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  • Built in 1923 on Lot 14 in Tract 3668
  • Original commissioner: real estate investor Harold Hyde Braly
  • Architect: Johnson, Kaufmann & Coate (this firm's principals, Reginald D. Johnson, Gordon B. Kaufmann, and Roland E. Coate, would separate by the end of 1924, each going into practice on their own) 
  • Contractor: Security Housing Corporation, of which Harold H. Braly was president
  • On July 9, 1923, the Department of Buildings issued H. H. Braly a permit for a 15-room house at 165 Muirfield Road; on August 20, 1923, a revised permit was issued changing a specification for solid brick exterior walls to brick veneer 
  • Harold Braly's older brother Arthur Hughes Braly had recently completed 223 North Rossmore Avenue around corner from 165 Muirfield; both houses overlook the Wilshire Country Club fairway
  • Harold Braly had married Henrietta Adele Janss on April 2, 1903, at 850 South Bonnie Brae Street, the home of her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Peter Janss, with a reception afterward at Cumnock Hall on Figueroa Street. Etta Braly was the only daughter of the Jansses' four children. Dr. Janss's net worth was attained through much more than the fees he earned as a physician; considerable property had been acquired, the value of which had risen—and would continue to rise—with the expansion of Los Angeles. Family ties tightened further when, in August 1908, Harold Braly's sister Emma, recently divorced from absconding polo player Howard Graham Bundrem, married Etta's brother Herman Janss, a doctor as was his brother Edwin and their father. While extended Janss family members had early on built houses close to one another in Windsor Square (opened in 1911), with extended family members such as Harold and Arthur Braly building just west in Hancock Park, their interests the development of Westwood had many of them moving on to Holmby Hills, which marked an early point of demotion of Hancock Park in the hierarchy of Los Angeles neighborhoods of affluence
  • The Braly family—pronounced "Brawley"—had arrived in California in 1849 to start their fortune supplying Gold Rush miners, settling in Los Angeles in the early '90s in St. James Park, which opened in 1888, preceding Chester Place as then, arguably, the most exclusive residential enclave in the city. (The Bralys occupied both #9 and #38 St. James Park; their full story can be seen in our linked history of the latter.) The Janss family, who had long been subdividing property in parts of eastern Los Angeles city and county, in the San Fernando Valley, and in Orange County before developing Westwood, planned a residential compound for themselves on six Windsor Square lots, with Fifth Street as the southern border, between Windsor and Lorraine boulevards. Janss Investment Company partners were Edwin, Harold, and Herman Janss and their father Dr. Peter Janss, along with the latter's son-in-law Harold Braly; the intention was to build four houses in the compound for all but Herman. Only 434 South Windsor and 455 Lorraine were completed. Perhaps the family began to think better of working together as well as living together, a lovely dynastic idea that seldom pleases a majority for long; amusingly, an article on the Windsor Square plan in the Times of September 9, 1911, carried the subtitle "Janss Household Is Settled for Next Century." Edwin and Herman Janss would wind up near each other in Los Feliz by 1923, while their sister Henrietta Braly and her brother-in-law Arthur Braly, as noted, would choose Hancock Park by that date. The family compound idea was not at all dead, however, one forming within a decade around the north end of the Los Angeles Country Club
  • Dr. Peter Janss died at California Lutheran Hospital on Hope Street on November 18, 1926; his funeral was held from 165 Muirfield Road
  • It is unclear as to just when Harold and Etta Braly decided to leave Hancock Park, where they were living with her mother Emma Janss; in any case, a 20-room house would be designed by Gordon Kaufmann at 10224 Charing Cross Road in Holmby Hills for the Muirfield Road household. The new residence would be connected to the property of Arthur Letts Jr. at 10236 Charing Cross, a Gothic Tudor design of Arthur R. Kelly completed in 1927 that would in due course become the Playboy Mansion. Arthur Letts had built one of the earliest Hancock Park houses, 356 South Rossmore Avenue, in 1920. As the knotty trifurcated dynasty with many duplicate surnames expanded, Arthur's sister Gladys had married Etta Braly's brother Harold Janss in 1911. Gladys and Harold had Gordon Kaufmann design a Holmby Hills house for them at 375 North Carolwood Drive, close but not too close to other members of the family. (That house was later lived in by Gregory Peck and was demolished in 2006.) Plans for the house at 10224 Charing Cross would soon change somewhat; as it happened, only Etta and her mother would be moving to Holmby Hills
  • Off on a duck-hunting trip, Harold Braly died at 52 shortly after his car collided with a trailer truck on December 12, 1931, while driving north toward Bakersfield on the nortoriously dangerous Ridge Route. In the car with him was his son-in-law Felton Stowe Hollister, his daughter Dorris's husband, who was only slightly injured. His large obituary in the Times on December 14 described him as a businessman and former Pacific Coast singles and doubles tennis champion. It seems that his bonhomie and athleticism appear to have more than made up for his disinterest in working quite as hard as other family members in their various real estate ventures. Etta Braly and her mother moved as planned to Holmby Hills though, interestingly, Etta died before Mrs. Janss, expiring on October 4, 1935, after an operation at St. Vincent's Hospital. She was 55. Emma Janss died at 10224 Charing Cross Road at the age of 85 on January 29, 1944; her granddaughter Dorris Hollister and her family, and Dorris's single brothers Harold Hyde Braly Jr. and Robert Braly, had moved into 10224 after Etta's death


Successive residents of 165 Muirfield Road included its original commissioner, Harold Hyde Braly;
Katharine Phillips Rollins, putting in a brief appearance before a divorce; Annis Van Nuys
Schweppe and her husband Richard Jewett Schweppe, seen arriving at the opera—
he was a staunch pillar of the Los Angeles Grand Opera Association,
which existed from 1924 to 1934; and Patricia Barham,
who soon moved on to 100 Fremont Place.


  • Perhaps due to a delay in the plans for the new house but before Harold's death, the Bralys and Mrs. Janss had moved from 165 Muirfield to 627 South Irving Boulevard nearby in Windsor Square, where his funeral was held. 165 was rented to John Lind Carson Rollins, a Los Angeles man apparently in the investment business but frequently described in newspaper social columns slyly as a man-about-town. Rollins had married Katharine Phillips, the younger daughter of powerful attorney Lee Allen Phillips of 4 Berkeley Square, in 1926. Renting 165 Muirfield rather than buying it was perhaps a good idea. By 1932 Mr. Rollins had left Kay, as she was known; wasting no time, she got a Nevada divorce and married Herbert Godfrey Day, a son of the president of the Pacific Gas and Electric Corporation, on August 25 of that year
  • There were still buyers with deep enough pockets in the nadir of the Depression to afford what had become Hancock Park's white elephants barely a decade after the subdivision's opening; by the spring of 1933, banker Richard Jewett Schweppe and his wife née Annis Van Nuys of the Southern California Van Nuyses were in possession of 165 Muirfield Road. (Another daughter of Isaac Newton Van Nuys, who'd moved his 1898 house from an earlier suburb to 357 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square in 1915, was Mrs. James Rathwell Page of Windsor Square's 354 South Windsor Boulevard.) Heirs married heiresses; Schweppe was a son of the Schweppes of St. Louis; his brother Charles and his wife, née Laura Shedd of the aquarium Shedds, were among the biggest fish in Chicago. Their daughter married an Armour and their house in Lake Forest, among that suburb's most lavish and attractive, has become known for tragedy and myth
  • Richard Schweppe, Andover and Yale '00, had come west after having been head of the Central and South American operations of the United Fruit Company based in Costa Rica, stopping first in Arizona Territory in 1908 to set up as a cattle rancher. Me married Nona Kingsbury there in July 1909; she died six weeks after giving birth to their daughter Nona on October 24, 1910. It was on to Los Angeles by early 1912, where Richard's older brother William had come a decade before and gone into real estate development. Richard followed the same career path, moving into the Jonathan Club as he settled into the life of a burgher. He combined eastern social clout with western when he married Annis Van Nuys, Wellesley '03, on July 14, 1913, the ceremony taking place at the Van Nuys residence then at West Sixth Street and Loma Drive (which, as mentioned, would soon be moved to 357 Lorraine Boulevard, where it stands today). The couple, who do not seem to have had any children of their own, first lived at 610 South Gramercy Place, where they remained—later also maintaining a house on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica—until moving to Hancock Park
  • On May 9, 1933, the Department of Buildings issued R. J. Schweppe a permit authorizing the rearrangement of rooms and a two-story, 30-by-30-foot addition; a permit issued on October 20, 1933, authorized a new reinforced concrete chimney, for which Schweppe had hired the firm of Morgan, Walls & Clements to integrate into the design of the house
  • Richard J. Schweppe died at 165 Muirfield Road on May 12, 1940, after a brief illness, two months shy of his 64th birthday. Large obituaries appeared in local papers as well as in The New York Times, with notices appearing in smaller papers across the country
  • Annis Van Nuys Schweppe remained at 165 Muirfield Road for more than 25 years and appears to have still been in possession of it when she died on August 22, 1966, at the age of 85 at Good Samaritan Hospital. According to the Times, she had spent the previous two years there. Interestingly, her sister Kate Van Nuys Page had died at the same hospital the month before following a long illness. According to Mrs. Page's large obituary in the Times on July 18, the sisters had recently sold their father's I. N. Van Nuys Building at Spring and Seventh streets downtown, which had opened in 1912
  • By the summer of 1967, the Los Angeles social figure Patricia "Patte" Barham moved into 165 Muirfield Road. She was the daughter of Frank Barham, a physician who began managing the Los Angeles Herald with his brother after the paper's purchase by William Randolph Hearst in 1911, serving as publisher from 1922 to 1950 through the paper's various mergers. Having divorced her husband when Patte was a child, Patte's mother acquired the title of Princess Jessica Meshki-Gleboff in 1940. Her husband the prince—a title of dubious origins acquired since earlier days as a socially ambitious Hollywood actor known as George Du Count—claimed to have once been in the service of the imperial family at the time of the Russian revolution. His tales influenced his stepdaughter to co-author, with the subject's daughter Maria, Rasputin: The Man Behind the Myth, A Personal Memoir. The book was a curious attempt to exonerate the famous mystic. Somewhat more convincingly, Barham had years before covered the Korean War for the Hearst Syndicate. Her stay at 165 Muirfield Road was brief: it seems that appealing to her more was 100 Fremont Place, which the Archdiocese of Los Angeles owned for use as the Archibishop's residence from 1927 until after Cardinal McIntyre retired in 1970
  • Soon after acquiring 165 Muirfield Road, Miss Barham was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety on July 28, 1967, for a 17-by-35-foot swimming pool
  • Occupying 165 Muirfield Road in the early 1970s was department-store executive Teller Weinmann. Interestingly, he had been named president of The Broadway department stores, the original outlet of which had been developed by Arthur Letts Sr. from 1896 into a downtown Los Angeles retail powerhouse and that Arthur Letts Jr. sold for $10,000,000 in 1926. (Letts Sr. had also financed his employee John G. Bullock's eponymous high-end retail venture that became most famous for its Bullock's-Wilshire store)
  • The timeline of the ownership of 165 Muirfield Road is unclear after Patte Barham moved to Fremont Place, though it may be that she retained ownership, renting it, to 1986, when the Canadian Government purchased the property for use as a residence for its consul, which it remains


Illustrations: Private Collections; LAT