Beyond the Getty: Brentwood's Quieter Cultural Side

Most people meet Brentwood through the Getty Center. It is the right introduction, but it is not the whole story. The neighborhood has a quieter design sensibility that shows up in its streets, its storefronts, and its weekly routines.

The building on the hill

The Getty Center opened on December 16, 1997, and now draws roughly 1.8 million visitors a year. Richard Meier clad it in travertine quarried near Rome, the same source that supplied stone for the Colosseum and St. Peter's Basilica. Roughly 1.2 million square feet of it, some 16,500 tons, was cut with a technique that leaves fossils and rough texture visible in the surface. Up close, a building that reads as austere white from the freeway turns out to be full of grain.

The garden that argues with the architecture

Robert Irwin's Central Garden is the counterweight. Irwin described it as a sculpture in the form of a garden aspiring to be art, and it behaves that way, changing plantings and color through the seasons against Meier's fixed geometry. The tension between the two is the most interesting conversation on the property.

Come back down the hill

Brentwood's own architecture is lower and less declarative: mid-century retail blocks, shaded courtyards, and buildings that stop at a human height. The neighborhood's real landmark is horticultural. The coral trees along the San Vicente median are protected as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, and they do something no building does, which is change completely every spring.

Culture you can walk to

The Sunday farmers market at San Vicente and Gretna Green runs 9 AM to 2 PM and functions as the neighborhood's town square, petting zoo included. Angeles Academy of Music keeps live instruction in the mix. And the small shops carry their own curation: Flowers With Love, Peter Norman, and Capsule in Town & Country, Community Goods at The Lawn, Jacques Jewelers at San Vicente Plaza.

The point

The Getty is the destination. Brentwood is the part you experience on foot afterward, and it rewards the same attention you gave the galleries.