West Hollywood, from a cleaner's point of view
The building stock reads like a timeline of Los Angeles apartment design. Along Harper, Havenhurst and the streets near Plummer Park there are 1920s and 1930s Spanish courtyard buildings with tiled stairs, arched loggias and a fountain in the middle. A block over sit 1950s and 1960s dingbats propped over their own parking. Then the newer condo buildings, glass and steel, with a lobby and a front desk. One small city, three unrelated jobs.
What they share is smallness. A unit here is often 500 to 1,100 square feet, so the work concentrates: kitchens with no spare counter, one bathroom doing everything, closets packed to the ceiling. Detached houses turn up mainly in Norma Triangle and West Hollywood West, and they are the exception rather than the pattern.
What West Hollywood homes are like to clean
Pre-1978 construction dominates, which shows up as painted casement windows, wall furnaces, hand-set tile and hardwood buried under decades of finish. Very few units have laundry inside them; most share a machine off the courtyard. Older buildings rarely have a lift, so a third-floor walk-up means equipment goes up on somebody’s shoulder. The newer condo towers along Sunset and Santa Monica invert all of that with a freight elevator, a loading bay and a desk that wants a name.