A 1927 house, renovated for its designer
The house is a 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival of 5,083 square feet on lower Sunset Plaza Drive, with five bedroom suites, two powder rooms, a bungalow over the garage and a pool garden behind it under mature pines. The designer Ross Cassidy and his partner, Jed Weisman, bought it in 2020, Cassidy renovated it over about two and a half years, and Architectural Digest published the result in April 2025.
The 1920s fabric stayed: leaded windows, wrought-iron railings, carved ceilings and hand-painted beams. In the living room the ceiling is coffered and painted, carried on carved corbels over pink plaster walls, and the window on the garden side frames the pool and a classical figure standing among clipped boxwood at the end of it.
What the renovation moved
Cassidy rearranged the plan rather than the shell. A guest room that could only be reached from outside became the formal dining room, with French doors to the garden on both sides. A double-height library was divided into two floors, the family room below and the primary suite above. The small kitchen took in the space beside it and became a long galley, sapele cabinets under marine varnish on one side and painted cabinets on the other, and no island: Cassidy told AD he banned it, because otherwise people never leave.
His references were Italian hotels, the Excelsior Parco on Capri and the Villa d'Este on Lake Como, which is where the marble casings around the openings, the terrazzo of the kitchen and baths, and the primary suite's ribbed ceiling, in the style of Piero Portaluppi, come from. The entry's painted tile floor is a nod to the Chateau Marmont, further along Sunset.
The rooms
The main floor holds the formal living and dining rooms, the family room, the kitchen and breakfast room, one bedroom suite and two powder rooms. Three more suites are upstairs, the primary among them, with a dressing room behind cane-fronted doors and a bath in marmorino plaster and terrazzo around a freestanding tub. The bungalow over the garage has the fifth bedroom and a full bath. Laundry and storage are on the lower level.
The walls change from room to room: plaster, lime wash, wallpaper, handmade Japanese paper in the TV room and linen in the primary bedroom. Almost all of the lighting is vintage Italian or French, the faucets are Waterworks, and the appliances are Sub-Zero, Wolf and Miele. There are three wood-burning fireplaces, in the living room, the family room and on the garden terrace.
The garden, and the street
The pool is partly recessed and trimmed in rusticated stone, with a band of green tile at the waterline, gravel paths, citrus and a fig among the hedges. A pergola of cane over black steel shades a terrace of hexagonal terracotta with an outdoor bar and a fireplace built into the stucco. A two-car garage and driveway parking for four more cars are unusual on a hillside street.
Sunset Plaza Drive was Holly Vista Drive when the house went up; it took the Sunset Plaza name in 1932, after the development the Montgomery family had begun along Sunset Boulevard in 1924. AD reports the house was later owned by the decorator Craig Wright. Its current owners describe what they made of it as somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and The Birdcage.
