Crestwood Hills, Los Angeles

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Crestwood Hills, Los Angeles" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Crestwood Hills is a neighborhood within Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, located on the ridges to the north and east of Kenter Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. It is best known for its mid-century modern architecture, and contains several homes designated as architectural landmarks by the State of California. The homes were designed by A. Quincy Jones, and are featured in numerous magazines, articles, and books about mid-century modern housing. The community includes a park, pre-school, and homeowners' association.^{[citation needed]}

Crestwood Hills began as a utopian experiment in the late 1940s by a few intellectuals, and eventually turned into a cooperative association that included 400 members. The project was initially called the Mutual Housing Tract, before changing to Crestwood Hills. It was intended as a multi-ethnic project, but pressure on the landowner from existing Brentwood residents—this was still the era of racially restrictive covenants (primarily against African-Americans; the development itself was nearly all White) and religiously restrictive covenants (primarily against Catholics; the development itself was nearly one-half Jewish)—eventually led to some members of the founding group being dropped as a condition of finalizing the sale.

The 1961 Brentwood-Bel-Air fire led to the destruction of 49 homes. Brenda Rees of the Los Angeles Times said "decades of construction and reconstruction erased much of the original modern design."^[1] By 2000, Crestwood Hills was a wealthy neighborhood.^[1] Today's sales are typically in the multi-million dollar range, whereas when initially purchased in 1949, a typical residence was priced at twenty thousand dollars ($20,000).