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  • Built in 1929 on Lot 32 of Lot 3819
  • Original commissioner: industrialist Willis Jay Boyle Jr.
  • Designer and contractor: The A. D. Chisholm Company. Alexander D. Chisholm had formed a prolific partnership with William H. Fortine and Evan L. Meikle in a contracting, building, and real estate development business earlier in the decade; by the time of Willis Boyle's commission, Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle had disbanded and Chisholm was operating on his own
  • On March 25, 1929, the Department of Building and Safety issued W. J. Boyle Jr. permits for a 15-room brick-veneer house and a 22-by-40-foot two-story garage of complementary design
  • Willis Boyle's father brought his family to Los Angeles from eastern Kansas in 1894. Willis Sr. became associated with the troubled Los Angeles Iron & Steel Company, becoming its receiver within a few years. The company appears to have been folded into a new entity, the Charles L. Pinney & Company, with Pinney and Boyle as partners. (Pinney was financed by his father, investor Henry L. Pinney, who built 1355 Carroll Avenue in Angelino Heights in 1887.) By 1900, the firm had become the Pinney & Boyle Company, pipe manufacturers. The business's metal-products line expanded; after Charles Pinney's early retirement by 1915—he would spend his entire nearly 107 years living in the house his father built—Willis Boyle formed the Boyle Manufacturing Company. The firm's myriad products included included metal ceilings, barrels, and a signature product, Boyco canteens. Willis Boyle Sr. was president; his brother Milo C. Boyle became secretary, while his sons Louis and Willis Jr. became vice-president and treasurer, respectively. Boyle was still head of the firm in 1934 at the age of 78; the next year he passed the baton to his namesake. (Louis became secretary-treasurer; Milo also retired. Willis Sr. died at home on Christmas Eve 1937)


Boyle Manufacturing produced sheet metal as well as consumer products that became well-known; in
addition to camp and automobile accessories, Boyco, as it became known, manufactured among
many other products metal furniture, barrels of many varieties, and garden tools including
wheelbarrows. The firm was sold to the United States Steel Corporation in 1939.


  • The family of Willis Boyle Jr. would occupy 511 Muirfield Road for decades. He and his wife Blanche had two daughters, Marion Elizabeth and Arline Gwendolyn, and a son, Jonathan, when they first occupied their new house. They moved from 1657 Wilshire Boulevard in Westlake, a house that Willis's father built in 1896, then addressed 1657 Orange Street (Willis Sr. would demolish it in 1935; he had moved to a house he'd built at 150 South Windsor Boulevard in 1924). After Marlborough Arline attended junior college locally and then matriculated at Finch in New York; she married Charles Winfield Oliphant of Tulsa (Exeter, Harvard) at Immanuel Presbyterian on Wilshire Boulevard on August 6, 1942, with a reception afterward at 511 Muirfield. They later settled in Tulsa. Marion's engagement to Lieutenant Colonel Frederick P. Jenks was announced at a party at 511 in January 1945; they were married that August in Honolulu. Like her sister a Marlborough graduate, she attended Stanford and the University of Colorado; Fred Jenks, who entered Harvard at the age of 16 and had a Ph.D in mathematics from Notre Dame by the age of 22, was an Army Air Force pilot involved in aircraft design at the time of the wedding. Jonathan, known as Jack, attended Black Foxe and Harvard military schools and then Glendale College locally before finishing at Washington State College in Pullman; he married a Texas woman in 1952 and settled there


Arline Boyle as seen in the Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1942.
In 1940, Sergis Alberts's studio had been taken over by
his son, Maxwell Sergis Alberts, who started out 
photographing Hollywood stars. Alberts
began to appeal to Los Angeles's
downtown establishment,
becoming known as
the "Bachrach of
the West."


  • The Boyles had begun summering on Bay Island at Newport Beach before World War II. Tiny, reachable-by-bridge-only Bay Island is also notable for H. R. Haldeman's stay at his parents' house on his return from Washington in 1973 (before he resettled in Hancock Park at 443 North McCadden); Otis Chandler was another notable resident as was earlier General Moses H. Sherman, who died at his home there in 1932. Blanche Boyle was dividing her time between the island and 511 Muirfield Road when she died of a heart attack in Monrovia—possibly at the well-known Pottenger Sanatorium, a tuberculosis clinic, on July 8, 1948, eight weeks before her 57th birthday
  • After returning from Hawaii to live in the states after he was demoblized, the Jenkses moved to a house in Hollywood Knolls and then to 511 Muirfield Road with her parents; they stayed on there after the death of Mrs. Boyle, with three children, Steven, Maureen, and David, born to them by September 1952. Fred Jenks had joined Lockheed to head its Missile Division after the war; in the early '50s, he and Marion invested in a small manufacturer of missile components, he becoming president and she controller. The business grew, expanding to Europe and to Puerto Rico, where the Jenkses moved for a stretch before returning to Los Angeles and 511


The Jenkses—Maureen, Fred, David, Marion, and Steven—were among those featured in a story in the
Los Angeles Times titled "Five Southland Families Reflect Happiness in Bonds of Unity" on May
31, 1953. Mrs. Jenks's grandfather, Willis J. Boyle Sr., "pioneered in the development of
the Vernon industrial district and founded the Boyle Manufacturing Company."




  • On the day before Thanksgiving 1953, Willis Boyle Jr. married again. His bride was Marguerite Anderson, widow of real estate investor Stanley Anderson, who had been manager of the Beverly Hills Hotel for 16 years from the time of its opening in 1912; he died at home in Benedict Canyon in July 1951. (On the strength of their experience running the Hollywood Hotel for six years, Anderson and his formidable mother, Margaret, had received backing from Beverly Hills developers to build a new hotel there; they sold it in 1928.) Moving in with Peggy Anderson after the wedding, Willis left 511 Muirfield Road to the Jenkses
  • On April 19, 1960, the Department of Building and Safety issued the Jenkses a permit for a 14-by-19-foot den addition to the first floor
  • The Jenkses appear to have retained 511 Muirfield Road until the mid 1980s, when Frederick and Marion moved to a condominium at Wilshire Terrace in Westwood
  • Attorney Frank H. Golay Jr., a partner in the Los Angeles office of the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell, owned 511 Muirfield Road for a decade from at least the early 1990s to 2002; the property was on the market in the summer of 2002 with an asking price of $3,250,000
  • Permits issued by the Department of Building and Safety indicate that an owner since 2002 added a pool in 2005, apparently the property's first


As seen in The Hollywood Reporter of July 2, 2002



Illustrations: Private Collection; M. Sergis Alberts; LAT; The Hollywood Reporter