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  • Completed in 1921 on Lot 13 in Tract 3446
  • Original commissioner: Mrs. Francis Pierpont Davis
  • Architects: Francis Pierpont Davis and one of his three younger brothers, Walter Swindell Davis, sons of—and apprentices of—prominent Baltimore architect Francis Earlougher Davis. Also credited on the original building permit for the house, which was to be Pierpont Davis's own home, is architect Henry Franklin Withey, with whom Pierpont and Walter Davis had been in partnership during the 1910s; Withey, while afterward maintaining his own practice, designed in association with the Davises into the 1920s. The brothers, along with other architects, had formed the Garden City Company of California by the mid 1910s, the firm being the publishers of stock house plans in book form. By 1922, Pierpont and Walter Davis had established the firm of Davis & Davis
  • On October 1, 1920, the Department of Buildings issued "Mrs. Gertrude Davis" a permit for a 19-room house at 500 South Rossmore; her husband, brother-in-law Walter S. Davis, and Henry Withey are cited as architects




The newly built Pierpont Davis house at 500 South Rossmore Avenue as
seen in a northeasterly view in The Architectural Digest, January 1922. The house
was featured in promotional materials for recently opened and heavily promoted
Hancock Park including an ad in the Los Angeles Times on July 9, 1922.



  • 500 South Rossmore would remain in Pierpont Davis's extended family for 66 years. He had come to Los Angeles in 1906, working first as a draftsman for the partnership of John Parkinson and George Bergstrom. The next year he was drafting for another top firm, that of Abraham Edelman and Leo Barnett. One of Davis's first commissions after arriving in Los Angeles was the residence of Thomas A. Churchill Sr. at 215 South Wilton Place, which may be how he met his future wife, Churchill's niece: On November 17, 1909, Davis married Gertrude Alberta Churchill, born in Los Angeles in 1886 soon after her family's arrival from Montana, where her father, Owen Humphreys Churchill, had been a major cattleman. O. H. Churchill had aquired at least three acres south of the center of the city on which he built his residence at 2201 South Figueroa Street. Pierpont Davis formed his partnership with Henry F. Withey in 1910; in 1913, while with Withey, he designed a 12-room house for himself and Gertrude at the rear of her father's property, addressed 2114 Estrella Avenue, where the couple lived until moving to 500 South Rossmore. That West Adams house still stands, incorporated into a church building in 1985; the property remained in the hands of the Churchill family into the late 1960s and may have been retained as late as the 1980s
  • Pierpont and Gertrude Davis had two daughters, both of whom were born at 2114 Estrella Avenue, Gabrielle (known as Gay) in 1914 and Althea Churchill Davis in 1916. On her parents' 32nd anniversary in 1941, Gay married businessman William James Kuehn in the old neighborhood at St. John's Episcopal Church, which her father and uncle had designed in 1922; a reception followed at the California Club. The Times described the wedding as "one of the most brilliant ceremonies of the fall social season," echoing the Herald's characterization of the Davis's 1909 wedding as "one of the most elaborately appointed weddings of the season." Mr. Davis had come west to give his daughter away; he'd been lving in Washington temporarily while participating in the design of the Pentagon. The Kuehns moved into 2114 Estrella Avenue in 1946. Althea Davis married Croatian-born, American-educated opthalmologist Lucas Hugo Lucic at St. John's on March 28, 1942, with a supper afterward at 500 South Rossmore Avenue




Pierpont Davis and his siblings gathered in the loggia of 500 South
Rossmore in 1921. From left are Henry, Walter, Pierpont, Dorothy, and
Emmett. Below: As seen in the Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1942.



  • Francis Pierpont Davis died at 500 South Rossmore Avenue on July 15, 1953, at the age of 68; his funeral was held at St. John's Episcopal
  • Gertrude Churchill Davis' brother, Owen Porter Churchill, had his brother-in-law's firm design his Spanish Revival house at 108 South Las Palmas Avenue in Hancock Park in 1925. O. P. Churchill had taken over the business interests of his father after the latter's death in 1916, with the firm, the O. H. Churchill Company, Incorporated, being the nominal owner of the house. Owen P. Churchill was a member of four Olympic sailing teams, captain of three, and a gold-medal winner at the 1932 Los Angeles games; he was also the designer of what is considered the first rubber swim fin (the Churchill Swim Fin is still in production). His brother-in-law Pierpont was also a yachtsman; Owen and Gertrude's sister Marion Churchill McCartney, a divorcée who had recently married Dr. Burrell O. Raulston of Chicago, was a noted portrait and landscape painter who had the Davis brothers design her Hancock Park residence at 200 South Hudson Avenue in 1927. (It was demolished in 1956; before moving into the new house, the Raulstons had their turn living in the family property at 2114 Estrella Avenue.)
  • Gertrude Davis remained at 500 South Rossmore after the death of her husband and until her own on September 22, 1963, which was followed by a funeral at St. John's; a listing for Pierpont Davis would last be seen in the Los Angeles city directory issued in April 1964. Owen Churchill had, in the meantime, divorced his wife, née Lucille Cliff, whom he'd married in August 1915 while at Stanford, marrying Permelia Thompson Pagano in 1956; from at least 1960 until his death in 1985, the Churchills were listed in city directories at 500 South Rossmore Avenue. The second Mrs. Churchill was an actress known professionally as Norma Drew. She had been married to screenwriter Ernest Pagano and appeared in a number of films of the 1930s including Our Blushing Brides alongside Joan Crawford
  • Writer, director, producer, and photographer Larry Yust and his wife Clara had been living since the mid-1960s at 520 South Rossmore, next door to 500. According to architectural photographer and historian Michael Locke, the Yusts, "after peering through the hedges and taking into account the extensive albeit neglected formal gardens decided they had 'bought the wrong house'." After 89-year-old Owen Churchill died at 500 South Rossmore on November 12, 1985, and his ashes were scattered from his sloop the Angelita—Mrs. Churchill, known as Norma, would die in 1998 and be buried with Ernest Pagano at Forest Lawn—Larry and Clara Yust moved from 520 to 500
  • In the way of the local social old guard, even as it moved from West Adams to what was termed in the early 1920s the "West End" of Los Angeles, Owen Churchill appears to have deemed little alteration to his family home necessary after its construction. While an impressive hedge now completely hides the house—its height helpful in terms of privacy and as a sound barrier at its very busy intersection—500 South Rossmore appears to remain in 2021 much as it was when completed a century before. The only apparent addition to the property included in the Yusts' meticulous restoration of the house was a well-integrated 50-by-7-foot lap pool built in the garden in 2005



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT;