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Some houses announce themselves instantly. Others ask you to decelerate. Tucked behind gates and layers of greenery in Brentwood, Benmore Terrace belongs to the latter. You don’t arrive at this home a lot as you progress via it—previous a sequence of panorama, mild, and quiet intention—till the structure reveals itself. Designed in 1960 by A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, the house feels much less like a second preserved in time and extra like an ongoing dialog between construction and nature.
Initially commissioned by developer Sarah Jane Lapin, Benmore Terrace was designed to reward motion slightly than spectacle. Set on almost an acre, the home reframes conventional concepts of back and front, guiding you inward towards expansive glass, hillside views, and a waterfall that feels integral to the house slightly than an added characteristic. Gentle and openness choreograph day by day life right here, blurring the boundary between indoors and out in a method that also feels trendy.
Claire O’Connor
Claire O’Connor is the founder and visionary behind O’Connor Estates – a Los Angeles-based actual property and improvement agency redefining trendy luxurious via soul, storytelling, and design. Claire’s strategy focuses on fewer, higher houses that align deeply together with her imaginative and prescient for high quality, connection, and emotional resonance.
When investor and actual property agent Claire O’Connor encountered the property, she wasn’t looking for a undertaking—she was responding to a sense. “Benmore was not a home I went attempting to find,” she says. “It was a home I stumbled into, and it revealed itself in layers over time.” Even after years of renovation that had dulled its voice, the house’s authentic architectural DNA—the restraint, the readability, the best way it privileges nature over show—remained intact. Reasonably than reimagining the home from scratch, Claire noticed a chance for stewardship.
Why Preservation Issues
What in the end set Benmore Terrace aside wasn’t simply its setting, however the truth that its architectural intent was nonetheless legible. The house carries a transparent viewpoint about how trendy life in Los Angeles can really feel—open, grounded, and deeply linked to the pure world.
“Realizing it was a Jones and Emmons home commissioned by Sarah Jane Lapin got here with a duty,” Claire explains. “You aren’t simply updating a property. You might be stewarding an concept about how trendy residing can really feel in Los Angeles.” Whereas the house’s bones remained sturdy, a Nineties renovation had obscured that readability, layering on finishes that muted the structure’s voice.
Working with Jesse Rudolph and Joelle Kutner of Ome Dezin, the restoration started with subtraction. Dated parts had been eliminated so the house’s authentic gestures—mild, proportion, and stream—may learn once more. The purpose wasn’t nostalgia, however translation: restoring the structure’s intent whereas elevating perform for up to date life.
Designing With Nature
At Benmore Terrace, nature was by no means handled as an adjunct. Expansive fastened home windows body hillside greenery, permitting mild to filter via the house all through the day, whereas the waterfall’s presence anchors day by day life.
That philosophy guided the interiors. Ome Dezin labored inside a impartial palette designed to recede, warming the area with pure woods and grounding it with stone—most notably travertine within the kitchen and bogs. These supplies don’t compete for consideration; they create calm. “Nature was not handled as ornament,” Claire says. “It was handled as a collaborator.” The result’s a house that feels deeply attuned to its setting, the place interiors act as a backdrop to what’s unfolding simply past the glass.
Modifying With Intention
Deciding what to protect required each reverence and restraint. The house’s fastened glass, skylights, and main glazing moments—central to its id—had been non-negotiable. The place new parts had been launched, they had been approached as translations slightly than reinventions.
Customized particulars all through the house had been designed to answer its scale and rhythm: built-ins, mirrors, and a powder room door crafted to really feel seamlessly built-in. Within the eating space, a customized desk and chairs designed by Claire’s pal Ben Willet match so naturally throughout the structure that they really feel inevitable. “In a home like this, worth isn’t simply concerning the end stage,” Claire notes. “It’s about defending the architectural story.”
Letting a Dwelling Discover Its Folks
In a market pushed by broad enchantment, Claire resists the thought of designing for everybody. “A house isn’t for everyone,” she says. “It’s for anyone.” Curiously, Benmore Terrace challenged assumptions about who that anyone is likely to be. Whereas the staff initially imagined a design-forward purchaser, the house in the end discovered a younger household.
That end result strengthened a core perception: when a house stays sincere to itself, it creates area for true belonging. Benmore Terrace doesn’t attempt to accommodate everybody. It affords one thing rarer: a way of arrival.
Preservation as Duty
After dropping her own residence within the Palisades fires, Claire’s relationship to preservation grew to become deeply private. “Dropping a house adjustments the way you perceive what a home actually is,” she displays. “A lot of it’s reminiscence, routine, and refuge—not simply supplies or sq. footage.”
In a metropolis the place erasure occurs shortly, stewardship takes on new urgency. Preserving a house like Benmore Terrace isn’t about freezing it in time—it’s about honoring the concepts embedded inside it, and making certain they endure. In selecting preservation over reinvention, Claire has allowed this singular dwelling to proceed its dialog—with nature, with historical past, and with the individuals who now name it dwelling.
The Takeaway
Benmore Terrace is a reminder that readability doesn’t come from including extra—it comes from paying nearer consideration. When a house stays true to its structure, setting, and historical past, it creates area for one thing deeper than design tendencies or market enchantment. Preservation, at its greatest, is an act of care: for place, for reminiscence, and for the lives that unfold inside it. In selecting restraint over reinvention, Benmore Terrace exhibits how honoring what already exists may be essentially the most enduring type of trendy residing.
