PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES

145 North Rossmore Avenue




  • Built in 1923 on a parcel originally comprised of Lots 5 and 6 in Tract 3668
  • Original commissioner: civil engineer Richard Haden Hood
  • Architect: Arthur E. Harvey
  • Richard Haden Hood was the son of General John Mifflin Hood of Baltimore, a railroad and traction executive and developer whose honorific dated from the Civil War. Haden Hood was a civil engineer who in 1892 married a woman his mother did not deem rich enough; he was widowed the next year. Hood was living at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York by 1900; he married again in 1901, and, some time after an acrimonious divorce in 1914, he retired and moved west, by 1920 taking rooms in Los Angeles at the Hotel Hayward downtown as he began looking for a house. Early that year, real estate investor Jeanette N. Clark built a spec house in Windsor Square; before long, Hood was the owner of 414 Lorraine Boulevard
  • It seems that Jeanette Clark was planning projects in Hancock Park as well as in Windsor Square, apparently acquiring Lots 5 and 6 in Tract 3668 in Hancock Park within a few years of the opening of the subdivision. She soon sold the property to Richard Haden Hood. Clark's name appeared on the first permit pertaining to 145 North Rossmore, one issued by the Department of Buildings on March 6, 1923; it was for a 10-by-12-foot shack prefabricated by Pacific Ready-Cut Homes. Hood's name appeared on a permit for a nine-room house at 145 issued on April 2. A note attached to this document was signed "R. H. Hood per Jeannette [sic] Clark"
  • Arthur E. Harvey was listed in Los Angeles city directories in the early 1920s as a draftsman, in the 1921 issue as being affiliated with the Frank Meline Company, builder of many Wilshire-corridor houses; the next year he was listed as a draftsman but apparently working on his own. In the 1923 directory, and for just a year, Harvey was listed as working for the firm of Morgan, Walls & Morgan, which that year became Morgan, Walls & Clements after the death of the senior partner
  • The commercial appearance of 145 North Rossmore is attributable to the Morgan, Walls firm becoming well-known for employing the Spanish Baroque style known as Churrigueresque in many business buildings across Los Angeles; it may be that Arthur Harvey was closely involved with these designs. Among them are Morgan, Walls's extant 91-foot-long market building—completed in February 1923—at the southeast corner of West Seventh and Grand View streets, the Churrigueresque cast-stone ornamentation of which is particularly suggestive of that decorating the façades of 145 and its gatehouse 


The market building at the southeast corner of West Seventh and Grand View streets
carries cast-stone ornamentation similar that found in several places on 145
North Rossmore Avenue; the house's architect, Arthur E. Harvey,
was in the employ of the firm that designed the
market, which opened just before
contracts for the house
were signed.


  • Although the house was being advertised for sale in late 1937, asking $65,000, Richard Haden Hood appears to have remained at 145 North Rossmore until moving into a small house he built for himself at the southwest corner of Cahuenga and Waring in Hollywood in late 1947; he was issued a permit for the now-demolished 757 Cahuenga Boulevard on November 25, 1947
  • By December 1951, classified ads offering 145 North Rossmore for sale were appearing. The identity of the seller is unclear; when the house sold in 1952, an article in the Los Angeles Times that June 1 refers to a Tillie W. Lewis, of whom no other connection to 145 has been discovered. The value of the house given in the article was $80,000. The buyer was Edward R. James
  • Edward Raymond James had been selling Buicks and Studebakers in South Dakota before moving west in 1940 to peddle the latter make on Pico Boulevard and in Long Beach. James and his wife Ruth lived in "Iowa by the Sea" until early 1952, when 145 North Rossmore came on their radar. The reason for the Jameses' move up to Los Angeles was explained in the Times on April 13, 1952: "Change in ownership of one of Los Angeles' largest, best-known and longest established automobile dealerships was revealed last week in the annoucement that Ed James Buick Co. has been appointed a Buick dealer and has purchased the interests of Chas. Howard Buick Co. at 1367 S Figueroa St.... The new dealership is owned by Ed James, who...has had long experience in the automobile business and is well-known in the trade here. For the past nine years, he has headed the large, widely known "Jamestown" motor car dealership in Long Beach."


Ed James applied "Jamestown," the name he had used for his Long Beach operations, to his
new Los Angeles Buick dealership. Versions of the advertisement above appeared in
the press during the mid-1950s. For reasons unclear, Sunday openings were
discontinued in May 1956. By the next year James added Plymouths
and Dodges to his offerings at "Jamestown" on Figueroa.


  • The Jameses had 145 North Rossmore on the market by October of 1958. It appears that in selling the property that year or the next, the couple sold a southerly portion of Lot 5 (one measuring 61 feet wide at the street and 33.5 feet at the rear line) to architect William Pereira for him to create, along with the northerly 34 feet of Lot 6 sold to him by the owners of 115 North Rossmore Avenue, a parcel for 135 North Rossmore, which Pereira would design for himself and build in 1960
  • The new owners of 145 North Rossmore on its smaller revised parcel was insurance executive Weymouth Livingston Murrell and his wife Marjorie, who were in residence by mid 1959 with their daughters Marsha and Roxanne. The girls attended Marlborough, just down the street
  • On August 11, 1959, the Los Angeles Times ran a large item headlined FATHER SEEKING DOG THAT BIT CHILD FRIDAY: To spare his daughter Roxanne, 8, the necessity of taking Pasteur shots, W. L. Murrell, of the Los Angeles office of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co of Newark, N.J., is seeking the dog which bit her Friday near Third St. and Rossmore Ave. She was bitten on the arm[,] the child recalls, by one of two dogs. Both were large and light tan (possibly either Afghans or wolfhounds) and both wore chain collars, one collar having the intial "F" in silver attached. The Murrells, of 145 N. Rossmore Ave., are vacationing at the beach, but Murrell can be reached daily at his office." Whether or not Roxanne had to endure the painful inoculations is unclear, but she survived. On June 29, 1968, she married Kevin Coates of Los Angeles in a small ceremony at All Saints Episcopal in Beverly Hills followed by a reception at 145 North Rossmore. (The marriage was over by early the next year)
  • Weymouth and Marjorie Murrell put 145 North Rossmore on the market in 1969; by the end of the year the house had been purchased by Dutch-born refrigeration executive Albert Rebel, who was retiring that year at the age of 76, and his second wife, Carmen
  • On January 1, 1970, the Department of Building and Safety issued Albert Rebel a permit for a remodeling of the kitchen
  • Albert Rebel formed the Recold International Corporation in 1955, assuming the role of president. Rebel had long experience in the field of refrigeration apparatus used in the shipment of food from the United States and had been the export manager of Refrigeration Engineering, Inc., a Los Angeles manufacturer of cooling equipment, since 1948. Albert Rebel died on March 22, 1974; Carmen would retain 145 North Rossmore until her death on April 17, 1994, at the age of 85. In December, display advertisements appeared for a Butterfield auction of some of her possessions, which were going on the block alongside those of Norman Lear and Dorothy Lamour         




Albert Rebel had been featured in the January 1956 issue of
the trade journal Refrigerating Engineering; retiring in 1969, he
spent his last four years at 145 North Rossmore. After the death of
his widow in 1994, the house was sold and some of its contents
auctioned off, as advertised in the Times, December 1994.



  • There appear to have been at least two occupants of 145 North Rossmore Avenue after the departure of the Rebels, one of whom was attorney Gerald W. Palmer, before its purchase by real estate broker Timothy Enright and interior designer Brian Little in 2003. The couple paid $2,225,000 for the house, which was described as needing rehabilitation. At least 19 building permits have been issued over the years for the renovation and enlargement of the property, which, according to real estate listing illustrations, now has the curious old-fashioned formality referred to in some quarters as being piss-elegant (a round hotel banquette, a demilune, and a crystal chandelier in the living room, tasseled pillows, lit gilt-framed paintings, monogrammed throws, and much fringed upholstery), jarringly set off by glary high-gloss white paint and marble. On the market in July 2021 asking $14,850,00, the price of the house was reduced within months to $11,850,000




Glossily restored and ambitiously priced, 2021



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; Noel Kleinman