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  • Built in 1925 on a parcel comprised of the northerly 80 feet of Lot 16 and the southerly 10 feet of Lot 15 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: retired real estate operator Thomas Wright Phillips Sr.
  • Architect: Clarence J. Smale, then working for the construction firm of Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle
  • On February 17, 1925, the Department of Buildings issued permits to Thomas W. Phillips for a 12-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-44-foot garage at 536 Rimpau Boulevard
  • Ohio-born Thomas W. Phillips and wife Sallie and their family had come west to Pasadena from Chicago by the mid 1890s; he and a partner incorporated the Adams-Phillips Company in 1897 to handle bonds, real estate, and insurance matters and to finance homebuilding. By 1900 the Phillipses were living on fashionable South Hope Street in Los Angeles; in 1905 Phillips had the esteemed firm of Sumner Hunt and Wesley Eager build him a substantial shingled house at 2215 South Harvard Boulevard, which still stands on Sugar Hill. As a savvy real estate operator, Phillips would have understood even as early as 1920 that the West Adams district's day as the most exclusive in the city would be fading as new Wilshire-corridor tracts opened up. Their children married and gone—at least for the time being—the Phillipses sold 2215 South Harvard and moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel for the time being. In 1921 they bought the newly built 681 South Norton Avenue (demolished in 1962); perhaps realizing that south of Wilshire and east of Irving wasn't quite the ticket, they rented 400 South Arden in Windsor Square while planning 546 Rimpau Boulevard in Hancock Park, which trumped even Windsor Square and Fremont Place in prestige
  • Thomas W. Phillips was 72 and Sallie 62 when they moved into 546 Rimpau Boulevard. The new house, which would have been big for a retired couple, would actually also be occupied by the couple's two grown children and their children; by 1930, Thomas W. Phillips Jr. and his sister Marie Angelita, both divorced, and a daughter of each were living with the senior Phillipses at 546. Junior had been ranching in the San Fernanado Valley; he'd married Marion Henderson in Tacoma on January 31, 1910, a daughter, Marion, arriving on October 3. Madeleine Phillips arrived on April 22, 1912. The Phillipses appear to have divorced and remarried again in 1924 before giving up and divorcing a second time; by 1930 Marion and her namesake were living with her brother and his wife on Irving Boulevard in New Windsor Square. Angelita Phillips had married Newark-born Frederic James Dennis, Harvard '12, then working as an attorney, on March 4, 1919; their wedding was announced in both the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles and noted in Vogue and Town & Country. The Dennises moved into an apartment at 503 South Hobart Avenue; Katherine Jane Dennis arrived on March 11, 1920. The Dennises' marriage soured very quickly; she and the baby were living with her parents on Norton Avenue by 1921. (Frederic Dennis remarried in 1923 and gave up law to become a magazine editor and feature writer. After a second divorce he married again in 1929 and was known as an expert on 16-century England when he died in 1945)
  • Thomas W. Phillips Sr. died at 536 Rimpau Boulevard on July 22, 1932, at the age of 79. Obituaries, including a sizable news item with his picture that ran in the Times on July 24, curiously mentions Sallie and Angelita as survivors but not his son, whose trail grows cold after April 1930, apparently dead or otherwise missing by the time of his father's death. Offering a persepective on what constituted long-term history in Los Angeles in 1932, the illustrated obituary describes Mr. Phillips Sr. as a local pioneer and his firm as one of the oldest of its type in the city. Marion Phillips married divorced Pasadena attorney Cornelius Thornton Waldo in Yuma in December 1933; in August 1936, Madeleine married war correspondent Robinson Maclean and moved to Toronto. Sallie Phillips died on December 31, 1938; her obituary in the Times the next day does not mention her son
  • Calling him a "society burglar," the Times reported on July 16, 1939, that 54-year-old Frank Fuller had been arrested in Glendale after a long string of robberies in affluent districts including Hancock Park, where he'd burglarized Howard Hughes's house at 211 Muirfield Road and extracted $2,000 worth of loot from the Phillips residence


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on June 29, 1941


  • With her parents and brother gone, Angelita Phillips Dennis was now the owner of 536 Rimpau Boulevard. Before she left, there would be 21-year-old Katherine's wedding at home on July 29, 1941. The groom was another Los Angeles native, 22-year-old Lloyd Mills Jr., who was then studying ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. The couple had two children born in Boston before divorcing within the decade. The 1950 census enumerated on April 21 has Katherine married to businessman Henry Seward Van Dyke and living in Pasadena with Carol Mills and Lloyd Mills III, though marriage records indicate that the wedding took place in Santa Barbara in July 1. (In February 1954, Lloyd Mills Jr. married Joan O'Melveny Morrison at her parents' house at 212 Muirfield Road.) The Van Dykes were eventually divorced, she marrying Kenneth J. McGinnis in November 1961
  • Angelita Dennis sold 536 Rimpau Boulevard not long after her daughter's wedding; she moved to an apartment at 887 South Lucerne Boulevard
  • Purchasing 536 Rimpau from Angelita Dennis was Narcisse Sentous Garnier, the widow of Peter (a.k.a. Pierre) Garnier, both of whom were natives of the city and of actual Los Angeles pioneer stock, their parents having arrived from France in the 1860s. The Garniers built 2143 South Hobart Boulevard in 1913 when West Adams Heights was among the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city but which would by the Depression be undergoing demographic changes that had old families such as the Garniers heading for newer Wilshire-corridor suburbs including Hancock Park. Mrs. Garnier held on to her Hobart house until moving to Rimpau Boulevard
  • On September 22, 1942, the Department of Building and Safety issued Mrs. Peter Garnier a permit for alterations to the dining room and library of 536 Rimpau that included wall relocations
  • Narcisse Garnier appears to have retained ownership of 536 Rimpau Boulevard until the house was put on the market in early 1966; she died in Los Angeles on December 29, 1968. Audette Garnier, a noted philanthropist, died in 1986     
  • Real estate investor Paul Gader acquired 536 Rimpau Boulevard by the summer of 1973. On July 20, 1973, the Department of Building and Safety issued him a permit to build n 18-by-36-foot pool on the property
  • Dr. Tadeusz Wellisz, a plastic surgeon, occupied 536 Rimpau Boulevard from the late 1980s until 2012. The property was on the market by late 2011 with an asking price of $3,395,000 and was sold following summer



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT