Pristine A. Quincy Jones House Built for Utopian L.A. Community Lists for

A remarkably intact A. Quincy Jones house built in a postwar Los Angeles cooperative community has come to market asking $2.7 million.

The post-and-beam home on Rochdale Lane, known as the Gelb House, was one of 160 modest mid-century homes designed by Jones, along with Whitney R. Smith, for the utopian Mutual Housing Tract project, in today’s Crestwood Hills, located within Los Angeles’s affluent Brentwood neighborhood.

Today, fewer than 30 of the Jones-Smith homes remain, and the Gelb House is one of a handful that have been declared historic because of its original condition. 

The redwood-frame home was built in 1950 for Morris and Lydia Gelb, who owned a grocery store in Hollywood. It remained in the family until 2010, when it was purchased for $985,000 by architect Bruce Norelius and his partner Landis Green, according to property records. 

The pair lived in the aging Mid-Century Modern home for a few years before carefully renovating it and updating the systems in 2014—while staying true to the simplicity and elegance of the original structure, Norelius said. “There is not a wasted move in the house, but it has such a soul,” he said. “We stripped it down, removed the stuff that had been added, and started building it back up.”

The three-bedroom home spans 1,200 square feet and features an open common room with a double-sided fireplace and three bedrooms off a central corridor. The structure is made of a mix of plate glass, concrete block and interior redwood paneling, contained beneath a gently sloping roof with extended eaves, according to Los Angeles City Planning documents. 

“It’s a really simple material palette,” Norelius said. “Each one is a humble material, and somewhat organic too. That material aspect is what gives a small modest house a lot of elegance and a lot of presence.”

The concrete block, which forms the bottom half of the house’s structure, has a pinkish, purplish hue that is a distinctive feature of the Crestwood Hills homes. The Gelbs’ wall had been previously painted over, but the sellers restored it to its raw, textured form. “The outdoor wall is the indoor wall in this home; there’s nothing in between,” Norelius said. 

The home is on a 0.32-acre lot that slopes towards the street and has several outdoor spaces, including a patio overlooking a garden anchored by towering eucalyptus trees, and a walkway flanked by acacia bushes and strawberry trees. The Gelbs bought the two eucalyptus trees for $1.35 a piece, and they have grown to be some of the tallest in the neighborhood at over 100 feet. “That just grounds the whole back of the…