SELLERS: Eric Garcetti and Amy Wakeland
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $1,705,000
SIZE: (approx.) 1,900 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Once upon a time, before Los Angeles’s progressive Democrat Mayor Eric Garcetti and wife Amy Wakeland moved to Getty House, a grand Tudor Revival mansion in the historic and historically wealthy Windsor Square ‘hood that serves as the official mayoral residence, they resided in a much more modestly proportioned but still quite striking mid-century modern residence perched high on a steep slope in the ethnically and economically diverse Echo Park neighborhood that they’ve sold for $1.7 million, a bit more than its $1.65 million asking price. The lucky couple turned a pretty penny on the three-bedroom and two-bathroom property, which they picked up in 2000 for $345,000, according to property records we peeped at, and incorporates a trio of steep hillside parcels that total almost half of an acre.
Designed by professional football player-turned-modernist architect Daniel L. Dworsky, built in 1953, and thoroughly overhauled in 2012 by Scrafano Architects, the roughly 1,900-square-foot post and beam residence has an unconventionally shaped, open plan and concrete-floored living, dining and kitchen space that orbits around a double-sided fireplace. A main floor bedroom tucked behind the kitchen rather luxuriously incorporates an en suite sitting room but unfortunately lacks an en suite bathroom. Upstairs, per online marketing materials, there are two more bedrooms — one of them with a walk-in closet and designated as the master — that offer unobstructed canyon and city views through wide stretches of floor-to-ceiling windows but less-than-ideally share a compartmentalized bathroom.
The committed environmentalists and veteran community activists added a variety of energy-efficient and “green” features such as rooftop solar panels, tankless water heater, bamboo flooring on the upper floor, closet doors of recycled plastic, and decks built with sustainable wood and treated with non-toxic sealant. A cozily compact dining deck dramatically nestled into a slim space between the back of the house and the rocky hillside has an outdoor fireplace and built-in grilling station. A much larger, tree-shaded deck wedged in to the hillside above the back of the house, accessed by a bridge-like exterior stairway, includes a water feature and built-in fire pit with cushioned banquette seating. A sunny slope beside the house was extensively terraced with sturdy concrete planter boxes where, according to a 2008 spread in Dwell magazine, the couple grew vegetables and 22 types of perennial herbs.
The Garcetti-Wakelands, who met in the U.K. as Rhodes scholars in 1993, actually moved from their eco-conscious Echo Park property in 2011 and subsequently made the house available for lease at $4,500 per month. The politically upwardly mobile couple moved to the more gentrified and even more hipster-swarmed neighboring Silver Lake neighborhood, where they paid $1.425 million for a boxy, five-bedroom and five-bathroom contemporary they set out for lease at $8,500 per month before it was sold in June 2014 for $1.9 million in an off-market deal to Anthony Gonzalez, founding member of the reverb-loving electronic music band M83.
Listing photos: Sotheby’s International Realty
