21269 Entrada Rd

The stone arch on Entrada Road went up in 1928, built by Thomas W. Kneen, called Bill, for a neighbor named Hanlon. Kneen had come to Topanga from the Isle of Man in 1915 with his wife May and their infant daughter Katherine, and built Kneen's Kamp, a resort of tent houses and stone cabins on the creek off Topanga Canyon Boulevard. He became the canyon's stonemason, laying basalt walls and fireplaces through the Santa Monica Mountains, among them the walls at Trippet Ranch. Locals have called his arch the Taj Mahal ever since, and the road that passes under it ends at this house. The house came later, in 1964, the year California voters approved the park bond that funded the purchase of Trippet Ranch, the acquisition that opened to the public in 1974 as Topanga State Park. The neighborhood around it is still called the Post Office Tract, after the Topanga post office that opened in 1908.

The house is a single story of 2,262 square feet on 0.79 of an acre, a lot measuring 167 by 212 feet. Original wood paneling carries into a living room with open beamed ceilings and floor-to-ceiling glass, where a two-sided wood-burning fireplace opens through to the dining area and on to the breakfast nook and kitchen. Four bedrooms and two remodeled baths sit along one hall, two of them separated by a wood accordion partition that folds back into a single room. The primary reaches the backyard through sliding glass. Outside are mountain views, an attached carport, several flat pads, and an in-ground pool waiting to be restored. Trippet Ranch, the state park's main entrance, is up the same road and reopened through 2025 and 2026 after the Palisades Fire. The house last changed hands in June 2022, eighteen days on the market and above asking, and it comes back now at less than it made then.