One of the most influential architects in the Los Angeles area during its boomtown early days was Myron Hunt. Part of an early group of innovative architects that came to be known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School; Hunt left Illinois for California in 1903. By the early 1920s he’d made a pretty good success of himself, first in partnership with Elmer Grey, then on his own, and from 1920 until his 1947 retirement, with Harold C. Chambers.
Among his most celebrated commissions are numerous landmarks in and around Pasadena. They include the Rose Bowl stadium, a summer ranch for cereal tycoon W.K. Kellogg, which now makes up part of the Cal Poly Pomona campus, numerous buildings that comprise Occidental College in L.A’s Eagle Rock district, and the San Marino mansion of railroad magnate Henry Huntington, which later became an art gallery at what is now the renowned Huntington Library complex.
In the early 1920s, Hunt was commissioned to design a sprawling, single-story Spanish Revival-style hacienda in the then semi-rural and nowadays solidly suburban and well-to-do community of La Cañada Flintridge, which abuts Pasadena about 15 miles due north of downtown.
Completed in 1922 and named by Hunt as “La Casa Bonita,” the vintage home has been owned for the last decade by singer turned actress turned TV writer/producer Rachel Sweet (“Sports Night,” “Dharma & Greg,” “2 Broke Girls,” “The Goldbergs”) and TV writer/producer Tom Palmer, who earned his first Emmy in 1992 for “Murphy Brown” and his second in 2008 for “Mad Men.”
The low-key sitcom dynamos acquired the property, according to tax records, in 2012 for $1.85 million, and now, after it’s been comprehensively restored and sensitively updated, have put the house back up for sale at a smidgen over $3 million. Listings held by Carey Haynes of Compass show there are five bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in the main house, plus another bathroom in the two-room guesthouse that’s attached to the detached two-car garage.
