ADUs & Additions in Westwood

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. Nearly all of Westwood, its flat southern blocks included, lies inside the city's Hillside Grading Area, so excavating for a permitted pool here also requires a separate LADBS grading permit. The community sits outside the city's mapped Hillside Area, the zone where Baseline Hillside Ordinance limits apply. Specific plans that require Design Review Board approval cover most of Westwood's multifamily and commercial areas, including Westwood Village and North Westwood Village, while its single-family blocks generally fall outside them. We prepare the drawings, make the submittal and handle plan-check corrections ourselves, so you are not the one chasing plan check.

The largest lots sit in the Minimum Residential area east of Beverly Glen Boulevard and north of Holmby Park. Generally smaller home sites on undulating ground lie east and west of the UCLA campus and south of Wilshire Boulevard. High-rise condominium towers line Wilshire between the Los Angeles Country Club and Malcolm Avenue, with single-family streets extending north and south of that corridor. One local condition that shapes the work: Terrain runs from flat land in the southern section to rolling hillside in the north, so the grading and drainage approach for a pool near Santa Monica Boulevard can differ markedly from one on a sloping lot closer to Sunset Boulevard.

All of it, including Holmby Hills, Holmby Westwood, Westwood Hills and Comstock Hills. 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.