The Greystone Mansion

I recently visited the beautiful Greystone Mansion, which is a Los Angeles treasure and historic landmark that is located in Beverly Hills, California.  Walking through the beautifully maintained gardens, I felt both peace and melancholy.  For a moment in time, this grand manor was inhabited by one of the wealthiest families in Los Angeles, but now it sits empty.  The story of this mansion goes back over a century, when Los Angeles was a young but burgeoning city.  

Built in the late 1920s, the monumental opulence of Greystone Mansion is the product of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when spirited explorers sought their fortunes in new frontiers.  One of these pioneers was Edward Laurence Doheny who made his fortune in the 1890s by finding oil in Los Angeles, which launched the oil industry in southern California. With his newfound wealth, he purchased acres of rolling countryside in Beverly Hills and when his only son married in 1926, he gifted the newlyweds with a very large parcel of this land to build what would become the Greystone Mansion.  

It took three years to build the 55-room Tudor Revival mansion which was surrounded by English gardens, cascading brooks and waterfalls, a swimming pool and pavilion, horse stables, tennis courts, a fire station, and a lake. Young Ned Doheny and his wife Lucy moved into Greystone Mansion in September of 1928, but within five months Ned Doheny would be dead, the victim of a murder-suicide. 

Lucy eventually remarried and continued living at Greystone Mansion until 1955 when she sold Greystone Mansion and acres of surrounding land. Portions of the land was sold to Paul Trousdale, who built a community of Hollywood Regency and Mid-Century Modern style homes called the Trousdale Estates.  The Greystone Mansion was purchased by the city of Beverly Hills and is beautifully maintained and preserved by the Friends of Greystone as a park and museum that is open to the public. 

Greystone Mansion is a beautiful reminder of a bygone era and the family that helped build the City of Angels.