El Segundo, from a cleaner's point of view
El Segundo does not look like the rest of the South Bay. Standard Oil bought the land in 1911 and the town went up around the refinery, so the residential grid west of Sepulveda filled in between the 1920s and the 1950s: small California bungalows and Tudor-revival cottages on modest lots, one story, garage off the alley. The typical house here is genuinely small, and a fair number still run on one full bathroom.
What has changed is who lives in them. El Segundo has always been a working town, and the current wave of owners tends to remodel one room at a time, so it is normal to find a 1930s front room, a two-year-old kitchen and a bathroom somewhere in between under the same roof. Main Street is walkable, Recreation Park is where the town runs into itself, and the whole thing sits within a mile of the water.
The building stock here
The El Segundo baseline is a single-story bungalow of roughly 1,100 to 1,500 square feet on a flat lot, with old oak or refinished wood in the living room, tile in the kitchen and one or two bathrooms. That is a compact, straightforward visit. The exceptions are the three-story infill homes now going up on those same small lots, and the duplexes and small apartment buildings toward the north end, where two units share a single staircase and a common entry.