Aldous Huxley’s estate is a brave new market listing

This is one of those “if walls could speak” places. Aldous and Laura Huxley’s presence is felt throughout this historic estate on Mulholland Drive that just came on the market at $1.95 million. Built in the 1930s, it very much remains a period house. The 4,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bathroom Spanish Mission-style home is situated on 30,000 square feet of gardens and meditation paths – all perched under the Hollywood sign, which is visible from the home’s north windows.

Huxley showed us his “Brave New World” – a futuristic society based on pleasure without moral repercussions – and in doing so challenged the thinking of a generation. Although that novel wasn’t written in this house, his final one – “Island” – was finished here. The Huxleys had been living two streets away on Deronda Drive in a house that burned in 1961. They escaped with just two possessions: his unfinished “Island” manuscript and her violin.

Aldous Huxley lived in this house just two years before his death in 1963, the day after JFK’s assassination. It was his wife’s home until her passing in December at age 96.

Laura Huxley was a distinguished writer in her own right and frequently entertained in this house, which became an early “salon” for intellectuals and free thinkers. Among the long list of guests at this social hive were Ben Kingsley, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller and Ram Dass, according to Stacy Valis, the estate’s administrator and a longtime family friend.

The house has a two-story living room with arched windows and a minstrel’s balcony. In the center is a slump-stone brick fireplace. The room has a hand-carved and vaulted ceiling, and peg-and-groove wood flooring. The outside dining loggia is framed with massive plaster archways and includes a brick fireplace.

The kitchen has original tile and period hardware.

Huxley moved to Southern California in 1937, five years after “Brave New World” was published. He came for many of the same reasons others came: the beauty, the light, the outdoors.

The secret to happiness, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World,” was to convince people to like their inescapable social destiny – ironic words from a man who lived under the monument to dreamers, the Hollywood sign.

Timothy Enright of the Enright Co. has the listing.