This 1929 apartment complex distinguishes itself from the many Whitley Heights high-rises by the spectacular vines that wrap around it, as if mama nature herself designed the facade.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 1986

As I stood in front of the 1929 apartment building Villa Bonita in Whitley Heights, a tour guide passed behind me on Hillcrest with a gaggle of out-of-towners walking behind her. “Francis Ford Coppola stayed here when he was making The Godfather” she said, pointing toward the vine-covered apartment building before us. 

There’s an understandable itch to know who inhabited all the old apartments that date back to Hollywood’s big boom in the 1920s. With all the hopefuls that poured into tinseltown during that era, chances are the ghost of somebody famous has to be haunting the halls of any given high-rise, right? 

My take is that the celebrity history of a building tells just a sliver of its story. Yes, there’s the Coppola connection with Villa Bonita. And Errol Flynn and opera/Broadway star Ethelind Terry also lived there. But the majority of the tenants here over the years were non-names; they were the artists and musicians, executives and behind-the-scenes folks that needed a place to stay near the action. And the fact that they chose a place like Villa Bonita instead of staying long term at a hotel, or buying a single-family home in the area, is in itself very telling of how Hollywood was transforming in the ‘20s and ‘30s. 

At the time Hollywood was annexed by LA in 1910, its population was about 4000. That number had skyrocketed to over 150,000 by the ‘30s, as the growing motion picture industry attracted aspiring actors and others from the east and midwest. In the early 20th century, many of Hollywood’s residential lots were single family homes. But as the population grew, Hollywood became more urbanized and denser, and many of those homes were demolished to make way for multi-family apartment buildings. The ’20s and early ’30s witnessed the construction of tons of the great old Hollywood apartment complexes that were standing, spots like the Montecito Apartments (visit #68), the Hollywood Tower and all of the Zwebell courtyards (see visits #30-32).

There’s a lot of apocrypha associated with Villa Bonita, and it can be difficult to untangle fact from fiction. Some histories I’ve read indicate it was originally built to house Cecil B. Demille’s cast and crew (same story with El Cabrillo, visit #79); other histories mention nothing about Demille, but claim it was owned by Sidney Ullman, business manager for Rudolph Valentino and a real estate investor on the side. Who knows, maybe both are true?

What we do know is that Villa Bonita was designed by Frank Webster, an LA architect responsible for a few other apartments and hotels in the southland but otherwise not very well known. In Villa Bonita, he created a seven-story concrete beauty with some elegant Spanish colonial decoration, including a roof of red clay tiles (since painted over), and a frieze that juts out between the fifth and sixth stories. In pictures of the building from the NRHP nomination form, taken in the 1980s, you can see an extra level of decorative flair on the sixth story. The three bays of windows get arches at top, and fancy patterns carved into the concrete. That must have been the high roller floor.

Today, much of the decoration is obscured by the vines that now cover the facade and north sides of the building; you can track their slow creep upwards and around by comparing the ‘80s photos with how it looks today. Over time they’ve wrapped the apartments in a growing embrace, as if mama nature herself designed the exterior. And while the vines may have covered up some of the distinctiveness of the outside, they are also what makes Villa Bonita so effing AWESOME to look at. Combine the vines with the overgrown patio that surrounds the front entrance, and the private, shady park right across Bonita Terrace to the north, and Villa Bonita becomes a temple hidden deep inside the hidden jungle, right in the middle of Hollywood. 

In 2016, photographer Pamela Littky released a book of luminous photos of the current residents of Villa Bonita. Some of them had been there for seven months; one former dance teacher had been there for over four decades. There are bartenders and actors, musicians and landscape designers, therapists and painters. They all have stories to tell. The photos give us a glimpse into these personal spaces that we don’t normally get from the staged images on realty websites and apartments.com. They reveal how actual people, doing actual people things, can transform architecture and interior design into meaningful, personal environments. I think you can appreciate buildings on a purely aesthetic level. But to truly appreciate great architecture, you need to get a sense of how people use them. We’re lucky to have a building that reveals so much character on its outside…and to have these artful photos to reveal all the characters living inside. 

Recommended Reading

+Villa Bonita’s NRHP nomination form (1986)

+Villa Bonita’s application for Historic-Cultural Monument status (LA Department of City Planning, 2009)

+Inside Villa Bonita, the Hollywood building that Errol Flynn, Francis Ford Coppola and others called home (LA Times, 2016)