The famed Beverly House is now available for rent for just $ 600k/month.

This Week’s Top Stories: Raising well-coiffed eyebrows everywhere, LA City Council candidate Matt Szabo offered his proposal (with renderings!) to put a rail line on, or under, Sunset Boulevard connecting downtown to Hollywood and points in-between. Intrigue continues with the NFL’s proposed return to LA as news breaks that a stadium is being pushed for Chavez Ravine, next to Dodger Stadium. After a brief period of ownership, Lloyd Wright’s Sowden House in Los Feliz has come back onto the market for $ 4.88 million. Bob Hope’s Palm Springs home, designed by John Lautner to resemble a volcano, has finally come on to the market for a hefty $ 50 million. Another of those big Hollywood projects lost to the Great Recession has resurrected itself, as word on the street says the mixed-use project at Selma and Vine is back in action. A twisty 22-story hotel and condo tower is being proposed for Santa Monica, designed by Frank Gehry. Is LA’s infrastructure finally getting a needed aesthetic upgrade? The trend for pretty new bridges would suggest so.

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Image via Triangle Modernist Houses

Haul out the bold-facing machine: the Kellerman-Krane House off of Laurel Canyon has a 1983 addition by Frank Gehry and (presumably much) earlier carpentry work by a pre-fame Harrison Ford; it’s owned by actress/singer Sally Kellerman (best known as “Hot Lips” Houlihan) and producer Jonathan D. Krane (Look Who’s Talking, Face/Off). The house has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a pool, plus it’s in the Wonderland school district. All this reflected glory will cost you, though: $ 21,000 per month.

Image via Triangle Modernist Houses
· $ 21000 / 5br – 3694ft² – FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER’S ESTATE [Craigslist]

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VENICE: Matrix, etc. producer Joel Silver has made his purchase of the historic Venice post office official with a press release today: “The Windward Circle facility, built in 1939 as part of the Federal Works Progress Administration, will serve as the new home of Silver Pictures once significant restoration and renovation work have been completed” (the company is moving from Burbank). Silver, who has restored a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright properties, say he’s committed to restoring the post office and its Edward Biberman mural, “Story of Venice.” Work is set to be finished in 2014. [Curbed Inbox]

ARTS DISTRICT: SCI-Arc kiddos, get ready to scrap for the Gehry Prize–the school announced today that trustee and biggest starchitect in the world Frank Gehry has endowed the prize (at $ 100,000) to be awarded to the best thesis projects every year. The first one will be given out next week at the 2012 graduation ceremony. [Curbed Inbox]

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DOWNTOWN: The Wall Street Journal reviews the LA Philharmonic’s Don Giovanni, which has sets designed by Frank Gehry (who also happened to design the concert hall the opera is staged in). Sounds like Gehry really took his old Simpsons guest appearance gag to heart: “Mr. Gehry filled the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage with tall mounds of white crumpled paper interspersed with large, white movable boxes; the orchestra, appearing to float on what looked like a sea of black plastic garbage bags, was positioned above and behind it.” [WSJ]

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Frank Gehry is defending himself and architects like himself who like to throw a little bit of artistic expression into their buildings. “Most of our cities built since the war are bland,” he says. “They’re modernist, they’re cold, and now architects want to go back to that. But there are people in the community who want a little more juice, something to relate to, and so they seek out artists and the artists they seek out have become very wealthy and they have big studios.” Gehry also answers those who criticize the crumpled aluminum foil style he has become know for. “I can do square too.” [The Oberver]

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SANTA MONICA: The Gehry Residence, architect Frank Gehry’s first significant work, has won the AIA’s 2012 Twenty-Five Year Award, for a “a building that has stood the test of time for 25 to 35 years as an embodiment of architectural excellence.” The award will be handed out in May in Washington, DC. As Dexigner describes, the house is “A seemingly ad hoc collection of raw, workmanlike materials wrapped around an unassuming two-story clapboard bungalow.” The LA chapter of the AIA gave Gehry’s Loyola Law School their Twenty-Five Year Award in 2011. [Dexigner]

THE VALLEY: With work moving swiftly on the Orange Line extension to Chatsworth, construction necessitates the temporary relocation of three current busway stops during the weekend of the twenty-first: “Stops at Pierce College, De Soto, and Canoga stations will be temporarily relocated one block south of these [permanent] stations to Victory Boulevard beginning at 12 a.m. on Saturday, January 21 through 12 a.m. on Monday, January 30.” [Curbed Inbox]

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