Kim Rozell Makeup Design

It’s story time. In 1946, four musicians returned from WWII and decided to pool their resources with the intention of buying land and building four houses with a shared pool/playground at the center. Quickly, the group ballooned to around 500 members, each submitting a $25 entrance fee and quarterly deposits of $500, in the hopes of establishing a cooperative community. By 1947, the Mutual Housing Association was formed and 800 acres of land were divided into 350 lots in the Santa Monica Mountains. After a year of interviews with the likes of Richard Neutra, among others, a final design team was formed between architects Whitney R. Smith and A. Quincy Jones, along with engineer Edgardo Contini. By 1956, 150 houses were completed, and the site office—from which the architects worked for nearly a decade—had been converted into a home. Today, as tastes have changed and landscapes have evolved, many of these homes have fallen prey to maddening alterations or are simply no longer standing, and only 30 remain. This is where architect Cory Buckner comes in. “We tried to get people interested in creating a historic preservation overlay zone, but we couldn’t get enough support,” Buckner says of her campaign to keep the community intact. “So then I just decided to pursue getting individual houses declared historic monuments.” Thankfully, she’s had quite a bit of success: Within a decade, Buckner spurred the restoration of nearly half of the extant houses, 15 of which have been declared Historic-Cultural Monuments by Los Angeles. It is entirely fitting that Buckner’s own residence—which she walked us through back in 2009—is the aforementioned Mutual Housing Association office. What was once the neighborhood’s center is, in a way, fulfilling that role once more. | June 17, 2009 | Read more: https://www.dwell.com/article/mutual-fulfilment-64cc4b51

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