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  • Built in 1923 on the southerly 100 feet of Lot 28 in Tract 3668
  • Original commissioner: Mrs. Richard Barry Fudger
  • Architect: Robert D. Farquhar
  • On July 14, 1923, the Department of Buildings issued Mrs. Richard B. Fudger permits for a 12-room residence and a 1½-story 24-by-40-foot garage
  • Mrs. Fudger, née Eva Katherine Johnson, was a daughter of Alexander Parley Johnson, who built 33 Westmoreland Place in 1908. He was a younger brother of noted Angeleno O. T. Johnson, who was among the largest individual owners of property in early Los Angeles; his real estate ventures included construction of the Westminister Hotel on Main Street in 1887. The brothers had arrived in Riverside earlier that decade, later moving to Los Angeles to pursue property development together and individually. Born in Riverside on July 3, 1881, Eva Fudger was graduated from Marlborough in 1901 when the school was at West 23rd and Scarff streets in West Adams; she married Richard Fudger in Riverside on November 22, 1905. Fudger, born in 1880 in York, Ontario, before it became part of Toronto, was the son of a partner in Simpson's department store there and was himself a director of the company when he died at the Fudgers' summer residence near Clarkson, Ontario, on October 11, 1918
  • Deciding to return to live in Los Angeles full-time by 1922 and well-supplied by funds from both her late husband and her father—and with the benefit of the latter's investment and building experience—Eva Fudger bought several lots in the new Hancock Park subdivison, which began homesite sales in late 1919. (It is interesting to note that in 1908 Mrs. Fudger's father had built his own residence in the failed gated Westmoreland Place subdivision, which opened in 1904 too close to downtown as the automobile took hold, the popularity of which led to farther-flung developments such as Hancock Park.) After building 212 Muirfield Road, Mrs. Fudger built 211 across the street three years later, a house that would become one of the better-known residences of the neighborhood when she sold it to Howard Hughes (via an intermediary) in 1929. (From 211, Mrs. Fudger moved even father west than her father had perhaps ever dreamed—all the way to Beverly Hills, where she had Roland Coate build a new house at 1103 San Ysidro Drive. In the late summer of 1939, Mrs. Fudger left that house and bought 631 North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, where she was still living when she died in 1960; the vintage Colonial 631 North Crescent was demolished by early 2015 and replaced, in the now-common manner, with a house of considerably more bulk and considerably less architectural distinction—a wan nod to classicism in beige, beige, and more beige)
  • With her new house across the street being readied, Mrs. Fudger began to advertise 212 Muirfield Road for sale, with classifieds appearing in the Times in February 1927. The buyer was attorney John O'Melveny of what was then known as O'Melveny, Millikin, Tuller & Macneill, a firm founded his father Henry O'Melveny in 1885 and which John O'Melveny had joined in 1922 after Los Angeles High School, Cal, and Harvard Law, becoming managing partner in 1926. (Well-known from 1939 and until recently as O'Melveny & Myers, the firm is today simply called O'Melveny)
  • John O'Melveny appears to have made few changes to 212 Muirfield Road during his 32-year ownership. On December 17, 1931, the Department of Building and Safety issued him a permit to add a partition to form a hall in an unspecified part of the house; on January 21, 1936, a permit was issued to create a dressing room out of part of the south end of the rear balcony
  • John O'Melveny his wife, née Corinne Eisenmayer, had been married on August 24, 1922. Joan was born a year later, Patrick in 1925. The family moved into 212 Muirfield Road after several years at 100 South Irving Boulevard and were mentioned with regularity in newspaper social columns. While the wartime ceremony was a quiet affair, Joan married another well-connected Angeleno, Wayland Lee Morrison, at the Cathedral Chapel on August 25, 1943. An Army Air Force lieutenant at the time, Morrison was the son of Dr. Wayland A. Morrison, longtime chief surgeon of the Santa Fe Railway's west coast operations and a director of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company. Wayland Jr.'s maternal grandfather was the very rich attorney Lee Allen Phillips of 4 Berkeley Square. The Morrisons were divorced by the fall of 1948; Joan and their son Andrew moved in with her parents at 212 Muirfield Road for a time before marrying Dr. Lloyd Mills Jr. on February 5, 1954. The ceremony took place at 212 and was officiated by the groom's godfather, Judge Paul Nourse, yet another distinguished Angeleno who lived in Berkeley Square
  • On October 9, 1948, the O'Melvenys hosted the wedding of family friends Doris Choate Oesting and Miles Carrington Hannah, a New York businessman turned farmer turned Arizona rancher, at 212 Muirfield Road; the bride was 47, the groom 62. (Mrs. Carrington died suddenly less than two years later)
  • It seems that the O'Melvenys were interested in selling 212 Muirfield Road as early as 1951. Classified advertisements appeared in the Times in the spring of that year, with no price specified, though John O'Melveny still owned 212 in the summer of 1959, when he had termite repairs done on the house, which was finally being sold. O'Melveny had bought a small house at 2535 North Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. (John and Corinne O'Melveny were divorced by 1967; on September 16 of that year he remarried. Corinne died on November 17, 1969, at the age of 71; John died at 89 on March 1, 1984, neither wife appearing to have been buried with him at Holy Cross Cemetery)
  • Mrs. Annamary S. Flagg, apparently a recent divorcée moving from Beverly Hills with three young children, purchased 212 Muirfield Road from John O'Melveny by early 1960. She seems to have still been living there when she died at the age of 56 on July 28, 1977
  • Donald J. Robinson owned 212 Muirfield Road by early 1978. That year, Robinson, a banker, renovated the house starting with kitchen and baths, per a permit issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 30. Also included in that permit was authorization to add a 7-by-3-foot rectangular entrance portico to Farquhar's rather austere façade. A permit for a 16-by-30-foot swimming pool was issued on April 14 and, on May 19, one for an elevator on the north side of the house. The length of Robinson's ownership of 212 is unclear, though it seems that he may have sold the house soon after his 1978 renovations; it was being marketed in early 2021 as being on the market for the first time in over 40 year. It sold on July 30, 2021, for $5,937,500


Illustration: Private Collection