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  • Built in 1933 on Lot 2 in Tract 6748 (originally laid out as Lot 26 in Tract 3668)
  • Original commissioner: oil executive John A. Brown
  • Architect: William D. Coffey
  • On January 3, 1933, the Department of Building and Safety issued J. A. Brown a permit for a two-story, 12-room residence with an attached garage—an arrangement becoming increasingly common instead of separate buildings for automobiles. The Alexander D. Chisholm Company was the contractor
  • John A. Brown became president of General Petroleum Company in 1930 having come to Los Angeles two years before as a vice-president. He and his wife Ella rented 444 South Plymouth Boulevard in Windsor Square before deciding to build 227 Muirfield Road. The Browns were to spend little time in their new house; according to his obituary in the trade journal California Oil World and Petroleum Industry of January 15, 1944, Brown left Los Angeles in November 1933 for New York after becoming head of Socony-Vaccum Oil Company. The only social note in the Times regarding the Browns at 227 appeared that November 7; it described a recent dinner and musicale, which was perhaps an entertainment meant as something of a housewarming, if not a going-away party


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on March 14, 1937


  • It seems that John Brown's Los Angeles employer, General Petroleum, may have financed 227 Muirfield Road originally and been left holding the bag in the depths of the Depression after the oilman left for the east coast. It would be more than three years before General Petroleum was able to sell the house, as reported in the Times on March 14, 1937. A listing for the Browns at 227 appeared in Los Angeles city directories through 1936, though their actual address appears to have become the Waldorf-Astoria in New York
  • Dr. Edward Clarence Moore was an Indiana-born surgeon raised in Los Angeles. After obtaining his M.D. at Cal in 1904 (and with additional training in Minnesota with the Mayo Brothers), he worked alongside his father, Dr. Melvin L. Moore, and Dr. Percival G. White, their downtown practice becoming known as Moore, Moore & White. In 1924, the Drs. Moore and Dr. White built the Moore-White Clinic for their practice at 511 Bonnie Brae Street in the Westlake district; Moore was elected president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association for the 1925 term. On his domestic front, Dr. Moore and his wife, née Helen Rowland, bought a newly built house at 501 South Lucerne Boulevard in Windsor Square. Separated and divorced within a few years, he was living at the Ambassador by 1929 (and later at the Beverly-Sycamore apartments) while Mrs. Moore retained the Windsor Square house until her death in 1946. The second Mrs. Moore would be the widow of Claus Spreckles Sr., whose father John D. Spreckels was the owner of San Diego's Union and Tribune newpapers as well as of the Hotel del Coronado. Claus Spreckels died on January 12, 1935; his widow, née Ella Moon, and Dr. Moore were married in Yuma on October 20, 1936
  • On March 11, 1937, the "Chatterbox" column in the Times noted that "Dr. and Mrs. E. Clarence Moore...have just become master and mistress of a twenty-room [sic] mansion on Muirfield Road. They are neighbors of Howard Hughes and have the Wilshire Club links for their back yard." Mrs. Moore would be retaining her large house in Coronado, a wedding present from her first father-in-law designed by Harrison Albright, as a second residence




Ellis Moon Spreckles Moore paid artist Diego Rivera $650 for
this unconventional portrait of her husband. The ribbon is translated as
"These are the hands of Dr. Clarence Moore of Los Angeles, California. They
trim the tree of life so that it is renewed and does not die. Diego Rivera
painted them in 1940." Dr. Moore sat for the artist in Mexico City.



  • Dr. E. Clarence Moore died at home at 227 Muirfield Road on July 10, 1944, at the age of 62. A sizable obituary in the Times the next day noted that he had been ill with an unspecified malady for three months. Although she would retain a Los Angeles apartment for occasional visits, his widow sold 227 in 1946, having moved back to her house in Coronado. Mrs. Moore was still living there when she died at 78 on October 26, 1967, returning to Los Angeles for interment with Dr. Moore at Forest Lawn
  • Mrs. Moore sold 227 Muirfield Road to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thomas Mudd in 1946; an item in Lucille Leimert's "Confidentially" column in the Times on October 10, 1946, noted the sale
  • Henry Mudd was a mining engineer who became assistant general manager of his family's Cyprus Mines Corporation the year he bought 227 Muirfield Road. The Los Angeles–based firm, founded in 1916 by his father Harvey Seeley Mudd and grandfather Seeley Wintersmith Mudd, was the operator of vast copper mines on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. After his father died in 1955, Mudd became chairman and C.E.O. of Cypress, that year, with his mother, co-founding the science and engineering focused Harvey Mudd College in Claremont as a memorial. Henry Mudd had married Victoria Nebeker at the Old Guard St. John's Episcopal on Adams Boulevard on March 25, 1939; Harvey Seeley Mudd II was born on February 28, 1940. There would be another son and two daughters before the Mudds divorced in 1968, when they were still living at 227 Muirfield Road; it seems that Henry had a great deal of trouble keeping it in his pants and would go to great lengths to organize a veritable harem he kept available until his death at 77 in 1990. (His obituary, which appeared in papers across the country, extolled the Mudd family's business accomplishments as well as its lineage, including the ancestor-worshiper's dream of 20 antecdents having served in the Revolutionary War. Henry Mudd married one of his harem shortly before his death; soon after his demise his name turned to mud when another of his girlfriends sued his estate for palimony, with at least five others testifying as to their own closeness to the old man and of his largesse to them)
  • The Mudds carried out several alterations during their time at 227 Muirfield Road; the Department of Building and Safety issued a permit on February 21, 1951, for a remodeling of the living room, with subsequent interior alterations permitted in 1954, 1956, 1961, and 1964. On August 24, 1956, the Mudds were issued a permit to build a 45-by-33-foot addition containing a swimming pool. When the Sylmar earthquake struck on February 9, 1971, a chimney collapsed and fell on the porte-cochère, which was rebuilt as the Mudds were planning their new house at 247 Muirfield Road
  • Now 51, Victoria Mudd wasted little time in returning to the altar. In 1969, she married William Bayley Coberly Jr., a longtime widower and oilman who worked in his family business, in this case the California Cotton Oil Company, with local headquarters on East 52nd Street in Vernon. The Coberlys' major landholdings, once given over to cattle ranching, now yielded even more lucrative products. Bill Coberly had lived at 12 Berkeley Square (and his parents at #5) before moving with his three children to 356 South Rossmore Avenue by 1957. He remained there until 1962, when he moved to the Talmadge apartments on Wilshire Boulevard; upon marrying Mrs. Mudd he returned to Hancock Park, moving in with her at 227 Muirfield Road
  • The Coberlys immediately began an ambitious project not at 227 Muirfield Road but rather on the nearby but noncontiguous property at 247 Muirfield, which contained a 1923 house that they proceeded to demolish in 1970 and replace the next year with a new 8,667-square foot residence designed by A. Quincy Jones. The couple moved into 247 by late 1972 and put 227 on the market. Interesting is that Bill Coberly's younger brother Wheeler was married to the stepdaughter of Norman Macbeth, who'd built 243 Muirfield Road in 1924. (Victoria Coberly died in 1991 and her husband in 1994)
  • It appears that David H. Stern, who had done a curious makeover of 355 Muirfield Road in 1963 that has recently been undone by Shonda Rhimes, occupied 227 during the 1970s and early 1980s
  • Investment banker Angus W. McBain owned 227 from 1984 until 2011. The Department of Building and Safety issued McBain a permit for a new swimming pool at the northwest corner of the property on August 17, 1989; the original covered pool was filled in per a permit issued on September 8. McBain was issued a permit for a 23-by-22-foot family room addition on November 13, 2000
  • Retiring to Indian Wells, the McBains put 227 Muirfield Road on the market in December 2011 for $7,750,000; it sold a year later for $6,960,000





Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT; The San Diego Museum of Art