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Overview

The Pendleton House set a new standard for small-scale elegance among motion picture royalty in the 1940s and 1950s, prompting a temporary turn away from huge revivalist mansions to more modest, but carefully planned and proportioned residences, often done in the so-called Hollywood Regency Style. This much copied stylistic approach had been pioneered by James Dolena during the 1930s, but brought to its highest achievement by Woolf.

Building History

Young GA-born architect John Elgin Woolf (1908-1980) received the commission to design a compact, one-story pied-à-terre in Los Angeles for the New York-based interior designer John B. Pendleton and his wife, Mary Frances, whose nickname was "Dodo." According to an article published in Vanity Fair in 2010: "Woolf’s clients, the prominent art dealer and interior decorator James Pendleton and his wife, Mary Frances, had plucked the handsome architect from near obscurity and given him the break of a lifetime. They told him to design a house for entertaining, with a pool and pool house, set among a grove of eucalyptus and gardens of lilacs and roses. Because Mary Frances had a deformed hip and couldn’t climb stairs, the house had to be on one level. Woolf was given only 10 days to produce finished plans, and a year to get the place built. The Pendletons, whose home base was in Manhattan, were eager to move into their new retreat, set on four acres of land they had bought for $10,000 (the equivalent of $140,000 today) from the writer Dorothy Parker." (See Matt Tyrnauer, Vanity Fair, "Glamour Begins at Home," 06/12/2010, accessed 04/18/2016.)

Prolific Los Angeles landscape architect Tommy Tomson collaborated with Woolf on the residence's design.

PCAD id: 6838