The Casa Encantada at 10644 Bellagio Road in Bel Air, Los Angeles is a large detached neoclassical style house completed in 1938.
The house was commissioned by Hilda Olsen Boldt Weber (1885–1951) who in 1936 bought 9.5 acres on a hill-top site from the Bel-Air Country Club for $100,000 (equivalent to $2,277,612 in 2023.
[2] Unlike other prominent local residents, Weber was an outsider to the Los Angeles motion picture community and was a member of the nouveau riche, having married a wealthy glass manufacturer.
[2] The house was completed in December 1938 at a total cost in excess of $2 million (equivalent to $43,290,780 in 2023), the corner-stone having been laid in May 1937 by Weber and her contractor, landscape designer, and architect.
Among the buyers that were approached were the set designer Cedric Gibbons and his wife, the actress Dolores del Rio, and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer co-founder Louis B. Mayer and the publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Weber committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills the year after the sale of the house, overwhelmed by her precarious financial situation and unpaid bills.
[2] Murdock sold the original Robsjohn-Gibbings furniture designed for the house in a two-day sale fetching $700,000 in 1981; the individual pieces have remained popular with collectors.
[6] Hyland speculated in 2019 that the land value of the house was $175 million and it was impossible to 'duplicate' such a residence in the present era owing to a lack of craftspeople and the prohibitive building costs.
The garden features were inspired by Ancient Greek and Roman landscapes and included bronze sculptures and fountains designed by the American sculptor Gladys Lewis Bush.
[6] Conrad Hilton preserved the house and its contents for several decades after his 1950 purchase which Hyland described as an "extraordinary time capsule of high-style 1940s taste".
The setting of the house, along with its rich colors and the harmonic texture of its design has helped 'shrink the architectural mass a third of a city block in size to the conceptual intimacy of a country cottage'.