Casa Cazaux

Spanish Revival-Styled Villa Rental & Pool in the Hollywood Hills

This iconic villa’s interior showcases its Spanish architectural influences, with arching doorways, hexagonal tile floors, and a dashing wrought-iron staircase in its vast open living room under soaring, beam-accented ceilings. Furnishings throughout are tailored and refined, yet still exude California casualness and an organic textural and color palette. Upstairs, two serene, calmly furnished bedrooms have private baths, one with a clawfoot tub. There’s a vintage workspace built into a corner room under two walls of multipaned windows, and a balcony overlooking the garden.

Outside, a lavish, lounger-lined swimming pool anchors the home’s terraced garden, and the classic red-tiled roof and vivid, white walls rise from a fertile landscape of palms, agaves, California desert shrubs and vibrant bougainvillea.

Around

The house is located in Beechwood Canyon, a leafy area that gives the villa a lost-in-the-country vibe despite its proximity to Hollywood and downtown LA. Beachwood Canyon dates from the 1920s, when the neighborhood became one of Hollywood’s first residential enclaves to become home to the stars. Set just below the landmark Hollywood sign, it attracted film directors due to its “storybook-inspired” architectural style that incorporated elements from buildings in the south of France, Italy and Spain, details such as whimsical turrets, wrought-iron balconies, and spires. Think French Norman, English Tudor, Spanish Revival, Mediterranean villa, and German fairytale looks, joined in later years by California mid-century modern and the gleaming glass houses of the 1980s.

The Hollywood Castle is located in the neighborhood, and Beachwood Canyon abuts Griffith Park, a surprisingly large wilderness area in central LA that’s home to small wildlife (rabbit, deer, squirrel, and coyote) and trails for walking, running, and biking.

Beachwood Canyon has some of LA’s best views, overlooking the city as well as the glinting Hollywood Reservoir below. Beachwood has “secret” staircases that make for great, vigorous climbs, and various guides and maps of the area detail how to find these stony steeps. Beachwood offers dozens of cafes, bars, coffeehouses and shops, and the small neighborhood grocery, Beachwood Market, is an area landmark and great place for celebrity sightings. The neighborhood has also been a spiritual/contemplative mecca for decades, home to the Vedanta Society and Theosophists who formed a colony here called Krotona. Many of the colony’s original buildings are still dotted throughout the canyon. (Look for Moorish-styled towers, stained glass windows, and notable decorative flourishes like onion domes and lotuses.) For nearly 100 years, the Monastery of the Angels, a community of cloistered nuns, occupied in the neighborhood, and the monastery building remains a neighborhood landmark. Another site that’s not to be missed is the hilltop Griffith Observatory which offers views to the ocean and over the city, and has been in films from Rebel Without a Cause to La La Land.

Around

Nearest airport: LAX (20 miles)

Best time to visit

Year-round

Photography: Kort Havens