The Record
1235 South Grand Avenue is a one-story house of three bedrooms and four baths on 0.56 acre in Pasadena, with a pool and spa behind it and a three-car garage. The listing places it on a private five-home drive, on ground that was once part of Herbert Coppell's four-acre Mi Sueño estate, and the City of Pasadena's own records describe an estate that ran as far as this street.
A 2012 City of Pasadena nomination for the surviving Coppell garden says the estate extended east from South Arroyo Boulevard to South Grand Avenue and south to Columbia Street, and it names 1235 South Grand among the properties around the 0.84-acre parcel that holds the house today. The Coppell house was built in 1916 to a design by Bertram Goodhue, with a garden by Paul Thiene.
The Tract
The Los Angeles County assessor files this house as Lot 9 of Tract 15963, the same tract as Lot 8, the Coppell house parcel at 1210 South Arroyo Boulevard. Among Lots 1 through 11 of the tract, three carry buildings dated 1916 and eight carry houses dated 1949 to 1953, and this is the 1953 one. The listing gives the same year and adds an extensive renovation in 1985.
The House
By the listing's count the house has three bedrooms, four baths, an eat-in kitchen, a private office and a library, all on a single level, with wood parquet floors in the public rooms. Broad skylit eaves carry the living and dining rooms out to the rear grounds, where the pool and spa sit among large specimen and fruit trees. The listing calls the architecture mid-century, Japanese and postmodern.
