driveway off the street. Interestingly, 247 was demolished in 1970 and replaced by the sister- and brother-in-law of Norman Macbeth's eventual stepdaughter; see also our story of 227 Muirfield Road) 
  • On May 7, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued a permit in the name of Thomas C. Marlowe for a two-story, 12-room residence at 235 Muirfield Road, soon renumbered 243
  • Cement-company executive and golf-course designer Norman Macbeth was born near Manchester, England, on March 1, 1879, and, sailing from Liverpool, arrived in New York on June 24, 1903. For reasons unknown he settled first in Indianapolis, where on December 18, 1906, he married Lucia Holliday of that city. His work as a salesman having taken him to Pittsburgh for a brief period, the newlyweds lived there before returning to Indianapolis, from which they moved to Los Angeles in 1909. There, Norman Macbeth took up a sales position with the recently formed Riverside Portland Cement Company. The Macbeths, whose son John Holliday had been born in Indianapolis on August 31, 1908, first rented a cottage at 2911 South Harvard Boulevard. After a few years at 1710 South Hobart Boulevard in Harvard Heights, Macbeth bought a building lot in the Western Wilshire Heights subdivision


3823 West Seventh Street as seen in the trade journal The Architect and Engineer of July 1919


  • 243 Muirfield Road was not the first house designed by the team of Farquhar and Marlowe to be occupied by Norman and Lucia Macbeth. The Department of Buildings had issued Mr. Macbeth a permit for a two-story, 10-room English-style house at 3823 West Seventh Street designed by Farquhar; the family now consisted of Norman, Lucia, John, and Norman Jr., who'd been born on November 5, 1910. Alexander arrived on May 6, 1914. Mr. Macbeth left for Europe in October 1918 to manage the Coblenz district of the Red Cross, during which time his wife and children went to Indianapolis to live with her parents. Sadly, while playing with the son of his namesake grandfather's chauffeur on the banks of the White River in Broad Ripple—a village not yet annexed to Indianapolis—John Holliday Macbeth drowned on June 9, 1919. After burying their son in Indiana, the Macbeths returned to Los Angeles the next month. On March 31, 1920, Lucia Macbeth gave a tea at 3823 West Seventh for her sister Evelyn Patterson, who was visiting from Chicago; eight days later, of causes unclear, Alexander died a month shy of his sixth birthday
  • Norman Macbeth was not just an industrialist—he had risen briskly in rank at the Riverside Portland Cement Company alongside John Treanor—he was also an amateur golf champion whose second notable career was designing golf courses. He is credited with laying out the prized greens of the Wilshire Country Club, which were inaugurated in December 1920. It seems natural that his new house in Hancock Park would be close to the course; its back yard would overlook the club's eighth green. While the Macbeths and their surviving son had moved into 243 Muirfield Road by late 1924, the house at 3823 West Seventh Street was retained, perhaps being rented after the family left for Hancock Park
  • While the state of the Macbeth's marriage during the '20s is unknown, it cannot have been helped by having lost two children in less than a year; Lucia Macbeth, not one to be content as a housewife, had become a member of the city's Board of Education. On July 7, 1928, the Times reported that Norman Macbeth had filed for divorce from Lucia, charging desertion. It seems that Mrs. Macbeth had left home over a year earlier and taken Norman Jr. to live in the Seventh Street house. (Junior would become a Stanford- and Harvard-educated lawyer who later became an anthroposophist and an anti-Darwinist, which is apparently not the same thing as being anti-evolution; he and his mother were listed on Seventh Street in the 1937 city directory, she moving to Indianapolis soon after.) Norman Macbeth remarried in March 1932; his bride, who'd had two children before obtaining a Reno divorce in December 1930, was Lucille Chandler Stephens, whose father Jefferson Chandler and brother Jefferson Paul Chandler were prominent Los Angeles attorneys. The newlywed Macbeths moved into 243 Muirfield Road, which Norman had retained after divorcing his first wife. Interesting is that Lucille's daughter Betty Stephens would marry Wheeler Coberly, the brother of William Coberly, who'd been living at 227 Muirfield Road when he and his wife bought and demolished 247 Muirfield Road in 1970, replacing it in 1972. (The Wheeler Coberlys would divorce, she remarrying moderist architect Raphael Soriano in 1952)
  • Apparently still averse to having his own name on building permits, Norman Macbeth had one for a small addition to 243 Muirfield Road issued in the name of Riverside Cement cashier James H. Woods by the Department of Building and Safety July 12, 1938. Macbeth had hired architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to design a roof to cover an existing porch
  • Norman Macbeth died at Good Samaritan Hospital at the age of 61 on September 5, 1940. A funeral was held at 243 Muirfield Road two days later. Lucille Macbeth made plans to sell the house soon after
  • John Jacob Pike, who had a long connection to Hancock Park—at least as long as a connection to the subdivision could have been in the early 1940s—spent his teenage years in the house his father built at 600 Muirfield Road in 1925. Pike married Marion Hewlett of San Francisco in 1935; by early 1937 they became the owners of 667 South June Street, from which they would move to 243 Muirfield Road by early 1943 with their daughter Jeffie, born in August 1940 and son John Jacob Pike Jr., born in October 1942. Seriously social, the Pikes would often be noted and not infrequently pictured in society-page coverage from the time of their honeymoon. Not that Jack Pike was stuffy, but it seems that, echoing Lucia Macbeth, Mrs. Pike had an independent streak that had her interested in a wider, more sophisticated circle than one composed of standard-issue Southwest Blue Book Hancock Parkers
  • On October 26, 1948, the Department of Building and Safety issued John J. Pike a permit for a 50-foot irregularly shaped swimming pool at 243 Muirfield Road, which appears to still be in place today
  • The end of the Pikes' marriage came in December 1950 after three unsuccessful reconciliations, according to the Los Angeles Times. Jack remarried and left 243 Muirfield Road; Marion never did marry again but became a well-known portrait artist whose sitters would include Zubin Metha, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962 to 1978, Norton Simon, and Rosalind Russell. Mrs. Pike's portrait of Ronald Reagan appeared on the cover of Time magazine in October 1966. On December 2, 1967, the Times ran a fawning feature on her titled "Angeleno Paints Her Way Into the Coco Chanel Legend." "It has been Marion Pike's rare luck, inspiration and delight to have spent the last seven months in Coco Chanel's salon on the Rue Cambon in Paris.... Mrs. Pike, a half-time Parisienne for the last decade, is a Los Angeles artist and social figure who arrived late at art, but none-the-less intensely. She paints, mostly in acrylic with an occasional touch of oils, in her apartment-studio on the Blvd. St. Germain in Paris and in her home on the greeny edge of the Wilshire Country Club."
  • On September 2, 1970, the Department of Building and Safety issued Marion Pike a permit for a one-story, 42-by-42-foot studio to be added to the north side of the garage wing of 243 Muirfield Road 
  • On December 21, 1978, John Jacob Pike Jr. married Ariane Raoul-Duval, reportedly the daughter of his mother's best friend, at 243 Muirfield Road
  • "Popular socialite and aficionado of the arts," per her Times obituary two days later, Marion Pike died at 243 Muirfield Road on February 4, 1998, age 84. Her home of 55 years was already on the market, with advertising having begun to appear in the Times in January citing an asking price of $2,850,000
  • Owners since 1998 appear to have done little to alter the now century-old house at 243 Muirfield Road