Renovation Milestones Happened Fast and Slow in L.A.’s Mount Washington

Life-changing decisions rarely feel like them at first. Perhaps one small choice is made, and then another, and yet another, before something big happens. It’s the momentum that creates milestones, and architectural designer Grey Shaeffer of Willa Work studio understands that all too well.

“When I first moved to Los Angeles, Mount Washington felt like this secret neighborhood,” she says. “I felt drawn to it, but I lived in six different places before I moved into an apartment in the neighborhood.”

Grey was raised in Oregon and New Zealand before coming to Southern California for graduate school in 2009. She worked at a real estate company that “renovated hipster properties” in the city and daydreamed about the chance to update one on her own. Four years later, while habitually scrolling through listings, she came across one in Mount Washington that had a back cabin and spare lot perched on a slope. “The views were amazing,” she says. “The lot was lush and green, and that reminded me of my childhood.” Grey asked a coworker to put in an offer, and with no other competition, the place was hers. The steady yet swift quality of how this milestone appeared still stuns her.

BEFORE : “We took out 35 dumpsters’ worth of soil just to build the retaining wall between the main house and the cabin,” Grey says. “There was supposed to be one there, but the original owners never finished it, so land was literally falling on top of the house. We had to get that permitted before anything else.”

AFTER : “I didn’t want my family to spend too much time indoors, especially my kids,” Grey says. “My mom was always figuring out ways to get us outside, and I feel the same.”