10260 Fuerte Drive

A 1938 Monterey-style hacienda on the eastern shoulder of Mt. Helix, attributed to Wallace Neff, the Pasadena architect who defined what a California house looked like between the wars. Neff remodeled Pickfair for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, built King Gillette's ranch in Calabasas, took his first commissions from Edward Drummond Libbey in Ojai, and spent his later decades on the concrete Airform bubble houses. San Diego County barely figures in that record. His archive at the Huntington Library holds one commission this far south, a ranch house for Fairbanks at Rancho Zorro in Rancho Santa Fe, drawn in 1931 and never built. The attribution has traveled with this house through at least a decade of sales, which is its own kind of provenance.

Exposed wood beams carry the ceilings, and the plan keeps the manners of Neff's California style: a central fireplace at the heart of the house, original built-ins, French doors opening the main rooms to formal gardens. Picture windows face east, toward the mountains by day and the grid of city lights after dark. Five bedrooms and four baths in 3,039 square feet, restored rather than remodeled, on nine tenths of an acre that sets the house far off the street behind a curved driveway.

Mt. Helix is named for a snail, the Helix aspersa found on its slopes, and its summit has held a 35-foot cross and a 1,600-seat amphitheater since 1925, built by architect Richard Requa and landscape architect Emerson Knight for Easter sunrise services that continue today. The hillsides below were planted as citrus and avocado land, and Fuerte Drive keeps the name of the Fuerte, the avocado that survived the freeze of 1913 and started the California industry. The house has kept its post above all of it since 1938.