Your Los Angeles Story Setting: Bungalow Courts

When you write your Los Angeles novel or film script — as I know you will — where in the vast sprawl of the metropolis will you set your scenes and where will your protagonist live? Obviously, one temptation is those palatial mansions behind wrought iron gates and green lawns in Brentwood or Pacific Palisades, or the luxury “beach cottages” of Malibu. Well, it’s your story.

There are novels and movies set all over Los Angeles from Nathanael West to Raymond Chandler’s city of noir to the present day. Michael Connelly first put Harry Bosch in a lonely house on a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, then moved him onto a boat in the marina in San Pedro, just down the hill from me. Thomas Pynchon’s mined the beach cities of the South Bay — Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo — in a few of his books.

It’s a vast place, and you have areas that range from enclaves as wealthy as Beverly Hills, without the over-familiar name — I’m thinking San Marino — the widespread jumble of the San Fernando Valley or any number of cities, towns and neighborhoods that run the gamut from workaday midtown suburbs to recondite hillside enclaves at the base of the mountain ranges.

Here’s Your Set

Location is up to you, but I have a classic Los Angeles set for you. It’s a genuine Los Angeles form of architecture, invented here and still to be found: the Bungalow Court.

Early in the 20th century, as L.A. was attracting dreamers, drifters, grifters, the hopeful and those for whom hope had failed elsewhere. Real estate developers took note. Visitors from farther east looking for first-time housing or a place to spend a few weeks or months in sunny, burgeoning southern California needed places to stay. In 1909, a man named Sylvanus Marston had the idea to build 11 small units on a single property in Pasadena. To squeeze them into one parcel of land, he built them in two parallel rows with a central walkway/courtyard. That idea not only caught on, it caught fire.

“Bungalow” architecture was already well-established and enormously popular, especially on the west coast, from Vancouver to San Diego. Arranging small, single-floor units into “bungalow courts” became a way to maximize revenue while keeping the venues more attractive than mere apartment blocks.

The form proliferated across the L.A. basin and — to a limited degree — in San Francisco/Oakland, Seattle and San Diego, but Los Angeles and its satellite cities became the nexus of bungalow court development, which spanned the years 1910-1930 and continued at a lesser pace for some time after that.

Initially, the period’s popular Craftsman style dominated, as here at H&M Courts in Redondo Beach, from 1923.

Developers seeking to distinguish their properties explored a wide variety of motifs, including Mission Revival, Tudor and even an ancient Egyptian Revival model in that era of Egyptian and Persian themed movie palaces. I regret I don’t know of an extant Egyptian bungalow court, but Frank Winter has an archival photo of one in his 1980 study, The California Bungalow. Naturally, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival, reflecting the city’s Spanish heritage, became staples of the genre.

The archway courtyard entrance is a common feature.

For storytellers and filmmakers, the bungalow court offers innumerable advantages.

First, it’s an L.A. thing, not unique to the city, but authentically SoCal, not an import. It’s a detached dwelling, so there’s some privacy, but in close proximity to neighbors who share that central courtyard/walkway, adding to the dramatic possibilities.

They might be jewel thieves, a famous reclusive artist, a disgraced politician in hiding or The Girl Next Door.

Philip Marlowe encounters one or two on his beat, as do innumerable other private eyes. They’ve played a role in a number of films, including the ur-L.A. epitome, The Big Lebowski. The abode in which The Dude abides is a real-life bungalow court (it’s in Venice).

I shot the photos in this post in Redondo Beach and San Pedro, but several hundred bungalow courts survive, peppered all across the cityscape. Some are run-of-the-mill or simply run-down, but some are ineluctably appealing. Look more closely at #605, above, in Redondo Beach.

Yes, that’s an ocean view, friends. Not bad.

They’re not all so stylish, and the courts were adapted to any number of settings.

In time, the form morphed to include courts with blocks of apartments rather than separate units. Click on any of the next three images for a larger view.

The “Casitas de la Paz,” in San Pedro, is an interesting transitional hybrid of bungalow court and apartment complex.

If you pause to think of the year 1910 or so, and then consider those assemblies of small bungalows around a communal space, another archetypal American form of architecture may come to mind. It has everything to do with the cultural and technological trends of the early 20th century. It is, in fact, a direct outgrowth of the bungalow court: an application, if you will. If you have an idea what that might be, leave a comment. I’ll reveal it in a post during the next week.

And good luck with that novel.

Some Useful Links About Bungalow Courts

A detailed article from early 2018 about bungalow courts, their history and current status from Curbed L.A. at this link.

Some landmark Los Angeles bungalow courts are listed on this page from the Los Angeles Conservancy website.

Information about bungalow courts in Redondo Beach from the Redondo Beach Historical Society, click on this link.

An interesting list of 100 books set in Los Angeles is in a blog post by Bookriot at this link.

© Brad Nixon 2018, 2019. Sources include the websites above as well as Robert Winter, The California Bungalow, Hennessey and Ingalls, Los Angeles, 1980.