Homes North of Sunset, Beverly Hills

About the Neighborhood

Where the Grid Gives Way to the Estates

North of Sunset is the estate half of Beverly Hills: the ground that rises the moment Sunset Boulevard is crossed, running up to the city line where Los Angeles jurisdiction begins. The drives that organize the Flats continue north as narrower, curving roads — Roxbury, Bedford, Crescent, Canon, Beverly and Rexford — before dissolving into the hill routes of Lexington Road, Hillcrest Road, Summit Drive, Angelo Drive, Tower Road, Loma Vista Drive and Benedict Canyon Drive. Lots widen from the regular rectangles below to half an acre and well beyond, hedges and gates replace open lawns, and the address stays 90210 inside the City of Beverly Hills, with its own police, fire and school district.

The district was made by a hotel. The Beverly Hills Hotel opened on May 12, 1912 to a design by Pasadena architect Elmer Grey, before the city incorporated, and it was built to give buyers a reason to look at bean fields; the city later designated it as its first landmark under the 2012 preservation ordinance. Two estates predate and outlast the boom. Virginia Robinson's six-acre property on Elden Way, built in 1911 to a design by Nathaniel Dryden, is generally described as the earliest estate in Beverly Hills and has been listed on the National Register since 1978. Greystone, Gordon Kaufmann's 1928 Tudor Revival house for the Doheny family, sits on sixteen acres above Loma Vista Drive.

The architectural record here is unusually well documented. Wallace Neff rebuilt Pickfair on Summit Drive in 1932 in a Regency idiom, with Elsie de Wolfe on the interiors and A. E. Hanson on the landscape. Roland E. Coate built the David O. Selznick house at 1050 Summit Drive in 1933 and 1934. Gordon Kaufmann designed the house at 1011 North Beverly Drive for banker Milton Getz in the mid-1920s, later associated with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. Paul R. Williams's 1933 house for E. L. Cord on North Hillcrest Road ran to some thirty-two thousand square feet on eighteen acres; it was demolished in 1963 and the ground became thirteen separate parcels.

Building north of Sunset runs on a different rulebook from the Flats. The city's Hillside Area single-family standards, Article 25 of the zoning code, generally set a twenty-six-foot height limit, with more allowed only inside an envelope that starts at twenty-two feet at the front setback line and rises toward the rear at a thirty-three-degree slope to a maximum of thirty feet. Floor area derives from level pad and slope area rather than a flat percentage, and a discretionary Hillside R-1 Permit is required to exceed roughly fifteen thousand square feet of floor area or to build more than a thousand square feet off the existing pad. The findings turn on scale, character, privacy, light and air, and the garden quality of the city.

Diligence above Sunset is a hillside exercise. Confirm the parcel's area classification with Beverly Hills Community Development before assuming which standards apply, since the boundary between Central and Hillside rules does not always follow the boulevard neatly. Ask early about grading quantities, export volumes and haul routing, since those drive both budget and neighbor opposition. Check the code's view-preservation provisions against anything you plan to add in height. Confirm landmark status and any Mills Act contract on a documented commission, and verify school assignment through Beverly Hills Unified rather than the ZIP code, because 90210 continues past the city line into Beverly Hills Post Office territory served by Los Angeles.