A home belonging to one of Los Angeles’ most storied architects is now one step closer to being saved following a unanimous vote by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission.  

The Jefferson Park home was Paul Revere Williams’ principal residence for nearly 30 years and has been listed on the market for $1.6 million. The Los Angeles Conservancy submitted an application to the Commission wherein it cited the historic value of the home, which Williams inhabited during his rise to prominence in the city’s busy interwar period. The site “illustrates a part of Paul Revere Williams' life and story that is rarely told or fully understood,” according to a Los Angeles NBC affiliate.

Many of Williams’ houses have been mistakenly demolished owing to the fact that many of his business records, which were kept in a bank vault in nearby South Central Los Angeles, were destroyed when the branch was burned to the ground as part of 1992’s LA Riots.

The residence is an excellent example of Williams’ experimentations with the Craftsman style popular throughout Southern California. Commission member Gail Kennard pointed to the fact that Williams, one of the most prominent architects working in the city at that time, had to live a segregated life, which meant being confined (until he moved to Lafayette Park in 1952) to certain neighborhoods like South Central, a fact that led her and other committee members to consider the existing physical location of the home to paramount in lieu of placing the home in a museum as one attendee had suggested.

Conservationist groups, including the LAC, have since made steady progress over the years with help from USC as well as Williams’ daughter Marilyn, who died in 2015. 

The house can now be subjected to a formal objection process if and when the house undergoes a demolition. A full record of the public letters to the commission can be found here.