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  • Built in 1922 on a parcel comprised of Lots 39 and 40 in Tract 3819 and Lots 5, 6, and 7 in Tract 5640; the site extended along Fourth Street from Muirfield Road to Rimpau Boulevard
  • Original commissioner: attorney and dairy operator Merritt Huntley Adamson
  • Architects: 1922: Elmer Grey for the original Italian Renaissance design, a rendering of which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on June 4, 1922 (as seen above); 1927: Morgan, Walls & Clements (Octavius W. Morgan and Stiles O. Clements, principal design directors) for significant floorplan additions and alterations; 1963: Rowland H. Crawford for extensive alterations converting Elmer Grey's original design to a Monterey Revival variation; 2015: Ty Kurtis Otjen and Bill Baldwin for extensive interior and exterior alterations converting Rowland Crawford's 1963 design to an updated Mediterranean Revival style
  • On May 19, 1922, the Department of Buildings issued M. H. Adamson permits for a two-story, sixteen-room residence and a one-story, 24-by-32-foot garage at 355 Muirfield Road. On April 11, 1925, Adamson was issued a permit for a 20-by-34-foot greenhouse at the southwest corner of his property (specifically, on Lot 7 in Tract 5640). The greenhouse was designed by Paul J. Howard, proprietor of Flowerland, a large "horticultural establishment," as his advertisements read, then located at La Brea Avenue and Third Street
  • After receiving his law degree from U.S.C., Merritt H. Adamson, the Los Angeles–born son of Arizona sheep rancher and territorial legislator John Quincy Adamson, was working as the foreman of the Malibu ranch of the very rich and powerful Rhoda May Knight Rindge, famous as a Malibu firebrand and widow of Frederick Hastings Rindge, when he met Mrs. Rindge's daughter Rhoda Agatha. Adamson married her at the Mission Inn in Riverside on November 18, 1915, a ceremony curiously not attended by her mother. In 1916 the Adamsons founded the large San Fernando Valley dairy that incorporated her first name spelled backward in its own name, Adohr Milk Farms




  • The Adamsons moved into 355 Muirfield Road with their two daughters, Rhoda-May Adamson (born on February 14, 1917) and Sylvia Rindge (born on May 18, 1921). Their son Merritt H. Adamson III was born on October 5, 1926
  • On September 12, 1925, the Department of Building and Safety issued Merritt Adamson a permit to add an additional stall to the garage with a staff room and bath above; Elmer Grey was the architect
  • In 1927, the Adamsons hired the firm of Morgan, Walls & Clements for significant renovations to 355 Muirfield Road. On September 16 of that year, the Department of Building and Safety issued M. H. Adamson a permit for the addition of a second-floor sleeping porch with an open loggia beneath it. A permit was issued on October 14 for the addition of a laundry/service wing to the house, which extended the Muirfield Road façade 43 feet to the north. Morgan, Walls & Clements also designed a chimney for new fireplaces in unspecified rooms on the first and second floors
  • Perhaps interesting in terms of future events, Morgan, Walls & Clements designed a 24-by-32-foot gun room addition to the garage/staff quarters, a permit for which was issued to M. H. Adamson by the Department of Building and Safety on January 14, 1928
  • In 1929, Morgan, Walls & Clements designed a house for the Adamsons, along with another for May Rindge, on family property at Malibu overlooking the Pacific. The Adamsons used their new house on weekends and during summers until 1937, when they began spending most of their time there. They would retain 355 Muirfield Road for business and social needs and as a voting address for the next 25 years
  • The Adamsons opened a subsidiary of Adohr Milk Farms in the late 1920s, the Adohr Creamery Company, on 20 acres at La Cienega Boulevard at Eighteenth Street, an intersection in a still undeveloped region but one more central to a westerly and southerly expanding Los Angeles. The facility processed and distributed products produced in Tarzana. With milk and butter remaining essential during the Depression, Adohr profits kept the family in high enough cotton even as the downturn bankrupted the family’s beef ranch and forced the Adamsons to sell much of their Malibu property to satisfy creditors
  • In a ceremony attended only the bride's immediate family at the Wilshire Methodist Episcopal Church—now the Wilshire United Methodist Church—on August 28, 1937, Rhoda-May Adamson married London-born Ian Richard Nevill Dallas, a fellow student at the Santa Barbara Teachers' College. Their daughter Leilani May Dallas was born on April 28 of the next year. Nevill Huntley Dallas was born on February 3, 1942
  • Mrs. Adamson's mother May Rindge died on February 8, 1941, reportedly leaving only $750 in cash after being declared bankrupt in 1940. Her holographic will left possessions to her daughter and sons Frederick Hastings Rindge Jr., who lived with her at 2263 South Harvard Boulevard, the senior Rindges' city house built in 1903, and Samuel Knight Rindge of 345 South Hudson Avenue in Hancock Park


The three faces of 355 Muirfield Road: 1922, 1963, 2022


  • When it was revealed in the summer of 1948 that the buyer of 401 Muirfield Road—across Fourth Street from Merritt Adamson's house—was the very famous singer Nat King Cole, Hancock Park's champions of Caucasian hegemony had a collective heart attack. Andrew J. Copp Jr., who in 1924 had completed 414 Muirfield Road just as 403/401 was being started and who still lived there, gathered a group of the like-minded to form the Hancock Park Property Owners Association (today known as the Hancock Park Homeowners Association). Copp was elected chairman of the organization. According to reports in the Los Angeles Sentinel on August 12, 1948, the group appeared to include Rhoda Rindge Adamson. Being among the earliest builders in the Hancock Park subdivision, Andrew Copp and the  Adamsons would have well remembered that their lot deeds included 50-year racial covenants that excluded any nonwhites from living in the neighborhood unless they were employed as servants. The Hancock Park Property Owners Association was founded to "seek a solution to the problem" of the interloping Coles. Interestingly, the fight came just months after the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision on May 3 in the case of Shelley vs. Kraemer that "the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a state from enforcing restrictive covenants that would prohibit a person from owning or occupying property based on race or color." (Los Angeles civil-rights attorney Loren Miller had argued the case in Washington alongside future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.) Attorney Copp appears to have been of the opinion that the Supreme Court decision did not apply to Hancock Park; he and Adamson and their group tried to prevent the secretive sale to Cole, with the seller of 401 and the real estate brokers involved being harrassed to the point of needing police protection. Copp went to see Cole and offered a $25,000 premium over the purchase price if he would relinquish the house, funds reportedly offered, per the Los Angeles Sentinel of August 5, 1948, by attorney Harold C. Morton, a member of the Property Owners Association who lived at 514 Muirfield Road. (The arrogant Morton would bring Hancock Park even more disrepute when his ne'er-do-well son was found guilty of killing his wife in front of his children in 1961.) It was considered by many that Cole's neighbors influenced the sudden and highly publicized seizure of 401 in a 1951 I.R.S. claim that Cole owed a reported $146,000 in back taxes, the tax agency threatening to sell the house in less than three weeks unless the lein was satisfied. To their everlasting credit, Nat King Cole's family would not budge and would retain their property into the 1970s
  • Dressed in a gray business suit, leaving no notes, and thought by police to have been standing in front of a mirror, Merritt Adamson shot himself in the temple in the cabana on his Malibu property on January 7, 1949. He had turned 60 two months before. Rhoda Adamson told sheriff's deputies that the bone-handled pistol found at her husband's feet was most likely part of the collection kept in the gun room her husband had built at 355 Muirfield Road in 1928. It was assumed that ill health drove Mr. Adamson to the act; he had suffered a stroke a year before and then broke his left leg after stepping into a hole in the corral at Malibu
  • Sylvia Adamson and Swiss-born Robert de Francia Neville—his father was born in Eldorado Springs, Missouri, his mother in Caracas—were married by a judge in Santa Monica on December 9, 1950. The Nevilles would have three children; Mrs. Neville ran the family's Adohr operations with her mother and her siblings Merritt and Rhoda. (The family sold Adohr to the Southland Corporation in 1966)
  • After 40 years in possession of 355 Muirfield Road, Rhoda Adamson died at Good Samaritan Hospital on April 2, 1962, weeks shy of her 69th birthday
  • As the property evolved after the departure of the Adamsons, the west three lots of the original parcel were spun off. On these would soon be built 344, 356, and 368 Rimpau Boulevard
  • David H. Stern bought 355 Muirfield Road from the Adamson family in 1962. Under his ownership during the 1960s, the entire architectural character of the house was altered; Stern's motivation for the bastardization of Elmer Grey's 1922 design into a Monterey Revival variation is unclear and puzzling. A Department of City Planning report outlines the renovation: "In 1963, work was undertaken to significantly alter the character-defining features of the house and change the style from Mediterranean/Italian Renaissance Revival to Monterey Revival. Two covered balconies on the front façade were enclosed, a long covered balcony added across the second story of the street elevation, and the roof material was changed from clay mission tile to concrete shake. Additionally, the front entrance was demolished and a new, smaller design was built in wood to better accommodate for the new balcony. Much of the [1927 north-side] service wing...was demolished, and a bedroom on the second floor was enlarged.... The modification of the original architectural style included re-stuccoing the exterior of the house and removing a cornice to add eaves and rafter tails to the roof. By the end of construction, most of the character-defining features had been removed and replaced."


Perhaps the owner who transformed the 1922 house at 355 Muirfield Road from its original Italian
Renaissance design thought a California-derived style was less pretentious. By the mid 1970s,
after the civil unrest and Manson taint of the previous decade, the desirability of central
Los Angeles, including Hancock Park, had sunk to a new low. In the new Gilded
Age, the revived subdivision strives mightily not to be outclassed by the
ever more ambitious displays of domestic architecture in Beverly
Hills and in the city's opulent Westside neighborhoods.


  • On February 5, 1963, the Department of Building and Safety issued David Stern two permits pertaining to 355 Muirfield Road that were part of his architectural transformation of the house. The first authorized the addition of a 6-by-60-foot balcony to the façade; cited as architect on the document is Rowland H. Crawford. The second permit issued on February 5 allowed for the demolition of the 1927 service wing. These changes were completed by midsummer. On May 22, 1967, Stern was issued a permit for a 17-by-40-foot swimming pool
  • Walt Disney's younger daughter Sharon and her second husband William S. Lund, known as Bill, occupied 355 Muirfield Road during the 1970s; they were divorced in 1977
  • A permit issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 7, 1986, for a spa addition to the pool area cites photographer John Viscott as the owner of 355 Muirfield Road
  • A moving sale was held at 355 Muirfield Road on June 25, 1994; who was moving is unclear
  • Director and producer Dick Lowry owned 355 Muirfield Road from the summer of 1994 until 2001
  • Actress Patricia Heaton and her husband, English-born actor and director David Hunt, purchased 355 Muirfield Road in late 2001 for $4,850,000. The couple's business manager Alan Reback is indicated as owner on numerous permits and certificates of occupancy issued by the Department of Building and Safety for various interior and grounds improvements to the property over the next 12 years
  • 355 Muirfield Road was on the market by late winter 2013 for $8,295,000. The house was sold for $8,000,000 that May; the purchaser appears to have been a flipper who was asking $8,999,000 for the property six months later
  • The Hollywood heritage of 355 Muirfield Road continued with its purchase by prolific television producer, director, screenwriter, and serial renovator Shonda Rhimes for $8,800,000 in early 2014


Shonda Rhimes's restoration has brought 355 Muirfield Road back from architectural ignominy


  • In the second remarkable architectural transformation of the house, Shonda Rhimes completely removed vestiges of its peculiar 1963 Monterey Revival makeover (and most recent incredibly dark, hideous interior decoration) by bringing 355 Muirfield back toward the Mediterannean Revival impression intended by the original architect, Elmer Grey. A faithful reproduction of Grey's original street entrance included its Solomonic columns, and, inside, his elaborate details such as the coffered ceiling of the living room. Ms. Rhimes described in detail her first thoughts on contemplating its purchase in an article for Architectural Digest in 2019: "My first thought was that it was ugly. And wrong. The house was ugly and wrong. Six years ago, standing on the curb, a baby on each hip, a ten-year-old by my side, in the shade of a for sale sign, all I could think was: What an ugly, wrong house.... [It was a] rambling 8,400-square-foot behemoth the color of pea soup, it was a mess, an illogical pairing of design styles." Rhimes continued: "...somehow the house had mistakenly received a historic designation with this fake Santa Barbara mission front on it. So the first thing we did was ask the Office of Historic Resources staff to research and correct the issue. Once that was done, we were able to get down to the business of restoring the house to its original glory." (The request to rescind the historic designation may be read here)
  • While Rhimes professed in the AD article to love the result, to now have her "dream kitchen" and a house in which her children would grow up, the appearance of a property in a shelter magazine has long presaged its appearance on the market not long after. Indeed, by the summer of 2021, 355 Muirfield Road was on the market at an asking price of $25,000,000. In October the price was reduced to $22,995,000. It sold on Janury 4, 1922, for $21,000,000. Even if Rhimes might have been harmlessly disingenuous in describing her attachment to the house, she has left Hancock Park with not only with a record sale price for a property but a residence brought back closer to the subdivision's architectural roots


FURTHER READING on the Rindge and Adamson families is here


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; California State Library