Modest Beginnings

Karen McHugh still has the thick black notebook she kept six years ago during the course of her and her husband’s eight-month search for a first home.

In the notebook she carefully logged the descriptions of the 80 homes she saw on the Westside of Los Angeles--Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, the canyons and Santa Monica.

The house hunt, and her notebook jottings, came to a sudden end one Sunday afternoon when she stumbled onto a two-bedroom, two-bath 1928 Spanish-style house in the Santa Monica neighborhood of Sunset Park.

Within minutes of stepping inside the 1,800-square-foot home, McHugh said, she paged her husband, Jon, who is in the music business.

“The house felt very expansive to me, very cool,” said McHugh, who was reminded of the open plan of her Texas childhood home. “You could see the backyard. I really felt this was a home we could live in.”

The next day the couple withdrew their bid on a Palisades view home and made an offer on the Sunset

Park house. They paid $415,000, said McHugh, who reports her delight in learning that their home was recently assessed in the mid-$500,000 range.

A number of the McHughs’ friends have also bought homes in Sunset Park, making the neighborhood feel even more like home. “On Sundays, Jon will take the dog and I’ll get the stroller, and we literally walk around the neighborhood visiting people. Our friends will come early in the morning [and ask], ‘Do you want to go roller-blading?’ ”

A mile and a half from the beach, Sunset Park is a rectangular swath of hills and flatlands and has 2,700 single-family homes, 450 condos and some apartments.

With the Santa Monica Airport occupying a portion of its southeast corner, Sunset Park’s boundaries are Pico Boulevard on the north, Centinela Avenue on the east and Lincoln Boulevard on the west.

Sunset Park was developed in the late 1920s as a tract of modest homes that once housed the employees of the Hughes and McDonnell Douglas Corp. aircraft companies. Since then the McDonnell Douglas plant has been turned into Clover Park and the nearby celery fields have become Penmar Golf Course.

Today, an eclectic mix of homes set back along wide, shady streets reflects the architectural diversity of seven decades.

Old-timers who have lived in Sunset Park since the 1940s and young families who view the community as Santa Monica’s last affordable reserve make up a balanced blend. Additionally, people who work in the entertainment industry have long been attracted to Sunset Park.

Though many mom-and-pop stores and small coffee shops survive, a drive toward revitalization has taken off along Sunset Park’s commercial corridors.

For example, a Starbuck’s has opened on Ocean Park Boulevard, and Il Forno, an Italian restaurant that was remodeled last summer, is packed every night.

The families moving to Sunset Park have caused Oohs and Oz, a children’s resale store in the community retail mix, to triple in size in the last two years.

“The escalating land values north and just south of trendy Montana Avenue have caused buyers who were priced out of that residential market to turn to Sunset Park,” said Heidi Schuler of Coldwell Banker-Jon Douglas Co. She and her partner, Suzanne Sanders, specialize in Sunset Park.

Though Schuler acknowledges that Sunset Park homes are “pricey,” she said a buyer can get into the community through a strong condo market.

At the low end are 1,500- to 1,800-square-foot townhomes, Sanders said. These were built between 1981 and 1991 and cost from $250,000 to $325,000. Anything for less means a single-level apartment conversion.

A 1,100-square-foot starter home on a 6,700-square-foot lot sells in the $375,000-to-$450,000 range and will usually require a lot of work, said Sanders.

The median price home is $469,000. This buys a house with two to three bedrooms and one to 1 3/4 baths.

At the high end, four-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath homes run in the mid-$700,000s to the low $800,000s. They can be on lots as large as 9,000 square feet, with ocean views, and should be in very nice condition, she said.

Paula Erickson, who works for Sony Corp. in Santa Monica, and Dan Chavira, an artist, had been renting their 1,560-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath house in Sunset Park for three years when they got an ultimatum from the owner in December: Either buy or move out by March.

After some hectic comparison shopping of every available home in Santa Monica and the Palisades, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. They bought, paying $580,000.

What sold them on the home was the 900-square-foot detached unit in the back that Chavira uses as his studio. “Some houses had them but not nearly as nice,” he said. “And they were always a lot smaller.”

The couple also feels fortunate in their luck with schools.

“Grant [Elementary] has turned out to be wonderful,” Erickson said of the school where their 5-year-old son, Sam, attended kindergarten.

Lisa Gaynor moved to Sunset Park 10 years ago with her husband, Kerry, so that their three children could attend the schools.

“Most of the teachers [here] get their teaching credential at UCLA, which has quite a famous teaching program,” Gaynor said. “The Santa Monica [school district] gets to hire the cream of the crop of teachers who graduate from UCLA.”

The Gaynors paid $310,000 for their 1,500-square-foot home. The first thing that struck Gaynor about Sunset Park when the couple moved into the neighborhood was that a number of the dads work at home.

“They work in entertainment, or are a therapist like my husband, or do some sort of entrepreneurial thing,” Gaynor said. “So many of the dads are around.”

Recently the Gaynors bought a larger home in Sunset Park. Built in 1979, the two-story, 3,000-square-foot contemporary house sold for $540,000.

Though many Southland communities have neighborhood parties on summer holidays, Halloween is by all accounts the occasion taken most seriously in Sunset Park. Said Erickson: “The neighborhood really comes alive.”

She and Chavira began contributing to the festivities two years ago by holding a party for neighborhood children. “Dan has already designed the invitations for this year’s party,” she added.

Word of Adam Johnston’s Haunted House on Oak Street has spread far beyond the neighborhood, however. The sound editor said that from 2,000 to 3,000 people came by lastyear to view his wild sets and chilling special effects.

“The first year I did it [1993] was the best because I finally met all my neighbors,” said Johnston. “Everybody bonded and had a good time.”

Johnston, who is single, spotted the “For Sale” sign in front of the 2,200-square-foot duplex when he was home shopping in Santa Monica 4 1/2 years ago.

Although he hadn’t intended to become a landlord, he said he found that “the duplex was a great way to offset the mortgage.” Johnston paid $335,000 for his property.

Halloween decorations were not what surprised George and Winona Ashley two days after moving into their Cloverfield Boulevard home in 1943.

George, the retired North American Aviation employee, recalled that the outside of the Douglas Aircraft plant had suddenly assumed the appearance of a makeshift, small-town movie set.

“It was all covered with chicken wire and feathers and camouflaged with artificial trees,” he said. “From our back porch or the air, it looked like part of the neighborhood. They did not want anyone to know it was an aircraft factory.”

But wartime precautions did not dampen the Ashleys’ joy in their 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom, 1 1/2-bath house.

The couple had hoped to pay $5,000 for their first home. “At the time we were looking, houses were selling for about $7,200,” recalled Winona Ashley, who is retired from the phone company.

“We could hardly afford it. But we saw this and we liked it so well. It [was owned by] a friend and they let us have it for $7,800,” she said.

Scraping together enough for the down payment, though, took some feverish negotiating.

“My folks wouldn’t loan us $500 because they thought we were going to lose our shirts,” she said. “We sold our car, bicycle, nursery equipment. It ended up we took a second [mortgage] from the people we bought it from so we could swing it.

“I think we were lucky. Somebody had their arm around us.”

Linda Beth Mothner is a Los Angeles freelance writer.