Holmby Hills, through the archive

In 1843 Governor Manuel Micheltorena issued a Mexican land grant for Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres, 4,438 acres, to Maximo Alanis. In 1859 the rancho was sold to Benjamin Davis Wilson, the second mayor of Los Angeles. In 1884 Wilson sold it, by then 2,000 acres, to John W. Wolfskill, who paid ten dollars an acre and built a ranch house.

Arthur Letts Sr. later bought 400 acres of the Wolfskill ranch at $100 an acre. The name was loosely derived from Holdenby, his birthplace in England; it was also the name of his estate in Hollywood. Letts died suddenly in 1923, and his son-in-law, Harold Janss, took over. The Janss Investment Company, which also developed Westwood, developed the neighborhood in the early twentieth century.

Zoning for the community, which straddles Sunset Boulevard, allowed lots of up to four acres. The streets were named after places in Great Britain: Devon Avenue, Charing Cross Road, and Conway Avenue, after Conwy in Wales.

English-style street lamps were added in the 1920s, and after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 the grand mansions were built. Linen postcards of the period named some of them, as the two below show. In 2000, the Higley 1000 ranked Holmby Hills the richest urban neighborhood in the United States.

Wallace Neff designed a Provençal-style mansion in Holmby Hills, and a one-storey house of 9,200 square feet. Paul Williams designed a house in the neighborhood, and John Elgin Woolf another in 1938. In 1955 A. Quincy Jones designed a four-bedroom house of 5,721 square feet.

Later decades brought estates in older idioms: Fleur de Lys, built in 2002 to designs by the architect Richardson Robertson III, and a Georgian-style mansion rebuilt in 2006.

Holmby Hills is bordered by Beverly Hills to the east, Wilshire Boulevard to the south, Westwood to the west and Bel Air to the north. South of Sunset Boulevard, the absence of sidewalks and the historic street lamps still set it apart from the rest of Westwood.

Holmby Park, next to the Los Angeles Country Club, has two playgrounds, the nine-hole Armand Hammer Golf Course putting green and lawn bowling, home to the Holmby Park Lawn Bowling Club, started in 1927. De Neve Square Park is the neighborhood's second park, and the University of California, Los Angeles, lies several blocks to the west.