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(Photograph by Lake Douglas) -
4486 St. Roch Avenue (Photograph by Lake Douglas)
Built by the design department of the Gentilly Terrace Land Company, perhaps as a model house, this small Arts and Crafts residence is one of the most attractive of the Gentilly Terrace bungalows. Bihli purchased it in 1912. The deep entrance porch is covered with a wide, low-pitched roof, its gable end crafted from interlocking wood beams, brackets, and slats in the manner of California architects Greene and Greene. Indeed, one of Gentilly Terrace’s developers, Colonel R. E. Edgar de Montluzin, traveled to California to study suburbs there before Gentilly Terrace was begun, and Los Angeles foremen, familiar with building bungalows there, were brought here to oversee construction of the earliest houses. The stucco-covered, red pantile–roofed bungalow at 4486 St. Roch Avenue, with a capacious front porch supported on massive obelisk-shaped brick piers, is a fine example of the California type, as is the house at 4468 Music Street, with its rubble stone piers and gabled dormer. More unusual in this neighborhood is H. Jordan MacKenzie’s 1910 design for a two-story house for Rosella Bayhi at 4437 Painters Street, which with its Dutch-styled gable is similar to designs by the early-twentieth-century Secession architects at the Darmstadt Colony. Gentilly Terrace developed slowly at first; then a building boom in the late 1930s generated the yellow-brick houses and Cape Cod cottages in this area.