The story of how the Chandler mansion ended up foreclosed upon and languishing on the market at $10.6M is an L.A. property saga for the ages, one which tangentially involves at least four U.S. presidents. Built in 1913 for Peter Janns, who founded Janss Investment Corp and developed some 90,000 acres of Southern California property, Los Tiempos was designed by J. Martyn Haenke, William Dodd, and Julia Morgan, a trio that also collaborated on LA's Herald-Examiner Building. Morgan, who designed the Hearst Castle, was publishing baron William Randolph Hearst's favorite architect, so it's fitting that this nearly 10,000-square-foot Beaux Arts beaut ended up in the hands of Norman Chandler, the mid-century publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Norman and his wife Dorothy Buffum Chandler, whose name graces LA's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, hosted presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon over the years, earning their home historic-cultural monument status and a reputation as a "Western White House."
The mansion stayed with the Chandler family until Dorothy's death in 1997, after which interior designers Timothy Corrigan and Katherine Scheinfeld bought it in disrepair for $2M. Corrigan lived there for nine years, decking the place out with the kind of fineries found today in his French chateaux. The designer sold Los Tiempos for $8.75M in 2006, to a pair of buyers who later sued him, claiming that they were misled about the state of the home, which was "rotten to the core."
The new homeowners were Courtney Callahan and Joseph Handleman, the latter an heir to a music distribution firm. (Before moving in to Los Tiempos, they sold their old home to Britney Spears for nearly $7.2M.) The case dragged on for years—and was even featured out on at least one episode of Bravo's "Flipping Out"—with Callahan and Handleman spending nearly $3 million on repairs and renovations, for which they sold off heirlooms and drained a trust fund established for their son, later stating in court that "our family has been decimated." They lost the case in 2012, appearing in the LA Times the next day embracing in front of the former home of its old publisher. The day after that, Handleman died in an apparent suicide.
Today, Los Tiempos sits foreclosed upon, reduced from the 2012 price of $11.25M. The current ask is $10.6M, and it's also on offer as a rental at $60K a month. For his part, Corrigan tells Zillow Blog that "it has always been considered one of the most important cultural and historic residential landmarks architecturally and socially in Los Angeles. It still is all those things."
· Once Hub of LA Power, Landmark Home in Foreclosure [Zillow Blog]
· L.A.'s Delightfully Grand Chandler Mansion Returns to Market [Curbed National]
· Mindbogglingly Pedigreed Chandler House Hits the Market [Curbed LA]
· 455 Lorraine Blvd [Altman Brothers]
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