Extremely rare LA home hits the market for attractive price and its one of around 40 left

In a city marked by endless urban sprawl that layers its brief but fascinating architectural history like rings on a tree, few buildings feel like genuine time capsules.The Alice Lynch House at 2414 4th Avenue is one of them.Built in 1922 for poet Alice Lynch, the modest yet striking residence located in the hip and historical neighborhood of West Adams Terrace is a rare Los Angeles example of the true adobe building technique.

No, not the familiar stucco-over-wood-frame Spanish Colonial Revival houses that began populating the City of Angels in the 1920s, but an actual adobe structure made with traditional stacked sun-dried mud blocks.With only around 40 truly authentic adobe homes left in the Los Angeles area, this one still stands testament to California’s past.And it could be yours for the very reasonable (well, by LA standards) asking price of $1,849,500.Designed by architect Henry Harwood Hewitt in collaboration with adobe specialist John Byers (who dotted LA with his construction technique from 1916 before retiring in 1946), the house was built using Mexican craftsmen skilled in the old methods.Byers, who became known for reviving authentic adobe techniques across Southern California, produced many of the materials himself, including the bricks and tiles.“This type of house can only be arrived at successfully if one builds them much in the same manner as the old days one hundred years or so ago,” Byers wrote of his construction style in 1946.

“The adobes should be made by hand, and laid up preferably by Mexican labor… They can only be done economically if the adobe bricks are made right at the building site with the soil at hand.”The result of Byers’ painstaking process is this two-story, roughly 2,500-square-foot home organized in a U-shape around a central courtyard — a layout that feels intimate and redolent of a California bygone era drenched in sepia tones.Thick adobe walls, original timber beams, arched glass doors and a massive brick ...