Mar Vista Homes for Sale

Mar Vista is a neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles on the Westside, sitting between Santa Monica, Venice, Palms and Culver City. It is one of the six communities people mean when they say Silicon Beach, and the only one of them best known for a tract of modernist houses rather than for an employer.

Where is Mar Vista?

Mar Vista is bounded by the Santa Monica city line and the 10 freeway to the north, Walgrove Avenue and Centinela Avenue to the west, the Culver City border to the south, and the 405 freeway to the east.

Those edges matter more than they look. Two of them are freeways, one is a different city, and one is a city line. A property three blocks apart from another can sit in a different jurisdiction, a different school attendance area and a different tax picture. Confirm the jurisdiction for a specific address before you assume anything about it.

Venice Boulevard runs through the middle of it and is the commercial spine, with restaurants and small shopping along it and a straight run toward the beach.

Who governs Mar Vista?

Mar Vista is not a city. It is a neighborhood of Los Angeles, so the City of Los Angeles sets its zoning, issues its permits and provides its services.

There is also a Mar Vista Community Council, which is an advisory neighborhood council rather than a governing body. It carries real influence on land use questions and no authority to decide them. This is the single most common misunderstanding buyers bring to the Westside, and it is worth being clear about: if you are comparing Mar Vista to Culver City, you are comparing a Los Angeles neighborhood to an incorporated city with its own municipal code and planning department. They do not work the same way.

What is the Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract?

The Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract is a group of 52 single-family houses on Meier, Moore and Beethoven Streets, designed by architect Gregory Ain with Joseph Johnson and Alfred Day, landscaped by Garrett Eckbo, and completed in 1948.

They were sold as Modernique Homes, and they are documented as the first FHA-approved modernist tract in Southern California. That approval is the interesting part. Ain was trying to prove that modern design could be built at ordinary scale and ordinary cost rather than as one-off houses for wealthy clients, and Eckbo laid out the street planting as a single connected scheme instead of 52 separate front yards.

In 2003 the tract became a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone, and the first post-war Modern historic district in the City of Los Angeles. If you have read our Lunada Bay or Malaga Cove pages, the idea will be familiar. A neighborhood that still looks the way it does usually has a review process behind it.

What does the HPOZ mean if you are buying or selling there?

An HPOZ means exterior alterations and additions go through a review before they are permitted, so the architectural character of the district is preserved.

Each HPOZ has a five member board that advises City Planning on projects inside the district, and at least three of those members must own or rent property within it. In practice that means a second story, a changed roofline or anything that alters the street elevation sits on the critical path of your project rather than beside it.

This is not a reason to avoid the tract. It is a reason to sequence properly. The people who find the process frustrating are almost always the ones who found out about it after they had drawings. The ones who planned around it tend to describe it as the reason their block still looks like 1948. If you are considering a house inside the boundary, get the HPOZ status confirmed for the specific parcel at the start of your contingency period, not at the end.

What kind of homes are in Mar Vista?

The housing stock is predominantly single-family homes on modest Westside lots, with a large post-war layer from the 1940s and 1950s, a steady flow of substantial remodels and rebuilds, and multi-family property concentrated along and near Venice Boulevard.

Two things drive value here more than square footage. The first is whether the parcel sits inside a review overlay, because that changes what you can do to it. The second is the slope. Parts of Mar Vista sit up on a rise, and elevation buys a view that the flats do not have. Both are parcel-specific and neither photographs reliably.

What is there to do in Mar Vista?

The Mar Vista Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 9am to 2pm at 3826 Grand View Boulevard, at Venice Boulevard.

It is a certified market, so the growers are selling what they grow, and it has become the neighborhood’s standing Sunday appointment. Beyond that, most of what people do here is on Venice Boulevard or a short drive west, since the beach is a straight run down Venice and Santa Monica and Venice are both minutes away.

If you want the wider picture of what is on in this part of the Westside, the Silicon Beach Area page covers all six communities.

Which schools serve Mar Vista?

Mar Vista is served by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Attendance boundaries are set by the district and they change. Verify the current boundary for a specific address with LAUSD rather than relying on a listing, a map pin, or this page.

What should buyers verify here?

Three things, and all three are parcel-specific rather than neighborhood-wide.

Jurisdiction. Confirm whether the address is City of Los Angeles or Culver City. The border runs through this area and it determines which planning department you are dealing with.

Overlay status. Confirm whether the parcel sits inside the Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract HPOZ or any other overlay. This governs exterior work.

Zoning along Venice. Property on or near the boulevard can carry commercial or mixed-use zoning that behaves differently from the residential blocks behind it.

None of these are obstacles. They are all answerable inside a normal contingency period, and they are all cheaper to answer early than late.

Working with a Mar Vista agent

Mar Vista rewards an agent who checks the parcel rather than the neighborhood, because the jurisdiction line, the overlay boundary and the Venice Boulevard zoning all cut through it.

Chhabria Real Estate Company works the Westside alongside the South Bay and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. If you are weighing a specific address here, we are glad to walk it with you, including the parts that do not photograph well.

Continue exploring Silicon Beach

• Playa Vista, the master planned community built on the old Hughes Aircraft site
• Playa del Rey, the beach end of the Westside
• Westchester, on the bluff above LAX
• Culver City, the only incorporated city of the six
• Marina del Rey, unincorporated Los Angeles County
• Silicon Beach overview, how the six fit together