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  • Built in 1960 on a parcel comprised of an irregular northerly section of Lot 5  and the northerly 34 feet of Lot 6 in Tract 3668
  • Original commissioner: architect William L. Pereira as his own home
  • Architect: William L. Pereira
  • The 200-foot-deep parcel for the house was created from a southerly portion of Lot 5 in Tract 3668 (one measuring 61 feet wide at the street and 33.5 feet at the rear line and apparently sold to Pereira by the owners of 145 North Rossmore) and the northerly 34 feet of Lot 6 sold to Pereira by the owners of 115 North Rossmore Avenue
  • On July 28, 1960, the Department of Building and Safety issued William L. Pereira a permit for a 4,000-square-foot house at 135 North Rossmore; the project was valued at $85,000 on the document. Permits issued on September 19 and December 23, 1960, allowed for detail changes to the plan. A permit for a 15-by-99-foot pool, with an 'el," was issued on June 21, 1961, and one for a fallout shelter on September 12 of that year


William Pereira's appearance on the cover of Time, September 6, 1963, marked
his design for the city and university on the Irvine Ranch, which is his
portrait's backdrop. Pereira's career was soaring; in the spring
of 1960, just as he was planning his new house, the
board of the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art announced his commission
for its new building.


    • Designers with William Pereira's prolific partnership with Charles Luckman during the 1950s had produced, among other notable structures, CBS Television City and the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. Even more prolific after an acrimonious split with Luckman in 1959 as William L. Pereira & Associates there came such works as the Geisel Library at U.C. San Diego, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, Pepperdine University, and an addition to the Los Angeles Times headquarters downtown. The latter is under fire for its aesthetics and current practicality, as had been his L.A.C.M.A., opened in 1965 and demolished in 2020 in rising pushback against the arguably fetishistic rage for Midcentury architecture during recent decades. Pereira also designed the 1968 academic and library building for the Marlborough School at Third and Rossmore—just down the street from 135 North Rossmore—that replaced that institution's first building on the site after its move from West Adams in 1916. (Just as Peter Zumthor's new L.A.C.M.A., an aesthetic non-improvement, is sweeping away the design of a once prominent architect, Pereira's for Marlborough swept away a building by once-eminent, and equally prolific, Los Angeles designer John C. Austin)
    • The ultramodern appearance of 135 North Rossmore, even if hidden in greenery among its staid neighboring houses, created buzz in Hancock Park. Mrs. Pereiria's college sorority sisters would be getting a chance to see it not long after completion, as reported by gossip columnist Christy Fox in the Times on March 11, 1962: "Local Kappa Kappa Gammas are stirring up a gay-sounding party at Margaret and Bill Pereira's house on Rossmore. It's worth the trip to see the house alone."
    • The Pereiras remained at 135 North Rossmore until Margaret filed for divorce in 1973 after 39 years of marriage; she had hired Marvin Mitchelson to represent her
    • 135 North Rossmore was on the market in 1975, asking $495,000: "Architect's own home, reduced." By the spring of 1976, the price had been reduced 20 percent, down to $395,000: "Architectural masterpiece behind gates." The appeal of Hancock Park was at a low ebb during the '70s; "modern" houses in a neighborhood of English and Colonial revival styles perhaps of even less interest to buyers. Gates had become an important selling point in affluent Los Angeles neighborhoods after the Manson murders in August 1969


    A southerly 1962 view of the rear of 135 North Rossmore, now much altered and less open to the sky


    • A permit issued by the Department of Building and Safety on May 27, 1977, for two second-floor rear additions indicates the owner of 135 North Rossmore as Patrick Burns, who may or may not be the "man of taste and style," as the Times described him the year before, who was the son of prolific Southern California developer Fritz B. Burns. A certificate of occupancy was issued to Patrick Burns for these alterations on February 3, 1978. The senior Burns and his wife lived at 365 South Hudson Avenue in Hancock Park; a feature on Patrick Burns in the April 1978 issue of Architectural Digest describes him as living not in a steel-and-glass house such as 135 but rather in an "English" house of the kind his parents lived in. It wasn't unusual for an owner of a property to allow a shelter magazine to photograph his house knowing that it would soon be on the market; perhaps Burns was intending to go modern by moving to the Pereira house, acquired at a bargain price, and adding to it. He died, in any case, on January 31, 1980
    • 135 North Rossmore was again on the market by the fall of 1985, asking $1,400,000. While the fortunes of Hancock Park might seem to be recovering, the house was still on market over a year later, now asking $1,100,000
    • Interior designer Emil DePiero acquired 135 North Rossmore Avenue by late 1987, apparently for $840,000, and would retain it for at least a decade. He had founded Emil De Piero Associates Inc. in 1980, with offices at 4016 Wilshire Boulevard in the last remaining freestanding house on Wilshire east of Highland. (De Piero had once designed for Cannell & Chaffin out of their building at 3000 Wilshire Boulevard, next door to which stands another rare remnant from the residential days of the boulevard, this one hidden behind 2976.) De Piero owned 135 North Rossmore into the 1990s
    • On November 12, 1991, the Department of Building and Safety issued Emil De Piero a permit to remodel the kitchen of 135 North Rossmore and to add a bath
    • Larry Lester, founder of Lester Carpets in 1954, and his wife Irma owned 135 North Rossmore Avenue for at least two decades until their deaths on January 23, 2020, and May 5, 2021, respectively





    Illustrations: Julius Shulman/USCDL; Time