Stonehurst — a neighborhood built from the wash.
Tucked into the northeastern corner of Sun Valley, where the flatlands start climbing toward the Verdugos, sits a 92-home neighborhood built almost entirely out of river-rock pulled directly from the Tujunga Wash. It has the highest concentration of native-stone homes in Los Angeles, and it was largely the work of one man.
A 1920s developer and a stonemason
The Stonehurst tract was laid out and marketed in the early 1920s by the "Pep" Rempp Organization, a development company headed by a promoter whose full name is essentially forgotten because he was later arrested for embezzlement. Rempp's marketing pitch was that buyers could get a country-rustic home for city money — a bungalow on a horse-sized lot in the foothills of the San Fernando Valley, close enough to downtown for commuters but far enough to feel like the mountains.
The actual building of the homes, however, was almost entirely the work of a local artisan and stonemason named Dan (Daniel Lawrence) Montelongo. Between roughly 1923 and 1925, Montelongo and his crew built somewhere between 60 and 92 homes — plus a community center and a building originally intended as a post office — using stone gathered by hand from the nearby Tujunga Wash and the foothills above.
"He just picked up the rocks off the ground and piled them up." — Judy Carmango, 56-year Stonehurst resident, 1981
Stonemason Vernacular
The style historians have settled on is "Stonemason Vernacular" — a derivation of American Craftsman architecture, adapted to the specific constraints of working in rounded river-rock. The rocks themselves were not cut or shaped; they were selected for fit and laid into mortar as they came from the wash, which is why Stonehurst homes have the distinctive appearance of a child's cobblestone cottage, all curves and irregular lines rather than the rectangular coursing of quarried masonry.
Stonework appears in foundations, chimneys, porches, patios, garden walls, retaining walls, arched courtyards, and in some houses the full structural walls. Many of the designs incorporate Craftsman elements (exposed rafters, tapered porch columns, low-pitched gables) and some incorporate Spanish Colonial Revival details (arches, enclosed courtyards, tile accents). The combination is specific to Stonehurst — you will not find it at this density anywhere else in Los Angeles.
The Stonehurst Park Community Building
In 1930, Montelongo completed the Stonehurst Park Community Building — a civic structure in the same native-stone idiom. It has since been designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and sits today inside the Stonehurst Recreation Center. The 1930 date extends the official Period of Significance for the district from 1915 (the oldest home) to 1930, capturing the whole first generation of neighborhood construction.
HPOZ and horse-keeping
The neighborhood was formally recognized as the Stonehurst Historic Preservation Overlay Zone — an HPOZ, one of Los Angeles' district-level historic designations — in a process driven in large part by local resident Albert Knight, whose 1999 manuscript Stonehurst: A 1920s Stone House Neighborhood reconstructed the history of the tract and compiled photographs of every stone structure still standing. Knight's research materials now live at the CSUN library's Stone Houses of the San Fernando Valley Collection.
The HPOZ regulates exterior changes to contributing structures — you can't replace a stone chimney with stucco, you can't paint over the natural rock, you can't alter the distinctive setbacks. What the HPOZ cannot do is change the zoning. Stonehurst has always been zoned "K", the Los Angeles designation that permits ownership of horses and other livestock on residential lots. It remains one of the few neighborhoods in the City of Los Angeles where you can legally keep a horse in your backyard, and many residents do.
A plausible Hollywood footnote
Stonehurst lore, reported in Albert Knight's 2002 manuscript, holds that the silent-film-era actor Adolphe Menjou bought a Stonehurst home for his mother, and vacationed there with other Hollywood figures who wanted to "rough it." Menjou's own autobiography confirms that he "bought a bungalow for Mother in San Fernando Valley." Whether the bungalow was in Stonehurst, and whether Menjou ever roughed it there personally, is — in David Gebhard's tactful phrase — "a matter on which there is disagreement."
The neighborhood today is rustic, idiosyncratic, and slower than the parts of Sun Valley just a few blocks south. Horses are common. The street grid is deliberately asymmetric, with odd intersections that create a country-road feel even within the City of Los Angeles. Stonehurst is a place where the boundary between "La Tuna Canyon" and "Sun Valley" blurs — and it is, in a real sense, the oldest intact residential neighborhood in this part of the Valley.