A Spanish ranch in the desert Bel Air
Desert Bel Air Estates went on record in 1960, forty acres that developer Fillmore Crank and builder Robert Higgins cut into 107 lots at the entry to Eldorado Country Club, with William F. Cody, who had designed the club itself the year before, as the tract architect. Cody drew this house in 1963 for Crank and his wife, the actress Beverly Garland, and he drew it as a Spanish ranch house. Construction had barely begun when Garland took a co-starring role on The Bing Crosby Show and the couple returned to Los Angeles.
The Petrie years
Paula Vickers Petrie, an heiress to the Wichita oil fortune of Vickers Petroleum, bought the unfinished house with her husband Jack, a clothier who pioneered country club golf apparel, and completed it in 1964. They held it for 46 years, and the guest list ran to Arnold Palmer, Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Johnny Bench, Barry Goldwater, and Jack Lemmon, many of them straight off the Eldorado course. Jack died in the 1980s; Paula stayed until 2010.
The house today
Owners who arrived in 2019 pulled the house toward the midcentury reading its frame always allowed. Layered ceiling beams, an original interior planter, and the restored bar carry the Cody plan, and a redesigned primary bath runs as an open wet room. Five bedrooms and six baths in 5,578 square feet on 0.72 acres, sold furnished, with the pool set against the mountains.
