The house
445 Columbia Street is a single-story courtyard house of 1978 that the listing says Bob Ray Offenhauser designed as his own family home. Behind tall perimeter walls, a fountain courtyard opens to a parterre of clipped boxwood, reflecting basins and stone urns, and the house runs as a row of pavilions that each face their own garden or courtyard.
The living room rises to 14-foot ceilings under skylights, with a 12-foot wall of glass and steel that opens to the garden and an eighteenth-century limestone fireplace the listing traces to a chateau in the Loire Valley. Floors are terra-cotta, stone and wood, and mature trees give the pool and spa their seclusion.
The plan
The lot is 14,832 square feet near the Arroyo Seco, and the house has three bedrooms and three baths. Beyond the living room are a garden room, a kitchen with a walk-in pantry, an office, a laundry room and an attached garage.
The architect
Offenhauser lived from 1927 to 2016. He was educated at USC, and a book on his work, Bob Ray Offenhauser: An Architect's Journey, was published in 2010. The listing says he drew this house together with its neighbor, for friends of the family, on the former grounds of the Tanner-Behr estate. That estate was Villa Arno, built in 1916 for Dr. John Stewart Tanner and later named by the chemist Dr. Arno Behr.
