Recycled Becket

Architect Welton Becket's low-slung, ranch-style house at the southeast corner of Wilshire and Highland has changed hands. For sale signs have been replaced by fence banners for the Korean-oriented Western Realty and University of Western California. It's appropriate that 4950 Wilshire would be occupied by a real estate firm. Becket designed the Post-War House shortly after World War II to show home-shopping ex-GIs the new-fangled conveniences like garbage disposals, televisions and central air conditioning. Suburbs builder Fritz B. Burns charged a buck to tour the house and sold a million tickets after House Beautiful magazine devoted forty-two pages to the home in 1946. When the novelty wore off, Burns had Becket redesign the property as the House of Tomorrow with even more modern inventions and a small helipad on the roof. Burns later made the house into his real estate offices and at Christmas would feature live reindeer. More recently, the property had been occupied by a Korean newspaper and the German athletic club the Los Angeles Turners.

1946 photo: Los Angeles Public Library/Dick Whittington Collection