The rise and fall of Los Angeles' fabled 'Western White House'
Plenty of homes in Los Angeles have swimming pools, history and glamour, but few have a story like this one.
Built in 1913 in the stately Hancock Park neighborhood, the home at 455 Lorraine Blvd. has had so many presidents for house guests that it carries the nickname "The Western White House."
Arts philanthropist Dorothy Chandler held fundraisers in the lavish music room in the 1950s and ’60s. Her campaign to save the Hollywood Bowl landed her on the cover of Time. She and her husband, Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, named the property Los Tiempos, after the paper.
Such a dignified beginning is a long way from where the story ended up — with the landmark home in foreclosure, for lease and listed for sale after years of litigation and a controversial turn on reality TV.
Storied past
The home was famous before anyone lived there, as a Beaux Arts masterpiece in an intentionally high-end development. The home was designed by Julia Morgan, an innovating female architect at the time who went on to help design the Hearst Castle.
It became the hub of L.A. power when Norman and Dorothy Chandler lived there in the middle of the last century, and over the years presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all guests, according to the application for the home’s historic status.
Los Tiempos became Dorothy Chandler’s headquarters as she raised money for a Los Angeles music center, invigorating the city’s arts scene at a crucial moment. The Academy Awards were, for decades, presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion named for her.
When she died in 1997, interior designers Timothy Corrigan and Katherine Scheinfeld bought the estate, in disrepair, for $2 million. Corrigan had some star power of his own, having decorated homes for Sarah Jessica Parker and Madonna, according to an interview he did with Joan Rivers on her television show "How’d You Get So Rich?"
Over the nine years Corrigan lived there, he decked the home out with elegant decorations and displayed his art collection.
The home became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2006, just as Corrigan sold it to its next owners, Courtney Callahan and Joseph Handleman. Handleman was the heir of a music-distribution firm. The couple sold their old home to Britney Spears to move into the grand Chandler estate.
Recent troubles
Things soured quickly. Callahan and Handleman sued Corrigan and his real estate agent, saying they misrepresented the home’s condition. The case dragged out for years, through several attorneys, playing out in the pages of the L.A. Times and on the Bravo show "Flipping Out."
In court, according to a newspaper report, Handleman told the judge the couple had sold family heirlooms and exhausted a trust fund established for their son. The paper reported that Callahan was at one point arrested for scratching her husband with a butcher knife.
"Our family has been decimated," Handleman said in court.
In a 2012 arbitration, Handleman and Callahan lost. They appeared in the newspaper, holding each other in front of 455 Lorraine. The next day, Handleman died in a purported suicide.
Current status
Today, the 9,329-square-foot mansion sits empty, for sale for $10.6 million or, just added last week, for lease at $60,000 a month. The Altman Brothers — who have their own reality TV presence on Bravo’s "Million Dollar Listing" — listed the property.
"It has always been considered one of the most important cultural and historic residential landmarks architecturally and socially in Los Angeles," Corrigan said. "It still is all those things."
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