Ramsay-Durfee Estate (Los Angeles, California)

 house, historic landmark

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2425 S Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90018

The home is also known as Villa Maria. Completed in 1908, the three-story, 42-room mansion was designed by Frederick Louis Roehrig. Roehrig also planned the landscape gardening and layout of the grounds. The mansion is located on a 2.8-acre site that also includes a formal garden and carriage house with chauffeur's quarters.

The house was built for a wealthy lumberman, William E. Ramsay, who died in 1909 -- shortly after the mansion was completed. His widow continued to live in the mansion until her death in 1916.

In the early 1920s, the property was purchased for the unheard of price of $105,000 by William G. and Nellie McGaughey Durfee. Mr. Durfee was a horse-racing devotee, and Mrs. Durfee was the sheltered daughter of a Figueroa Street millionaire. Their marriage had been a scandal reported on in the newspapers, as Mr. Durfee had divorced the mother of his two children in 1910 and married Nellie in 1911. During the 1920s, the house was a gathering place for the motion picture business, and its grand staircase and ornately-paneled rooms were popular filming locations. Mr. Durfee died in 1927, reportedly from food poisoning while on a fishing trip in the Pacific Northwest. Nellie remained at the house until her death in 1976, reportedly living as a recluse. Columnist Jack Smith toured the Durfee residence in 1976 and found the house virtually unchanged from the time of Mr. Durfee's death 50 years earlier. Though Mr. Durfee had died during Prohibition, the wine cellar remained untouched and full of vintage wines dating to the 1890s and 1900s as well as 183 bottles of vintage whisky. Mr. Durfee's wide-brimmed felt hats and tweed suits were still hanging in his closet. Smith noted that Mrs. Durfee died at age 99, "wasted and blind," in an upstairs bedroom -- "alone with her companion-housekeeper, her cat, her ostrich feathers, her unopened boxes of silk stockings, her sculptures and paintings and Oriental rugs."

In 1978, the Brothers of St. John of God bought the property from the Estate of Nellie Durfee for $470,000. The purchaser was a Roman Catholic religious order that operated 260 hospitals which purchased the property to serve as its western headquarters. They sold off most of the original furniture, fixtures, and seventy oriental rugs. In 1982, the house was opened to the public for the first time in its history for a benefit dinner to support KUSC radio.

The house was used as a set for an unidentified Charlie Chaplin film, True Confessions, and Sister Act II: Back in the Habit.

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