Friday, December 10, 2010

An interesting house

Surfing the web, I came across a real-estate listing for this house at 3763 Fredonia Drive overlooking Cahuenga Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills. Why is this house of interest to the readers of this blog?

This house was built in 1939 and designed by Harwell Hamilton Harris. And it was built for none other than watercolorist and background painter Lee Everett Blair and his wife Mary Robinson Blair, the latter known for her stylized design and illustration work and for designing the "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland.

I only met Lee Blair once and I never met Mary or visited their home. In the 1950s and 1960s my mother did a lot of work for Lee's brother Preston Blair when he was running Preston Blair Productions out of his house in Westport, CT. I have a lot of memories from my childhood of Preston's home, and it looked an awful lot like an East Coast version of Lee and Mary's home (although I tend to doubt that Harris designed the Westport house.)

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