On Santa Monica’s La Mesa Drive, Architectural Gems Are Everywhere
It is rare to find so many architecturally significant properties in one community—let alone on the same street.
But Santa Monica’s La Mesa Drive is ripe with homes designed by noted architects, including Paul R. Williams, J.R. Davidson, Oscar Niemeyer and Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. The street has an usual concentration of architecturally distinct properties, with four out of about 60 designated as landmarks.
La Mesa continues to attract buyers for this reason alone. But as prices rise, so does the tension between deep-pocketed buyers drawn to its prime location and those who want to preserve the street’s historic homes as they are.
In 2019, trial attorney Otto Haselhoff unsuccessfully sued the city in an attempt to remove the landmark designation on his property, a circa-1926 English Tudor designed by the Beverly Hills Hotel architect Elmer Grey. “Anything you want to do requires approval,” he says. “There are constant questions. Is it your property if you can’t change it?”
Gen Z and Millennial furniture collectors are helping to expand the market for vintage IKEA. The average IKEA item listed on the online marketplace Chairish now carries a price tag of nearly $1,000, said Chairish vice president of brand and merchandising Noel Fahden, while LiveAuctioneers, an auction platform owned by Chairish’s parent company, has seen growth for vintage IKEA across virtually every metric over the past five years.
Lastly, we zoom in on San Francisco’s housing market, which has turned into the “Wild, West West” ahead of anticipated IPOs from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.