As the San Fernando Valley began to run out of room for new houses in the 1960’s, developers began to look around for a new place to plant their subdivisions.
Daniel Ludwig, owner of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company bought a 12,000-acre ranch east of Thousand Oaks with planning to develop it into a large master-planned community. A “city in the country” that would combine the best features of urban and suburban life.
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Ludwig worked with architects from A.C. Martin, the famed L.A. Firm, and the Bechtel Corp. and aimed to build a self-sufficient center of 70,000 people. Walkability was supposed to be a key feature with greenbelts and underground utilities and included twenty high-rise residential towers, none of which were ever built.
Ludwig and his team damned a nearby creek to create the 157-acre lake with nine miles of pricey shoreline. Since the new lake was west of Los Angeles, it was named “Westlake.” The “Village” was added later to avoid confusion with the neighborhood of the same name in L.A.
Westlake Village was incorporated in 1981 but never reached Ludwig’s hoped for goal of 70,000 residents and with local anti-development sentiment, it probably never will.
The great outdoors: With plenty of hiking and horseback riding trails, and with Malibu’s beaches just a few miles away, Westlake Village offers a wealth of activities for outdoor enthusiasts.
Country club life: There are few places in Southern California where you can go yachting on a private lake and follow that up with a round of golf at one of three nearby courses. Westlake Village is one of them.
Suburban idyll: An insular, small-town feel is a plus for local residents, for whom hobnobbing at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Westlake Boulevard is plenty exciting, thanks.
Westlake Village is split into two ZIP Codes. South of the 101 Freeway, 91361, the median sales price in September for single-family homes was $1.251 million, according to CoreLogic. That’s a 37.7% increase in median sales price year over year.
North of the freeway, 91362, saw a median sales price of $945,000 based on 38 sales, which was a 0.1% decrease year over year.
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