Types of Homes in Los Angeles - A Buyer’s Guide

People have inhabited the Los Angeles basin for centuries because of the welcoming climate and fertility of the land. Settled by the Spanish in the 1700s, this sleepy port city eventually grew into one of the technology and entertainment meccas of the world. 

The discoveries of oil, a strong manufacturing industry, and the riches borne from Hollywood enabled architects and designers to experiment with architecture in novel ways as each industrial boom brought new building styles into vogue. 

Depending on a homebuyer’s taste, there are options to own gleaming steel and glass compounds nestled in the hills or take up residence in an airy stucco compound mimicking the missions of old. 

Below we highlight several of the architectural styles in Los Angeles that buyers will find during their home search.

Top home styles in Los Angeles

• Mission Revival
• Spanish Colonial Revival
• Bungalow Courts
• Victorian
• Craftsman
• Beaux-Arts
• Georgian Revival
• Chateauesque
• Mid-century Modern
• Postmodern

Mission Revival 

Perhaps one of the most widely recognized housing styles found in Los Angeles, the Mission Revival style borrows themes from the Franciscan missions that once dotted the hills of LA. In 1887, the transcontinental railroad enabled Americans from the East Coast to easily travel to Los Angeles, and savvy developers built homes in the same manner as the ruins of the missions that mystified newcomers from the East.

Los Angeles realtors presented aspiring homeowners with abodes adorned with stucco walls that supported low-pitched tile roofs covered with red clay tiles. These homes evoke a missionary feel as they feature the same arches and parapets found in Mission San Fernando Rey de España of Mission Hills. 

Homebuyers can find Mission Revivals ranging from smaller two-bedroom homes in Highland Park to large mansions nestled within Hollywood Hills. 

Spanish Colonial Revival

When folks relocating from the East arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1900s, many residents wanted to evoke the history of old by living in a Spanish Colonial Revival. 

These homes became popular in the early 1900s after architects Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow blended motifs from Mexican, Spanish, and Islamic building styles to create stucco-sided homes with curving walls, polished wood floors, and vaulted ceilings. 

Spanish Colonial Revivals are similar to Mission Revivals with their low-pitched roof covered with terracotta tiles, featuring intricately designed tilework floors, open-air courtyards, and wrought iron accents for railings and staircases. 

Homeowners can find Spanish-Moorish style homes adorned with ornamental stones and vaulted arches or two-storied Monterey Colonial Revivals complete with windows adorned with louvered shutters and spacious second-story verandas. 

Bungalow Courts 

As East Coast newcomers came west, city planners needed affordable housing to maximize the housing stock for the Los Angeles real estate market. 

Developers created multi-family Bungalow Courts, where a group of homes detached from each other all surround a centralized courtyard acting as a social square for the families in that unit. These units are usually a single-story, borrowing the stucco walls and low-pitched roofs found on Spanish and Mission Revival homes.

City planners liked these homes as they provided affordable housing while preserving outdoor space for Los Angeles residents. Eventually, Bungalow Courts became obsolete as developers began building high-density apartment buildings that could house even more families. Today, only 350 of the Bungalow Courts remain in the Los Angeles real estate market.

Buyers must keep their pulse on the market to close a deal on historic Bungalow Courts in Silver Lake, South Los Angeles, and East Hollywood. But aspiring owners can find opportunities to buy newly-built Bungalow Court homes throughout Los Angeles, as the Small Lot Ordinance law passed in 2006 allows developers to build several units on a single lot. 

Victorian

Victorian homes are staples of historic cities like Boston or Philadelphia. The style became popular in Los Angeles when the financial elite of LA financed the construction of a variety of these homes through the 1800s into the 1900s.

Depending on a buyer’s price range, there are many building styles and home sizes to choose from in Los Angeles. 

The most bombastic and expensive style is Queen Anne. These homes feature multi-story towers, vaulted arches, and porches complete with elaborate woodwork and scrolling on the railings. Folks-style Victorians offer buyers affordable Victorian living in symmetrically-gabled two-bedroom homes in Pasadena and Boyle Heights. 

Prospective homeowners can find opportunities to purchase one of these coveted historic homes in Echo Park, University Park, and Montecito Heights. 

Craftsman

Featuring a low-pitch gable roof in the style of Spanish and Mission Revivals but adorned with wooden shingle siding evoking a distinctly American feel, the Craftsman-style home is a traditional home familiar to residents of California. Craftsman homes utilize high-quality woods and professionally crafted stonework to emphasize simplicity, standing in opposition to the exuberant Victorian styles that came before it.

Craftsman homes are affordable, well-built homes complete with second-story verandas, encompassing porches, and a blending of wood and stonework exteriors. The Craftsman provided middle-class owners with spacious, rugged-looking homes that developers could easily and quickly construct. 

Buyers can find freshly built Craftsman homes in Woodland Hills, as well as historic versions in Elysian Heights dating back to the early 1900s. 

Beaux-Arts 

The discovery of oil, coupled with the budding film industry in Los Angeles in the Roaring '20s, brought financiers to Los Angeles from around the world, and developers constructed Beaux-Arts buildings to house these titans of wealth. 

These monolithic buildings feature limestone exteriors, with arches, columns, and domes evoking a Greco-Roman style of construction, complete with stonework scrolling and bas-relief sculptures. The interior of a Beaux-Arts building had marble floors, polished wooden walls, and had railings made of gleaming bronze. 

Many of the original Downtown LA buildings built in the early 1920s still exist today, across Los Angeles in Downtown LA, Van Nuys, and Beverly Hills. Massive development efforts have transformed previously unused Beaux-Art masterpieces into hotels, apartments, and condos. 

Buyers seeking an urban lifestyle can find plenty of ownership opportunities in one of the many Beaux-Arts buildings in Downtown LA, as the city plans to add over 7,000 residential units to the region.  

Georgian Revival 

While Downtown Los Angeles in the Roaring ‘20s (1920’s, not 2020’s) is where financiers conducted their business, these moguls of entertainment and industry retreated to spacious Georgian Revivals nestled in the hillside enclaves of Brentwood and Bel-Air after work.

Georgian Revivals feature a rectangular shape with two stories, with symmetrical windows flanking a pedimented main entrance supported by columns carved in a Greco-Roman style, all topped by hipped or gabled roofs. The buildings were built with classical functionality in mind, with a symmetrical facade adorned by a centralized main entrance complete with decorative pilasters and brickwork exteriors. 

Today, homebuyers in Los Angeles will have to shell out top dollar to acquire a historic Georgian Revival in Bel Air, but buyers can also search West Adams to find other examples of this storied home style. 

Chateauesque

As Hollywood boomed and World War I ended, many soldiers returning from the war made their way West to create a living in the Golden State. Savvy developers capitalized on this trend, believing that the returning soldiers would appreciate and purchase units in the French-inspired Chateauesque style stucco compounds built throughout Los Angeles. 

From large single-family homes to towering luxury apartments, these castle-like buildings required massive amounts of stone and concrete to build, rising many stories above the streets of LA with airy spires adorning the gabled roofs of these buildings. 

The style popularized the fantasy of moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s, as residents of these lofty luxury residential districts worked in the entertainment business. Today, buyers can find clusters of Chateauesque buildings with units for sale in Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, and Koreatown. 

Mid-Century Modern

Following World War II, the population in LA swelled, and housing stock dwindled. Developers needed fresh ideas to quickly build homes that appealed to existing residents and newcomers to the market, leading to the creation of the Mid-Century Modern home. Boasting clean floor plans and adherence to proportioned angles, these homes provided buyers with futuristic looks with affordable construction.

Designers realized that the temperate climate of Los Angeles allowed builders to replace insulated stucco walls with panes of glass from floor to ceiling, easing the materials needed and time it took to build a home. Homeowners in LA fell in love with the open-air design of these homes. Featuring post and beam construction holding up the roof and ceiling in place of load-bearing walls, Mid-Century homes allow owners to customize their interiors however they see fit. 

These homes usually have a centralized fireplace for those rare nights when the temperatures dropped, keeping residents warm while they can stare out at the cityscape beyond the clerestory windows. 

Seeing that the Mid-Century Modern home was a response to a swelling population in the 1940s and 50s, aspiring buyers today can find these homes clustered in neighborhoods like Pasadena or find multi-story hillside retreats in Brentwood. 

Postmodern 

While the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of Mid-Century Modern homes evoke a sense of openness and a connection to nature, Postmodern compounds built from the 1970s to the present day have taken that mantra to the next level for a contemporary home. 

As Los Angeles became a mecca for the industrial, entertainment, and technological elite, wealthy homeowners wanted designers to push the limits of geometry and material used to make the most of their allotted real estate. Using the open floor plan model popularized by the Mid-Century Modern home, designers and developers evolved the design by building asymmetric roofs, rounded walls meshed with windows, and bold colors and building materials to wow aspiring homeowners. 

Buyers looking for these pieces of esoteric real estate in Los Angeles can find examples in Venice, West Hollywood, and Hollywood Heights. 

Prevu Real Estate, Inc. is a licensed real estate broker in California, license number 02134758.