Driving along Ventura Boulevard or the 101, it’s hard to miss the chateau-inspired office building developed by Danny Howard. Built in the 1980s and modeled on a Strasbourg mansion, it occupies a massive Chalk Hill parcel right by the freeway, with arched windows, multistory Corinthian columns, balconies, lions, and gargoyles—an audacious presence that makes you wonder why it backs onto six lanes of traffic.
For most, “Woodland Hills” evokes the flat, broad valley streets—Burbank Boulevard, Canoga Avenue, and the Warner Center grid—lined with towering office blocks—the “Mahatten of the Valley.” The real magic, however, begins in the whimsical, winding streets of the hills south of Ventura, areas few ever explore.
These hills trace back to the 1920s, when developer Victor Girard turned cow pastures into the fanciful Girard subdivision. Inspired by Turkish and Moorish architecture, he created dramatic, though largely fake, storefronts along Ventura at Topanga to suggest a thriving town.
Shaded by imported sycamores, eucalyptus and pepper trees, the “leafy hills” are in many ways a man-made illusion, the product of Victor Girard’s boosterism in the 1920s. Naturally, those hills were mostly dry chaparral and oak woodland, not the shady, almost storybook lanes people imagine today.
Girard marketed small hillside homes with ocean breezes, free lunches, and sightseeing “sucker buses,” sometimes selling the same lot multiple times. Despite the Stock Market Crash and Girard’s shady tactics, the area survived, evolving into the dual Woodland Hills we know today: the flat, wide boulevards of the valley most see, and the hidden, curvy, whimsical streets Girard imagined.
Amid this improbable history, the hills became a stage for architectural brilliance. Start at 22051 W Martinez Street, where H.H. McCulloh’s 1923 house recalls the community’s early Queen Anne-style era. Nearby, 22550 Cass Street, A. Quincy Jones’ 1960 home introduces airy, open lines of mid-century modernism framed by the Valley landscape.
Venture further into the hills to encounter Richard Neutra’s Kuhns House (4359 Camello Road, 1964) and the Bruce Goff Struckus House (4510 Saltillo Street, 1983), whose sweeping, whimsical forms evoke a giant redwood. R.M. Schindler’s Van Dekker House (19950 W Collier Street, 1940) is completely shielded from view, rising from the wooded hills as if it grew from the land itself.
Crossing into the northern Valley, John Lautner’s 1979 creation at 6530 Winnetka Avenue—now home to the Israeli-American Council—captures the “therapeutic architecture” of its era. Designed as a rehabilitation center for children, it once embodied mid-century ideals of openness and social engagement. Today it reads very differently: compound-like, fortified and inaccessible. What began as an optimistic experiment in healing architecture now reflects a world where heightened security has become the norm.
Close by, the Neutra Baldwin Residence (6025 N Lubao Avenue, 1962) floats on a private hilltop, hidden from the road. When it was built, Baldwin’s perch still overlooked a patchwork of open land and newly minted suburbs. The Ventura Freeway had just reached Woodland Hills, but it was a quiet four-lane stretch—nothing like today’s roaring artery—and the Warner Center’s dense office towers were still years away from reshaping the skyline.
Many of these structures couldn’t be built today. Modern zoning, safety codes, liability concerns, seismic regulations and accessibility mandates leave little room for the daring experiments that define Woodland Hills’ architectural legacy. All would face insurmountable scrutiny under today’s planning rules. Where architects like Neutra, Schindler and Lautner once tested the edges of human ingenuity, today we have Target.