Tag: Noble Manor

Actor Dovid K. was raised in Los Angeles, and he came over to our neighborhood last week for some agency photos.

The houses in our area (Victory/Kester/Columbus/Vanowen) were built in the 1950s, and due to the modesty of the neighborhood, many look roughly the same. There are the criss-crossed windows, the board and batten siding, the pastiche of architectural decorations that mid-century developers affixed to facades to make them warmer and more appealing.

The vintage styles have weathered six or seven decades and endured as archetypes of the San Fernando Valley. This section of Van Nuys was ideal because it was walkable, just across the road from the high school, near the shopping centers along Sepulveda. Those were the days when children rode bikes and walked to school and there was always someone home to greet them at 3pm.

Times change. Children don’t walk, they are driven.

Behind the house on the right someone is building an ADU out of an old garage. They installed solar panels like many of their neighbors.

This sign belongs in the archival collections of Valley Relics.

This totem statue was erected by a previous owner and still stands.

This house will have a new ADU in front, an adaptive revitalization of a classic Valley ranch house from the early 1950s.

There is something about the middle 1950s that endures in many of the houses, a cozy casualness of not so big houses with big lawns, semi-circular driveways, trees, hedges, and decorative lampposts. A lot of it is not so up-to-date. If this were Studio City or Brentwood these houses would have been long gone, demolished and replaced with white faced behemoths and tall gates and enormous SUVs on every property.

Sadly, many of these houses sell for over a million and are not quite starter homes. But they are home for many who inherited them from parents, with low property taxes and little or no mortgage payments. For the lucky ones who got lucky, this is kind of a paradise, guarded by NextDoor and patrolled by helicopter, seemingly an American paradise on the ground.

And it makes a good backdrop for a young man who channels the 1960s.