Laurel Canyon Contemporary With Rock Roots Seeks $3.5 Million

Once dotted with rustic hunting cabins cleaved to steep hillsides, some owned by some of Hollywood’s earliest stars, L.A.’s mountainous Laurel Canyon neighborhood became a mecca for L.A.’s countercultural music scene starting in the mid-late 1960s.

The Mamas & the Papas immortalized the neighborhood with their 1967 ditty “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)”; Carole King lived up on Appian Way, where the photo on the cover of her seminal 1973 album “Tapestry” was taken; the sprawling mansion Frank Zappa bought in the 1970s was sold by his heirs in 2016 to Lady Gaga, who’s since passed it to the third of Mick Jagger’s eight children; and Joni Mitchell, whose 1970 song “Ladies of the Canyon” pays homage to a trio of her women friends in the nabe, stills owns a wee wooden cottage she scooped up in 1968 for $36,000.

The heydays of the neighborhood’s deep ties to the music industry’s bohemian flank may be mostly long gone but even nowadays a cat cannot be swung in the area’s deep ravines and winding streets without knocking up against a house owned or once owned by someone in the music industry.

Along a narrow canyon-side road, near the tip of a hairpin curve, a multistory residence built in 1990 and owned in the late 1990s and early 2000s by 311 bassist Aaron “P-Nut” Wills is newly listed at a scratch under 3.5 million. (Tax records show Wills paid just over half a million for the house and sold it at a profitable $1.25 million.)

Fashionably charcoal-colored and standing two-plus stories atop a street-level three-car garage, the designer-redone home has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus a powder room, in just over 3,300 square feet.

The living room is large enough to accommodate two seating areas, one in front of a minimalist fireplace and the other arranged for optimal TV watching. Glass sliders open to a balcony with cross-canyon vistas. It’s half a flight up to the kitchen, which sports a combination of matte black and rift-sawn oak cabinets paired with gleaming stainless steel and thick slabs of marble-patterned quartz. The adjoining dining room offers both a dry bar and a climatized wine fridge behind a sheet of glass.

Each of the bedrooms is en suite, with the primary offering a sitting area, a bulbous fireplace suspended from the ceiling, and a dressing area and walk-in closets enhanced with oak built-ins.

Making the most of the parcel’s steep terrain, a mosaic-tile accented pool and spa is set into a terrace notched into the slope behind the house. An exterior staircase ascends to a glass-railed roof terrace with numerous strands of lights strung overhead. Open views sweep over and beyond the surrounding canyons and mountains to the city lights below. And from this high perch, late at night, when it’s really quiet, you can almost hear Joni’s voice echoing up the canyon.

The property is listed with Jonathan Mogharrabi and Marci Kays at Carolwood Estates.