Old Hollywood Actor’s Dreamy Hacienda Transports You to Alta California

Born in Prague in 1899, Franz Lederer gravitated toward the world of the theater while still a young boy. After receiving training at his hometown’s prestigious Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Lederer embarked on a successful stage career that saw him appearing in productions all over Europe. In the late 1920s, Lederer began acting in motion pictures as well, with one of his very first parts being the male lead opposite Louise Brooks in German director G.W. Pabst’s classic silent film “Pandora’s Box.”

In the early 1930s, with virulent anti-Semitism beginning to flare up across Europe in lockstep with the Nazi regime’s rise to power, Lederer, who was Jewish, immigrated to America. The handsome young actor had little difficulty establishing a career in Hollywood, landing leading roles opposite such silver screen sirens as Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, and Joan Bennett.

In 1934, the same year he shot his first American films, Lederer also began constructing a residence and ranch for himself on a sizable swath of acreage he purchased in the San Fernando Valley. Known as Owensmouth at the time, the area in which Lederer’s land was located was subsequently renamed Canoga Park, and later, given the name it now goes by, West Hills.

In those days, most showbiz folks building a grand home for themselves opted for something in the English/French Tudor or Spanish-Mediterranean vein — styles that had a fairy-tale quality, or “high-class” or “exotic/romantic” associations. For the style of his home, Lederer went with a less-common period vernacular, though one that may have seemed “exotic” to him as a European native — that of the Spanish Franciscan missions of Alta California. In collaboration with designer John R. Litke, over the course of a decade, Lederer painstakingly constructed an estate that was his own personal version of a California mission. That estate, Los Angeles Cultural-Historic Monument No. 204, is now on the market for the second time ever.

Sited atop a 6.7-acre knoll, the landmark property contains a three-bedroom, three-bath hacienda plus a two-story guest house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The 4,800-square-foot hacienda wraps around a brick-paved courtyard with a fountain and galleries on three sides providing access to the various interior spaces. At the home’s heart is a 1,000-square-foot great room that separates the west wing — containing the kitchen, formal dining room, and two ensuite bedrooms — from the east wing, where a third bedroom, a library, and a pub with built-in bar and banquette are located.

Exceptional craftsmanship and museum-quality details can be found at every turn. Most rooms are anchored by an impressive brick hearth and feature centuries-old floor tiles from Spain and Portugal, beamed ceilings, and white-washed, rough-brick walls. Other striking elements include arched windows, doorways and niches, circular stained-glass insets, carved-wood built-ins, wrought-iron sconces, 35 pairs of antique Spanish doors, and exterior walls constructed with stones quarried from the property’s grounds.

Lederer, who passed away in 2000 at the age of 100, enjoyed six decades at his assiduously crafted hacienda, and presumably would have remained in residence even longer had the Northridge earthquake of 1994 not done a number on the place. Lederer and his wife moved to Palm Springs, and the West Hills property sat empty for over a decade, until 2000, when, per current marketing material, “the entire estate was earthquake reinforced and brought up to current codes at an investment of millions.”

The historic hacienda is now on the market with an asking price of $10.5 million. Included in the sale are four parcels of land and two cows, and some, but not all, of the hacienda’s furnishings and artifacts.

Mike Deasy and Sean Vandygriff of Deasy Penner Podley hold the listing.