The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House | HCM #794 Los Angeles
West Adams · Historic-Cultural Monument #794 · Architectural homes
The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House
A circa 1904 Mission Revival landmark in Wilshire Center, designed by the firm that built the Wiltern, held by just four owners across more than 120 years.
What is the Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House?
The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House is a circa 1904 Mission Revival Craftsman residence at 1049 South Elden Avenue in Wilshire Center, Los Angeles. Designed by the architectural firm Morgan and Walls with the involvement of Stiles O. Clements, it is designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #794 and enrolled in the Mills Act program. The home spans over 5,000 square feet and has been held by just four owners in its more than 120-year history.
There are houses in Los Angeles that have been witnessed. They were standing when the city was still finding its form, before the freeway grid arrived, before one century's idea of a good life gave way to the next. The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House at 1049 South Elden Avenue in Wilshire Center is one of those houses. Built circa 1904 and designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #794 in 2005, it has stood through all of it, cared for by just four owners in more than 120 years. That is not luck. That is a house worth keeping.
The property sits inside the Wilshire and Westlake historic monument corridor, a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles. At over 5,000 square feet across two floors, the home spans six bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, a sunroom, a wood-paneled dining room, a music room, a servant's staircase, a ballroom-scale finished attic, and a full basement with its own separate entrance. The detached garage carries a fully permitted recreation room above it. But none of those numbers tell you what the house actually is, which is something quite specific: an early residential commission by Morgan and Walls, one of the most consequential architectural firms in the history of California, produced with the involvement of Stiles O. Clements before his name appeared on the firm's masthead.
Debbie Pisaro has spent years working at the intersection of architectural history and real estate value across Los Angeles. As an architectural homes specialist, she notes that homes like this one occupy a category all their own. They are not simply old. They carry documented provenance, protected status, and a physical integrity that most of the city's housing stock lost decades ago. When you walk through the Bumiller-Hickey House, you are not walking through a renovation. You are walking through a record.
Morgan and Walls, and the making of early Los Angeles
To understand what the Bumiller-Hickey House represents architecturally, you need to understand the firm that designed it. Morgan and Walls was not a peripheral practice. It was, by any measure, the firm most responsible for shaping the built environment of Los Angeles from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth.
The firm traces its lineage to Ezra Kysor, who designed Los Angeles's first cathedral in 1876. When Kysor's draftsman Octavius Weller Morgan was promoted to partner and John A. Walls joined the practice, the firm became Morgan and Walls. It worked for decades in that configuration, building civic institutions, commercial blocks, and private residences across a rapidly expanding city. Around 1910, Morgan's son Octavius Morgan Jr. became a partner, and with the arrival of designer Stiles O. Clements the firm hit its full stride, eventually becoming Morgan, Walls and Clements.
The portfolio that resulted is staggering. The Wiltern Theatre, the Mayan Theatre, the Music Box Theatre, the Samson Tire and Rubber Company factory now known as Citadel Outlets, the Adamson House in Malibu, the Richfield Tower, the Bumiller Building on Broadway. Clements became the firm's principal designer and, after 1937, practiced on his own until 1965. The drawings for more than 600 of the firm's projects are archived at the Huntington Library in San Marino. The Los Angeles Conservancy's firm biography covers the full arc from the 1890s through Clements's late career.
The Bumiller-Hickey House was built during the Morgan and Walls era, before Clements formally joined the partnership, but with his involvement in the design. It is a Mission Revival structure with Craftsman transitional elements: arched supports, low-pitched rooflines, plain plaster surfaces, and interior details that remain largely intact. Five decorative fireplaces. Leaded-glass windows. Original built-ins. Restored gas-electric light fixtures. A turn-of-the-century security system, preserved as an artifact of the period. That level of preservation in an urban Los Angeles home of this age is extraordinarily rare.
Caroline Bumiller-Hickey and the Bumiller estate
The house bears the name of Caroline Bumiller-Hickey, born Caroline Gerstenberg in Germany in 1848, who arrived in Los Angeles from Brooklyn around 1871 alongside her husband Jacob Bumiller, a Bavarian wine merchant. After Jacob's death, Caroline managed the Bumiller Estate, a portfolio of downtown Los Angeles properties that made her one of the more significant property holders in early twentieth-century Los Angeles society.
She was not a quiet figure. In her later years, Caroline became the subject of a widely covered divorce proceeding against her second husband, George C. Hickey. She appeared in court bearing an ear trumpet and claiming deafness. After eighteen years of marriage, the court granted Hickey's petition on grounds of desertion. Caroline Bumiller-Hickey lived until 1932. The house outlasted her by nearly a century and continues to carry her name, preserved in the official HCM record.
Her other major architectural commission, the Bumiller Building at 430 South Broadway, was also designed by Morgan and Walls, completed in 1906 in the Renaissance Revival style. That building now operates as the Broadway Lofts, a landmarked residential conversion. Together, the Elden Avenue house and the Broadway building represent a coherent patron-architect relationship that left two durable marks on the city.
HCM designation and what it means for the next owner
The City of Los Angeles designated the Bumiller-Hickey House as Historic-Cultural Monument #794 on May 4, 2005. The HCM program, administered by the Office of Historic Resources, recognizes properties with cultural, architectural, or historical significance to the city. Designation carries legal obligations regarding alterations and demolition, and it opens the door to the Mills Act program, which can have substantial financial consequences for the owner.
The Mills Act is a California law enacted in 1972 that allows cities to enter into contracts with owners of designated historic properties. In exchange for maintaining and restoring the property to preservation standards, the owner receives a reduced property tax assessment calculated using an income-based method rather than standard market value. The city of Los Angeles established its program in 1996 and today administers nearly 1,000 contracts. The City's Mills Act program page covers current requirements.
The Mills Act contract runs on a revolving ten-year basis, automatically renews each year, and transfers to the new owner at sale. The buyer inherits both the preservation obligations and the tax benefit. For a property of this size and value in Los Angeles, the annual savings can be substantial. Understanding how the income-method valuation is calculated, how preservation obligations translate into scope of work, and how lenders approach the contract during underwriting is a material part of representing these properties well.
Debbie Pisaro works regularly with buyers and sellers of HCM-designated and Mills Act properties across Los Angeles. For buyers new to the program, the Los Feliz Living blog covers what it means to sell a Mills Act or HCM home and how historic designation affects home value in practical terms. The Los Feliz historic homes series profiles individual HCM-designated properties in depth, including the Ennis House, the Lovell Health House, and the Blackburn Residence.
The house today: what survives, what was restored, what was added
The Bumiller-Hickey House has been thoughtfully maintained and selectively improved. The original fabric that survives is exceptional for a private urban residence of this age. Five decorative fireplaces remain in place. The leaded-glass windows, the original built-ins, and the restored gas-electric light fixtures all date to the home's construction. The wood-paneled dining room is intact. The servant's staircase and quarters survive. The ballroom-scale finished attic is original to the structure.
Recent mechanical and systems upgrades include a new roof, an updated sewer line, copper plumbing, upgraded electrical, dual-zone HVAC, and tankless water heaters, each executed in a manner consistent with preserving the home's period character. The basement has its own separate entrance, an unusual feature that adds meaningful functional flexibility to a property that already offers significant square footage.
The gated grounds carry mature fruit trees including citrus, fig, persimmon, guava, avocado, mango, and papaya. The detached two-car garage is topped by a fully permitted recreation room suitable as guest quarters, a home office, or studio space. The property is zoned R4, which provides long-term optionality without compromising the historic character of the main structure.
Mission Revival and its place in Los Angeles architectural history
Mission Revival emerged as a dominant residential style in Southern California at the turn of the twentieth century, drawing on the visual vocabulary of the Spanish colonial missions: stucco walls, low-pitched rooflines, arched openings, and restrained ornamentation. It was, in part, a regional identity project, an effort by a rapidly growing city to articulate a design language tied to the California landscape and its history.
The Bumiller-Hickey House sits at the transitional moment between Mission Revival and the Craftsman movement that followed. The arched porch supports and plaster surfaces belong to the Mission vocabulary; the interior woodwork, the built-ins, and the attention to craft in the details anticipate the Craftsman sensibility that would define residential Los Angeles design in the years immediately ahead. That overlap is part of what makes the house architecturally interesting. It does not sit cleanly in one period. It bridges two.
Morgan and Walls was among the most accomplished practitioners of Spanish Revival styles in Los Angeles before Stiles Clements directed the firm toward Art Deco and Streamline Moderne in the late 1920s and 1930s. The Bumiller-Hickey House predates that transition and belongs to the firm's earlier, more residential mode. It is a rare surviving private commission from a practice better known today for its theaters and commercial landmarks. For context on how Coastline 840 approaches pricing homes of this type, the guide to pricing an architectural home in Los Angeles covers the valuation questions that come up most often.
The broader Los Angeles canon of early to mid-twentieth century residential architecture gives the Bumiller-Hickey House useful company. The R.M. Schindler profile on debbiepisaro.com examines the Viennese emigre who became one of California's most radical residential architects, with surviving houses across Silver Lake, West Hollywood, and the Valley. The Richard Neutra homes guide and the Nesbitt House profile document Neutra's parallel contribution to the city's residential landscape. The Silvertop profile covers John Lautner's Silver Lake masterwork, a few miles from this property. The Gregory Ain profile traces the modernist who brought socially conscious housing to Mar Vista and beyond. And the Hollywood Heights High Tower documents another rare Los Angeles landmark, one that survives in the same fragile category as the Bumiller-Hickey House: original, protected, and irreplaceable.
Collectively, these profiles reflect what Debbie Pisaro has argued across years of writing about the city: that Los Angeles's architectural legacy is far deeper than its reputation suggests, and that the homes which embody it are among the most significant real estate opportunities in California. The Coastline 840 guide to coastal California buyers and the second home buyer's guide place historic homes within the broader context of the California property market.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House? The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House is a circa 1904 Mission Revival Craftsman residence at 1049 South Elden Avenue in Wilshire Center, Los Angeles. Designed by Morgan and Walls with the involvement of Stiles O. Clements, it is designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #794. The home spans over 5,000 square feet and has been held by just four owners in more than 120 years.
Who was Caroline Bumiller-Hickey? Caroline Bumiller-Hickey, born Caroline Gerstenberg in Germany in 1848, was a wealthy Los Angeles socialite and real estate holder who arrived in the city from Brooklyn around 1871. After her first husband Jacob Bumiller's death, she managed the Bumiller Estate, a downtown Los Angeles property portfolio. She also commissioned the Bumiller Building on Broadway, designed by the same firm, which now operates as the Broadway Lofts.
Who were the architects Morgan and Walls? Morgan and Walls was one of the oldest and most prolific architectural firms in Los Angeles, tracing its lineage to 1876. The firm eventually became Morgan, Walls and Clements and designed many of the city's most recognized landmarks, including the Wiltern Theatre, the Mayan Theatre, and the Adamson House in Malibu. Stiles O. Clements, who became the firm's principal designer, was involved in the Bumiller-Hickey House before formally joining the partnership.
What is Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #794? The Carolyn Bumiller-Hickey House was designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #794 on May 4, 2005. HCM designation recognizes properties of cultural, architectural, or historical significance to the city. It carries obligations regarding alterations and demolition and qualifies the property for the Mills Act property tax reduction program.
What is the Mills Act, and how does it apply to this property? The Mills Act is a California law allowing cities to contract with owners of designated historic properties for property tax reductions in exchange for preservation obligations. The assessment is calculated using an income-based method rather than market value, typically producing a significantly lower tax bill. The contract runs on a revolving ten-year basis, renews annually, and transfers to the new owner at sale.
What architectural style is the Bumiller-Hickey House? The home is classified as Mission Revival with transitional Craftsman elements. It bridges the Mission Revival vocabulary of the early twentieth century, including arched openings and stucco surfaces, with Craftsman interior details and built-in woodwork that anticipate the period that followed.
What original features survive in the home? Original features include five decorative fireplaces, leaded-glass windows, original built-ins, restored gas-electric light fixtures, a turn-of-the-century security system, and the wood-paneled dining room. The servant's staircase and quarters and the ballroom-scale finished attic are intact. This represents an unusual degree of preservation for a private residence of this age in urban Los Angeles.
What does the R4 zoning mean for this property? R4 designates a high-density multiple-dwelling zone in Los Angeles. For the Bumiller-Hickey House, it provides long-term development optionality beyond the current single-family residential use. Any future development would be subject to the property's HCM designation and Mills Act contract obligations, which govern alterations to the historic structure.
How does Debbie Pisaro approach buying or selling a historic Los Angeles home? Debbie Pisaro has specialized in architecturally and historically significant properties across Los Angeles for over two decades. Her approach combines architectural research, HCM program knowledge, Mills Act mechanics, and a marketing strategy built around each home's specific provenance. She can be reached at (310) 362-6429 or debbie@coastline840.com.
Where can I learn more about HCM-designated homes in Los Angeles? The Los Feliz historic homes series on Los Feliz Living profiles individual HCM properties in depth. The City of Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources maintains the official HCM database. The Los Angeles Conservancy publishes architect biographies for many of the city's most significant firms.
Coastline 840 Real Estate's West Adams team
Thinking about a historic home in West Adams or Wilshire Center?
Debbie Pisaro has spent 24 years helping people buy and sell architecturally and historically significant homes across Los Angeles. HCM designations, Mills Act contracts, and provenance research are part of the work.
Coastline 840 Real Estate · DRE #01369110
Debbie Pisaro is the founder of Coastline 840 Real Estate, an independent brokerage specializing in architectural, historic, and design-forward properties across California. She has 24 years of experience in Los Angeles real estate and writes about historic homes, architectural provenance, and the California property market across the Coastline 840 network of sites.
Coastline 840 Real Estate · DRE #01369110
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