Amir Jawaherian has been fascinated by La Mesa Drive in Santa Monica, California, for over a decade.
“The first time I drove through La Mesa was 2012,” he told Homes.com in an interview. “I was just blown away with everything.”
Jawaherian, a real estate agent with The Agency, specializes in representing builders and their developers. When a property on La Mesa came to market in 2021 for the first time since it was built in 1961, Jawaherian was eager to help bring it into its next iteration.
Now, four years after the home sold for $6.47 million, it’s back on the market for almost $25 million after a years-long reinvention that turned the nearly 65-year-old estate into a modernized, net-zero hideaway with five bedrooms and seven-and-a-half bathrooms.
Modernizing an original midcentury modern house
When the home hit the market in 2021, it was a 5,000-square-foot midcentury modern with five bedrooms and six-and-a-half bathrooms. The seller was the original owner and the designer of the home.
Unlike many of the street’s other properties, though, the home is not officially historically preserved. Jawaherian said he saw that as an opening, but his developers still wanted to maintain some of the home’s integrity.
“Instead of fighting what was there, we wanted to just cherish it and emphasize it and work with what’d been created 60, 70 years ago,” he said, explaining that the builders kept the home’s original framing.
As the team worked to build around that structure, Jawaherian said they were inspired by The Getty Center, an art museum in Los Angeles. With that in mind, they added features like a silent water pond, silver travertine throughout and a glass dome at the entryway.
“It’s very different than most of the homes nowadays that follow this trend of open floor plan without really creating intimate spaces,” he added. “The goal was to create an open flow, however, have intimate spaces defined for everyday use of the homeowners.”
A net-zero, environmentally friendly compound
The modernization extends beyond aesthetics: the home is net-zero, meaning that it makes the same amount of energy it consumes.
That’s due to features like energy-saving thermal-coated skylights that control heat gain and limit forced air use and solar panels equipped with energy storage systems. There’s also a steel roof, natural stone materials and fire-rated siding, according to Jawaherian.
“This has become a very welcome trend nowadays, that homeowners would like to have beautiful homes, but they also want to limit their carbon footprint,” he explained.
More than that, the environmental features are also a way for homeowners to save money. The materials “give you the advantage of having much less maintenance and impact and it makes the home much more durable,” Jawaherian said.
“The fact that there are enough solar panels installed on this property to bring you into a net-zero power consumption, that can save you thousands of dollars every month,” he added.
That adds value for all buyers — but it could be a big draw for buyers displaced by January’s Palisades Fire that destroyed thousands of homes in the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood adjacent to North of Montana, where La Mesa is.
“When they compare a house like La Mesa to other regular homes, it becomes almost like a case study because from a fire-hardening aspect, it almost checks all the boxes,” Jawaherian said. “That has been a main attraction. We have had a really great response, especially from people who have been misplaced because of the fire.”