When Hollywood star Francis Lederer purchased the extensive West Hills estate in 1933, the San Fernando Valley was mostly known for its agricultural fields, ranches and orange groves.
In the coming decades, the 1930s mission-style hacienda tucked off a quiet street in West Hills, with striking views of the Valley, was the center of lavish parties that drew Hollywood movie icons such as Eva Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Dick Van Dyke. Its owners, Lederer and his wife Marion Irvine, were noted for their hospitality.
A Prague-born actor with good looks and a slight accent, Lederer was a successful stage actor in Europe before he moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s where he enjoyed even more success starring in the classic 1929 silent film “Pandora’s Box” directed by G. W. Pabst. In 1932, he starred in a Broadway play called “Autumn Crocus,” a role that earned him the title of the ”newest and most popular New York matinee idol,” according to the New York Times. In 1958, he played a vampire in ”The Return of Dracula.”
Over the years, the couple accumulated an expansive collection of paintings, religious icons, furnishings, polychrome figures and religious artifacts. All those items are headed to an auction that goes live on Thursday, May 16.
“It’s like a time capsule,” said Todd Schireson, vice president at the auction house Abell Auction Co., describing the nearly century-old house. “When you walk in, it’s like a little museum.”
The Hacienda-style home’s Spanish colonial furniture — which is now at the auction site — and the religious-themed paintings, Schireson said, look exactly as they did in pictures from Architectural Digest published in 1965. Some of the most unique art pieces offered in the auction include 16th and 17th-century artwork, Schireson added.
The seven-acre estate in the Valley, designed to look like an old California mission by artisan builder John R. Litke, was surrounded by sprawling ranches and fruit tree groves. But the 300-acre property shrank when Lederer and Irvine donated part of their land to the UCLA West Valley Medical Center and the West Hills U.S. Post Office.
The property was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1978 by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission, and the once-bustling home became a quiet witness to the long-ago Golden Age of Hollywood and the rapidly changing San Fernando Valley.
The auction items that have drawn the most interest from potential buyers, Schireson said, include a jeweled crucifix that could be from Syria or Russia, and a Spanish Colonial painting titled “The Virgin with Attendant Putti” by artist Juan de Villalobos, born in 1687.
“Many of these things were probably bought out of old European seminaries and churches,” Schireson said. “They were probably adorning churches in Europe.”
Prices on items range from $1,000 to $100,000, and potential buyers include hotels and wealthy customers hunting for items in the old mission style, he said.
When Lederer bought the property in the 1930s, the San Fernando Valley’s population was under 80,000 and the population of Los Angeles had reached 1.2 million, according to Joshua Sides, a CSUN history professor.
“There was a phenomenal period of growth in the 1920s, and Los Angeles had enjoyed a reputation of quasi-rural existence, where at that time the Valley was almost exclusively rural,” he said.
In the 1920s, Sides said, Los Angeles was “subdivided into house lots that looked like they look today — about five to six thousand square feet. But before that, the houses were not subdivided into house lots yet. So you could get large pieces of land (in the Valley) that they would not be able to get in most cities at that time.”
The estate, which popped up on the market about two months ago, is now listed for $6.495 million, with six bedrooms, according to Laugharn Pierose, a listing agent.
“It’s one of the most special landmarks and properties in all of Los Angeles because it reflects California missions,” Pierose said. “It’s been preserved all these years and stayed with the same family all these years.”
After the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Lederers, who had no children, relocated to Palm Springs. The couple invested “a lot of money into retrofitting (the West Hills house) and caught it up to speed after the earthquake,” Pierose said.
Lederer passed away in 2000 at the age of 100. Irvine died in 2011 at the age of 91.
Aside from his contribution to silent movies, Lederer founded the American National Academy of Performing Arts in Studio City, where he hosted weekly actors’ workshops in 1957. Among his students were George Clooney, Jamie Lee Curtis and Helen Hunt.
Lederer was also involved in humanitarian work and along with Irvine served as ambassador for UNICEF, and he represented the U.S. Department of State in Czechoslovakia.
Art pieces from the celebrity estate will be auctioned online on May 16 at 10 a.m.