ADUs & Additions in Mar Vista

Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS). Private pools in the City of Los Angeles are permitted through a Combined Building-Mechanical permit, while pools serving more than two dwelling units need separate building, electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits. Using a City of Los Angeles standard plan on file with LADBS reduces plan check time. More than four in five single-family lots north of Venice Boulevard fall inside the city's Hillside Grading Area, where pool excavation needs its own grading permit, but no part of Mar Vista lies in the Hillside Area where the Baseline Hillside Ordinance applies. In 2017, Ordinance No. 184,814 rezoned most of the neighborhood's single-family lots from R1-1 to R1V2, so new houses and additions follow the R1V2 standards in LAMC Section 12.08. On the 52 parcels of the Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract HPOZ, significant work on a contributing house needs a Certificate of Appropriateness. A rear-yard addition under 250 square feet that is not visible from the street and stays within the existing roofline and side planes is reviewed by the Director of Planning rather than the HPOZ Board. We prepare the drawings, make the submittal and handle plan-check corrections ourselves, so you are not the one chasing plan check.

Mostly single-family lots, with a median of about 6,000 square feet in LA County Assessor parcel data and the middle half falling between roughly 5,400 and 7,000 square feet. The large majority sit north of Venice Boulevard. South of the boulevard, none of the single-family lots are in the Hillside Grading Area, and multifamily buildings make up a far larger share of the residential lots. One local condition that shapes the work: Assessor records date roughly seven in ten single-family houses to the 1940s and 1950s, so the capacity of the existing electrical service and the condition of the sewer lateral are worth confirming before pool equipment, an outdoor kitchen or an ADU is added.

All of it, including Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract, Westdale, North Westdale and Mar Vista Oval District. Our crews run every job out of our Cahuenga Pass base in Los Angeles, with our own people on site.

Detached ADU: generally $150,000 to $400,000+ across Southern California. What moves it is square footage, finish level, utility runs, and site access; garage conversions typically run well below a ground-up detached build. We give line-item pricing after seeing the site rather than quoting a number over the phone.

Plan a realistic year. Design and engineering typically take one to three months, city plan check and corrections add several more, and construction usually runs four to eight months depending on size and site access.

Usually yes, and often substantially, because the foundation, walls and roof already exist. The trade-offs are that you lose the garage, and older slabs and framing sometimes need upgrading to meet current code.

California ADU law is designed to allow long-term rental, and an ADU is one of the few ways to add rentable square footage to a single-family lot. Short-term rental rules vary by city, so confirm your local ordinance before counting on that income.

Yes. Plans, engineering, Title 24 and the city submittal are all handled in-house, including responding to plan-check corrections. That is a service we sell on its own, so it is not something we hand off.