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  • Built in 1923 on Lot 3 in Tract 3819
  • Original commissioner: builder Harry H. Belden for resale
  • Architect: Ray J. Kieffer
  • On January 5, 1923, the Department of Buildings issued Harry H. Belden permits for a two-story, 10-room residence and a one-story, 20-by-28-foot garage at 324 Muirfield Road
  • Kokomo-born civil engineer and public works contractor Lynn Smith Atkinson bought 324 Muirfield Road while it was under construction or soon after completion. He and his Texas-born wife, née Bernice Stephens, moved into the house with their young daughters Doris and Jeanne. It was not Mr. Atkinson's dream house in Bel-Air, which he would have architect Sumner Spaulding design for him a decade later—ostensibly as a surprise for his wife—but that he would never live in; acquired by hotelier Arnold Kirkeby in 1945, the over-the-top estate at 750 Bel-Air Road would be occupied by Ozarks oil millionaire Jed Clampett from 1962 to 1971. The story varies as to whether Bernice Atkinson found the Westside house vulgar and refused to move in or whether she was too ill to cope with its scale; at any rate, she seems to have been content to remain at the relatively modest upper-middle-class 324 Muirfield Road in suburban Hancock Park for years to come
  • Interestingly, general contractor John F. Atkinson, unrelated to the Atkinsons of 324 Muirfield Road, built 224 Muirfield Road as his own home in 1923


While Mrs. Atkinson was content living modestly on Muirfield Road in Hancock Park, her husband pined
for Bel-Air grandeur his whole life. This rendering of the house he planned on his dream estate was
featured in the Los Angeles Times on August 8, 1933; unless she never read the papers, this
public announcement appears to give lie to the tale of Atkinson having planned it as a
surprise, the story being that after completion he drove her up to it with her
reaction being "Who would live in such a pretentious house?" The
image's title refers to its Depression-era construction.
 

  • On March 21, 1927, the Department of Building and Safety issued Lynn Atkinson a permit to add a sleeping porch to 324 Muirfield Road
  • The Atkinsons left 324 Muirfield in 1951, moving to an apartment at Parklabrea (as the name of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's nearby skyscraper development was initially styled). In Michael Gross's 2011 Unreal Estate, the Atkinsons' daughter Doris Atkinson Kettler is described as telling of her father staring west through binonculars for hours from his highrise apartment toward his dream Bel-Air house, which perhaps indicated pathological existential despair. Bernice Atkinson died at the age of 65 on Christmas Eve 1959; on July 2, 1961, eight weeks shy of his 67th birthday, Lynn Atkinson jumped to his death from his 12th-floor apartment, leaving a note blaming Los Angeles's serious smog problem for having made living with emphysema unbearable: "I have lived here for almost 50 years in perfect physical condition except for smog-affected lungs that make life too miserable, but if my passing shall accent a need for a change"—presumably toward cleaner air—"it will have served a good purpose."
  • Brooklyn-born grocery-store executive Kenneth Oscar Olsen bought 324 Muirfield Road in 1951, moving from a six-room house near the Hillcrest Country Club built in 1946. Stationed in California as a lieutenant in the Army, Olsen married Dorothy Von Der Ahe, a daughter of Charles Von Der Ahe, at the Cathedral Chapel on November 14, 1942. "Dickie," as she was called, came with a job: Her father was the pioneer grocer part of whose surname became the name of the famous Southern California supermarket chain. (Von der Ahe had opened a store in downtown Los Angeles in 1906, which he expanded into a chain of 87 stores by the time he sold them in 1929 just before the Wall Street collapse; in 1932, with his backing, his sons Ted and Wilfred opened Von's Grocery Company, which has grown into today's Vons.) Charles Von Der Ahe lived in Hancock Park at 5250 West 2nd Street, built in 1929


Charles Von Der Ahe took his wife, their three daughters and their husbands, and one of their four
sons and his wife to Hawaii on the Lurline for a three-week trip to celebrate his 71st birthday,
as seen in the Los Angeles Times on September 1, 1953. Mr. and and Mrs. Von Der Ahe
are at left, the Olsens standing at right. At the time, the slogan of the grocery
chain that financed the trip was "Remember! It's Von's for Values!"
 


  • On May 11, 1960, the Department of Building and Safety issued Kenneth Olsen a permit for a 26-by-38-foot irregularly shaped swimming pool; on June 8, 1965, Olsen was issued a permit for a 23-by-26-foot family room and terrace addition to the rear of the house
  • Kenneth and Dorothy Olsen would have seven children and were still living at 324 Muirfield Road when he died at home at the age of 99 on March 4, 2018



Illustrations: CSL; LAT