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George R. Kress House

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Los AngelesLos Angeles County, California Registered Historic Place stubsLos Angeles building and structure stubsTudor Revival architecture in California

The George R. Kress House is a Tudor Revival-style home in a canyons area of Los Angeles, California that was built in 1931. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.Located in Benedict Canyon in a private gated community, it is a 98 feet (30 m) by 27 feet (8.2 m) house ranging from one-story tall on its south end to three stories on the north. It faces east. It has a terra cotta tile roof.It is significant both for its association with a builder and practical engineer who moved buildings, George R. Kress, and for its architecture. Kress moved hundreds of houses in Pittsburgh and in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles the buildings he moved included mansions and some 13-story buildings.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article George R. Kress House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

George R. Kress House
Benedict Canyon Drive,

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Latitude Longitude
N 34.113333333333 ° E -118.43472222222 °
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Benedict Canyon Drive 2342
90210 , Beverly Crest
California, United States
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The Mountain Beverly Hills

The Mountain Beverly Hills, formerly known as The Vineyard Beverly Hills, is a 157-acre (64 ha) undeveloped property in Beverly Hills, California reportedly worth $1 billion.Princess Shams Pahlavi, the sister of Iran’s last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, bought it in the 1970s and intended to build the shah a $20 million palace in exile after his overthrow in 1979. It never materialized and she sold it in 1987 to Merv Griffin for a reported $6.5 million. Griffin effectively sliced off the top of the mountain, grading 14 acres and removing about 2 million cubic yards of dirt. He planned an expanse including a 58,000-square-foot house, a helipad and a couple of lakes, but instead found himself busy with other real estate deals, including his 1987 purchase of the Beverly Hilton Hotel and several other hotels. Later, he divided the property into six lots for potential development. In 1997, Mark R. Hughes, the founder of Herbalife, bought the property for $8.5 million after that, it went through a number of owners, following a complex lawsuit after Hughes' death. The property was offered via a website for $1 billion and taken off the market in 2015. One of the owners in 2017 was Victorino Noval.On August 20, 2019, the property was bought back by the Hughes estate for $100,000 at a foreclosure auction. According to a Los Angeles Times report on the same date, Atlanta investor Chip Dickens "borrowed around $45 million from the Hughes estate to buy the property, and that debt has since ballooned to roughly $200 million with interest and fees. Three years ago, Dickens transferred ownership to a limited liability company controlled by his partner on the project, Victor Franco Noval. Unable to pay the debts, their limited liability company, Secured Capital Partners, tried — and failed — to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month, which led the Hughes estate to force a foreclosure auction to either sell the property in hopes of recouping its losses or buy it back, likely losing the $200 million they were owed in the process. They chose the latter."

Falcon Lair
Falcon Lair

Falcon Lair is an estate above Benedict Canyon in Bel Air, Los Angeles. The estate was built in 1925 by Rudolph Valentino, who named it Falcon Lair after his unproduced film, The Hooded Falcon. It is better known as a residence of heiress Doris Duke from 1952 until 1998.Valentino bought the four-acre estate in 1925 for US$175,000 (equivalent to $2,704,000 in 2021) and named it "Falcon Lair". He filled the house with antiques and memorabilia from his travels. Shortly after the purchase, he and Natacha Rambova divorced. Valentino retained Falcon Lair, hosted parties, and kept horses in his stable. After his death in 1926, it was auctioned off to settle his debts.After several owners, Doris Duke acquired the estate in the early 1950s to be with her companion, jazz musician Joe Castro, and to mingle with the Hollywood crowd. Falcon Lair became a venue for jazz concerts. Duke befriended Sharon Tate, her neighbor at Benedict Canyon. Eventually, she settled on a pattern where she would rotate her residence during the year, staying at Duke Farms and Rough Point during the summer, flying to Falcon Lair on her birthday, November 22 and spending the winter months at Shangri La in Hawaii. In 1993, after hip surgery, knee surgery, and a stroke, Doris Duke was kept in isolation—in a virtual "prison"—at Falcon Lair until her death. Thereafter, Bernard Lafferty, Duke's butler and initial executor of her will, renovated the bedroom for his own use. Falcon Lair was sold by the Duke estate in 1998. A renovation project started in 2003 but was not completed; the property was offered for sale in 2006. The historic main building of the estate was bulldozed in 2006. In April 2009, the property was on the market for $7.95 million. Remaining at the property are the former stable building and three-bay garage, converted by Duke into a three-bedroom guesthouse and pool pavilion. In 2019 this house on 1.3 acres was listed for sale at $4.95 million. The additional 4-acres of the original estate has been approved for a 30,000-square-foot-plus house and was listed for sale in 2018 at $29.5 million.

Misty Mountain

Misty Mountain at 1330 Angelo Drive (also known as the Stein House) is a large detached house in Beverly Glen, Los Angeles (not to be confused with the nearby city of Beverly Hills) standing in 6.5 acres of grounds with landscaped gardens and a swimming pool and tennis court. It was designed by Wallace Neff and built in 1926 for the film director Fred Niblo and his wife, the actress Enid Bennett. The house has been assessed for taxation purposes at 8,651 square feet with 11 bedrooms and nine bathrooms. It has been described as "crab shaped", with the design of the house curling around a motor court at its center.Neff's original floor plan for the house was described by Variety magazine as featuring an "elliptical entrance hall flanked by formal living and dining rooms, a library and a private guest bedroom with en suite bathroom and private entrance". A service wing contained "a kitchen-sized butler's pantry, a slightly larger kitchen with walk-in pantry, an adjoining breakfast room and a pair of staff bedrooms that share a hall bathroom". Staff or guest quarters had a living room with kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. Neff calculated the turning circle of Niblo's car when designing the driveway. Following a decline in Niblo's fortunes with the advent of sound in motion pictures, Niblo rented the house to Katharine Hepburn.The house was later owned by Jules Stein, the founder of the MCA Inc. talent agency and media company. Stein bought the house in 1940 after a bidding war against Cary Grant. Stein died in 1981; the house was listed for sale for $10 million. It was bought by the Australian-born American media proprietor Rupert Murdoch in September 1986 for $5.8 million, with Murdoch's purchase papers signed by Barry Diller. In his 2001 book Virtual Murdoch, Neil Chenoweth attributes the commanding position of the house as having contributed to Murdoch's success in deals and negotiations. The estate was quietly put up for sale in 2014 for a price believed to be $35 million. The house was bought by Murdoch's youngest son, James.The Stein house inspired Ken Ungar's design for his own house on Country Valley Road in Westlake Village.Jean Stein recounted her childhood in the house and her parents' parties there in her 2016 memoir West of Eden. Stein recalled her mother telling her that Orson Welles had visited the house with Dolores del Río and told her that it reminded him of the German resort of Berchtesgaden, the mountain retreat of Adolf Hitler. Stein was also told that Katharine Hepburn encountered snakes in the living room of the house when she lived there in the 1930s. In Stein's memoir Fiona Shaw recalled that when at the house "Up there you couldn't believe you were in Los Angeles...But of course as soon as you came out on the patio behind the house and looked down at the city, you thought you were in heaven, looking down on earth". At parties films were shown by Stein's parents in an underground screening room at the house.

Tate–LaBianca murders

The Tate–LaBianca murders were a series of murders perpetrated by members of the Manson Family during August 8–10, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, United States, under the direction of Tex Watson and Charles Manson. The perpetrators first killed five people on the night of August 8–9: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her companions Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. The baby later died of asphyxiation in Tate's womb. On the following evening, with Manson allegedly displeased about the chaotic operation of these murders, the Family then also murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.On the night of August 8–9, four members of the Manson Family—Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian—drove from Spahn Ranch to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, the home of Sharon Tate and her husband, film director Roman Polanski. The group murdered Tate, who was 8½ months pregnant, along with celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; aspiring screenwriter and Folger's boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski; and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old visitor. Polanski was not home that night as he was working on a film in Europe. Manson was an aspiring musician who had tried to get a recording contract with record producer Terry Melcher, who was a previous renter of the house at Cielo Drive along with musician Mark Lindsay and Melcher's girlfriend Candice Bergen. The following night, the four killers from the previous night, as well as Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Steve "Clem" Grogan, committed two more murders, with Manson allegedly saying he would "show them how to do it".: 176–184, 258–269  After considering various options for additional murders,: 258–269  Kasabian drove the group to 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood, the home of the LaBiancas;: 22–25, 42–48  Manson left with Atkins, Grogan, and Kasabian, while Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten proceeded to kill the couple in the early morning hours of August 10.