Hollywood Hills

IN these days when modest bungalows on small lots are replaced by looming mini-mansions, there's something pleasingly efficient and almost virtuous about a home that is small yet well-designed. Marianne Fox calls hers "our treehouse in the hills," a 1,100-square-foot one-bedroom that she shares with husband Jim high up on a Hollywood Hills ridgeline. The couple met in London and began a vintage clothing business called Go Monkey, which brought them to Los Angeles in 2002.

Come morning, western scrub-jays, mourning doves and ruby-throated hummingbirds gather in the cypress and podocarpus trees surrounding Kathleen Spiegelman's serene hilltop garden, waiting for her to pour birdseed into a fruit basket-shaped cement finial. If she's late, one particularly plucky sparrow pecks at the kitchen window--or, if the back door has been left ajar, flies in and out of the kitchen as if to ask, "Hey, where's breakfast?"

Construction cranes hover over Hollywood as the movie industry's historic home undergoes another sweeping -- and sometimes wrenching -- transformation. ? More than a dozen multimillion-dollar projects have been announced, launched or just completed that promise new shopping and restaurants, thousands of new apartments and condominiums and towers of glass and steel. ? Glitzy clubs dot once-sketchy street corners. Residents swim atop the former Broadway department store at Hollywood and Vine.

Seven people died and 19 more were injured Monday in two Los Angeles-area Memorial Day auto accidents, including a fiery six-car pileup along Crenshaw Boulevard. The South Los Angeles crash occurred about 6 p.m. at Crenshaw Boulevard and Florence Avenue, leaving several cars ablaze, melting a traffic signal and strewing wreckage about the streets, authorities said. Three people, including two children -- ages 7 and 12 -- died at the scene.

Mulholland Drive isn't just any serpentine, 55-mile-long Los Angeles byway. It's a launching point for local hikers. It inspired David Lynch's 2001 dream-like movie about amnesia and an attempted murder. And it's got Hollywood real estate cred: Jack Nicholson lives there, as did the late Marlon Brando. So it was no surprise to former bank executive Yaffa Koresh that R&B star Mary J. Blige decided to rent Koresh's remodeled, ultramodern Mulholland Drive home last year.

Los Angeles city officials are seeking help to pinpoint historically important homes and structures in a 2 1/2 -mile-wide swath of Hollywood that includes some of the entertainment industry's most significant sites. But some in Hollywood are questioning the sincerity of the preservation effort as they complain that officials seem to be in a headlong rush to modernize the area and pack more people in.

Identical twin brothers died in a car crash early Monday in the close-knit Hollywood Hills neighborhood where they grew up. Los Angeles Police said Jesse Brackett, 23, was driving north in the 2600 block of Beachwood Drive about 2:30 a.m. when he lost control of his 1996 Acura Integra, crossed into the southbound lanes and struck a U-Haul truck parked at the curb. The impact forced the truck into a 1990 Cadillac Seville parked behind it. Brackett was killed instantly, police said.

This old Hollywood Mediterranean has appealed to more than one celebrity over its 80-plus years. In the '20s, it was owned by actress Joan Crawford. In the early '90s, it was purchased by TV and radio personality Leeza Gibbons and her husband, actor Steve Meadows. Meadows built a 2 1/2 -story, 1,500-square-foot guesthouse in 2000 with a state-of-the-art sound studio, an office and a bedroom.

A fast-moving brush fire cut a path through bone-dry terrain in the Hollywood Hills on Friday, churning massive plumes of smoke across the region that slowed traffic, jangled nerves and for a time threatened the Hollywood sign. The 160-acre blaze, the largest in the heavily populated Hollywood Hills in nearly two decades, consumed brushland above the Warner Bros. Studio and Forest Lawn cemetery.

When it comes to naming a lead singer of a rock band who is finding happiness in family life, Gwen Stefani would like there to be No Doubt it's she. She and musician-actor Gavin Rossdale, frontman for the grunge group Bush, were married in 2002 and had a son, Kingston, in the spring of 2006. That September, Stefani and Rossdale bought a 10,000-square-foot Hollywood Hills home for their little family, paying slightly less than its $15.5-million asking price.