L.A. STORY
Jim McClintock is good with numbers. By the time the retired marketing executive and his partner, Richard Graves, found this French Eclectic–style house in Los Angeles’s Toluca Lake neighborhood, he tallied they had visited some 252 properties. “This house was the happy ending to our sixteen-month search,” Jim says.
But while the couple loved the 1939 three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house the moment they saw it, it was not at all what they had set out to find. “In our mind’s eye, we kept seeing that typical L.A. Spanish-style house: red-tile roof, bougainvillea and a palm tree in the yard, situated on a hillside,” says Jim, who now works as a yoga teacher and is a trustee of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. “But then we saw this and recognized its potential.”
One of the features that captured the couple’s imagination on their first walk-through was
