Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Owning a dog may not be a requirement for living in Beverly Glen, but it sure helps newcomers get acquainted and the old-timers stay in touch. Just ask Paul Ure.

“It was Angus who did it,” Ure said, referring to how he began meeting the neighbors when he and his wife, Sharn, and Angus, their West Highland terrier, moved to Beverly Glen as renters three years ago.

Walks with Angus, Ure said, often sparked friendly chats with neighbors out with their dogs. And that soon grew.

“Now when we take Angus for a walk,” he said, “before you know it, you may be walking with four to six people and at least eight to 10 dogs.”

Dogs and neighborliness are two of the staples of life in Beverly Glen, a 500-home community north of UCLA and west of Beverly Hills and Benedict Canyon. The rustic community runs along tree-lined Beverly Glen Boulevard for a mile and a half between Greendale Drive and Beverly Glen Place.

When the Ures, both freelance producers of television commercials, first came to Los Angeles, they looked for six months with a Realtor, considering a wide range of areas in which to rent. When their agent suggested they drive by the house they now rent, they couldn’t see the charm at first.

“Like a lot of Beverly Glen homes, the house was deceptive from the street,” Paul Ure said. “All we saw was a gate surrounded by trees.” But when the couple walked through the gate and discovered a garden and the privacy the house afforded, they fell in love with it.

Now they want to buy in Beverly Glen. In fact, they hope to buy the house they rent, which is in their projected price range of $340,000 to $400,000.

The Ures like the fact that, instead of traffic, they wake up in the morning to the sounds of children playing next door at the Beverly Glen Playgroup, the community preschool.

And they enjoy the friendliness of their neighbors and the rustic atmosphere of the Glen, which saw its first homes in the early 1900s and has been developed through the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Although dogs are central to social life in the Glen, they are not needed as watchdogs. The West Los Angeles Division of the Los Angeles Police Department puts Beverly Glen in the low-crime category, meaning that there are few major crimes and no discernible crime trends.

This may be a result of neighbors who watch out for each other. “There is an old-fashioned sense of neighborhood accountability,” said Chris Holabird, a 35-year resident.

And community counts in other ways too. Several years ago when the Holabirds moved from one house in Beverly Glen to another a block away, neighbors pitched in when they saw the Holabirds using their baby carriage to move belongings down the street.

Today the Holabirds rely on their neighbors to keep an eye on their house when they’re away. “We travel a lot, off to Arizona and such, and we always sort of wince at returning to Los Angeles, this smoggy city,” Holabird said. “But as soon as we’re back in the Glen, we know we’re home.”

Once people move into Beverly Glen, they stay put, like the Holabirds. Fierce loyalty appears to develop immediately. “Wouldn’t live anywhere else in Los Angeles” is a common feeling. As a result, there are few houses for sale at any given time in the Glen.

Realtor Sandy Grahm of Mossler, Deasy and Doe Realty Co. is a 30-year resident of Beverly Glen and an expert on the housing market there. “If you stand on one corner for 30 years,” she said with a laugh, “you end up knowing a lot about that corner.”

Beverly Glen home prices range from $170,000 paid in 1996 for a bank reposession that was “a basic tear-down,” Grahm said, to as high as $900,000 for newer, larger houses.

But the typical Beverly Glen house has two bedrooms and two baths with a den or an office and sells for about $350,000, Grahm said.

Last year, Tim Blair bought a 1960s contemporary two-bedroom, one-bath home valued at $325,000.

A writer for an Internet magazine, Blair first looked for a home on the Westside and in the beach communities, a futile search that led him through more than 100 houses.

He bought the very first house that Grahm showed him in Beverly Glen.

“It was the open feel of the house that did it,” he said. “It makes incredible use of the windows, which extend from the floor to the ceiling, so that I have spectacular views of the canyon and a west-facing deck that gets fresh sea breezes.”

Although Blair had a lot of Victorian furniture, he changed his style of furnishing and art to suit the house, which is built in the style of architect R.M. Schindler. “A house like this,” he said proudly, “has design features you just have to use.”

Of course, Blair has dogs, Labrador retrievers. “This area is great for them,” he said. “We hike the hills, walk around the neighborhood.” And, not surprisingly, “they really helped me meet my neighbors,” he said.

Many homes in Beverly Glen reflect the influence of Schindler, who became known as a quintessential California architect in the 1920s and ‘30s, although he came from Vienna.

Schindler used, as other architects increasingly did, the natural terrain of California to design homes that invited the outdoors in. Many of the houses in Beverly Glen are distinguished by their sense of space, even when the actual square footage is small.

Indoor and outdoor spaces meld together though the use of large windows, sliding glass patio doors and a weave of structural materials that retain their natural color and texture.

“Many of the houses here are warm and rustic but also have a very modern feel,” Grahm said.

Beverly and Mark Olevin’s three-bedroom house, which they bought 10 years ago for about $225,000, has such a feel. It is a cozy home set into a hillside, and the windows on one side open onto the large, terraced backyard.

“People are not behind closed doors around here,” said Beverly Olevin. The predominance of writers, artists and entrepreneurs in the Glen means that many people, including the Olevins, work at home. She is a writer, he is a graphic designer, and when they need a break, they meet up with other neighbors while walking Juno, their poodle-Labrador mix.

“The most unique thing here,” Beverly Olevin said, “is the sense of being like a cooperative. There are these almost Shakespearean feuds that go back 20 years among some of the people here, but whenever something happens, those Montagues and Capulets do work together. It is a real community of cooperation.” She cited neighborhood groups that monitor earthquake preparedness, fire hazards and traffic.

The Beverly Glen Playgroup, for instance, began as a grass-roots community effort more than 30 years ago as parents took turns hosting the play group in their homes.

Now, as a preschool, it rents space in the Les River Community Center, named after the man who spearheaded the drive to buy the building; he died in 1981. The center also hosts readings, plays and science lectures.

The community also hosts an annual street fair, a Christmas party and a spring garden walk and has a newspaper that comes out four times a year.

But it is also the peace and insulation from urban demands that people in the Glen crave. Chris Holabird regularly spots hawks and coyotes, while Beverly Olevin says she often sees deer. “When I saw another deer the other day,” she said, “I just felt good. Nature doesn’t seem far away when you’re here. . . .”

And along with the wilder aspects of nature, there are those dogs.

Teresa Yunker is a Los Angeles freelance writer.