Cheviot Hills Homes for Sale

About the Neighborhood

The Scottish Tract Below Century City

Cheviot Hills was sold on a resemblance. A.L. and Frankie King recorded a 127-acre subdivision here in 1912 and sold it to Frans Nelson & Sons in 1923; the developer opened Cheviot Hills on August 19 of that year, offered lots from November 11, and filed Tract 7264 on May 12, 1924, with the Los Angeles City Council approving it on June 10. The name came from the hills dividing England and Scotland, chosen because the lay of the land was said to be almost a replica of them, and E. E. Mix, who ran construction, carried the Scottish theme into the street names.

The tract came with rules, and they show. Deed restrictions set minimum building costs for twenty-five years — the higher figure on Motor Avenue, Cheviot Drive, Queensbury and Glenbar, a lower one elsewhere — required stucco, stone, artificial stone or brick, and routed every exterior elevation through Frans Nelson & Sons' own architectural department. The same instruments carried racial covenants, rendered unenforceable in 1948. What survives is the architecture: Spanish Colonial, Tudor and traditional houses on curving streets, with Monte Mar Vista, developed between roughly 1926 and 1940, the most ambitious section and documented work including a Wallace Neff-designed estate for Harry Culver.

Two country clubs frame the neighborhood, and the marketing history around them is worth knowing. Hillcrest Country Club was founded in 1920 as a club for Jews then largely excluded from other Los Angeles clubs, and it forms the northern edge alongside the Rancho Park Golf Course. The tract's own 1920s advertising promoted proximity to the Rancho Golf Club and the California Country Club, and never mentioned Hillcrest at all. Overland Avenue Elementary occupies a four-and-a-half-acre parcel subdivided from Tract 9976 in 1932, which is why the school sits inside the neighborhood rather than at its edge.

The northern boundary is the other defining fact. Twentieth Century Fox sold roughly 180 acres of its backlot to William Zeckendorf and Alcoa in 1961 for $54 million, the first Century City building opened in 1963, and the Cheviot Hills Home Owners' Association formed that same year specifically to deal with the high-rise development going up on the other side of Pico. Six decades later the relationship is settled but not forgotten: Century City's offices, shopping and medical campus are minutes from the tract, the studio lot still operates, and the neighborhood still watches what gets proposed north of the line.

The market has been consistent in a way few Westside pockets are. Cheviot Hills homes for sale draw family buyers on a recurring pattern — a walkable elementary school inside the tract, a recreation centre with tennis, ball fields and an archery range, real lots, and access to Century City, Westwood and the Expo line — and coverage in Forbes in 2024 described the area as having absorbed spillover from Beverly Hills pricing much as Mar Vista did from Santa Monica and Venice. Verify the specifics: there is no HPOZ here, so base Los Angeles zoning governs and the 1920s covenants are history rather than design review.