Living in Bel Air

In Bel Air you will find former First Ladies, movie stars, and moguls — but some things you will not find are multi-family homes and sidewalks. Bel Air is a small, affluent community within Los Angeles, located between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive.

 Bel Air is a part of what is known as the Platinum Triangle (the “tri” is Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Hills). The Bel Air community has many sprawling estates in its lower areas. As one drives up its hills, the homes tend to become less expansive — though they make up for it with more expansive canyon views.

There are private schools that service Bel Air, but there are many well-respected public schools in the area, too (it is within the Los Angeles Unified School District). The American Jewish University is also located in the Casiano area of Bel Air.

With the close proximity to UCLA and Westwood, there are theaters and cultural events in abundance. You can find film festivals, museums, and a younger college community. Within the limits of Bel Air, there is the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden (many of its structures were originally built in Japan, and then reconstructed in Bel Air).

In 1961, a fire swept through the communities of Bel Air and Brentwood. Many celebrities and politicians stayed behind to fight the fire away from their homes, but many were not successful. At the end of the battle, the fire took over 16,000 acres and nearly 500 homes. For this reason, many of Bel Air’s existing homes were built during or after the mid-1960s.

Driving up Stone Canyon, you can almost feel the exclusivity. Though sometimes all you can actually see are bits of sequestered landscapes and towering Sycamores, you still might catch the occasional glimpse of a majestic estate behind the shrubbery. This place is steeped in legend and luxury.

Bel Air is classic old Hollywood, replete with the Bel Air Country Club (with its many famous celebrities and executive members) and the “oh if those walls could talk” Hotel Bel Air (with it gorgeous pond and sleepy, floating swans).

Due to the location, there are a few streets in Bel Air that can become a bit congested (because some go through Bel Air to get from Westwood to the San Fernando Valley), but despite traffic in these few areas, the community remains quiet and peaceful.

Bel Air has the advantage of being very centrally located. When you live in Bel Air, you have easy access to the freeways, to the valley, to Santa Monica and Malibu on the northwest, and Beverly Hills and West Hollywood on the southeast. As most Angelenos know, when one lives in the east, one rarely gets to the west. And visa versa. The same can be said for living north or south. In this sense, the 405 and 10 are more than just freeways, they are boundaries with unspoken symbolic meaning. However, denizens of Bel Air enjoy being the exception to this rule, for Bel Air is probably the finest of all of the centrally located communities in Los Angeles, with access to just about everywhere.