Scenes From A Cinematographer's $7 Million LA Hilltop Home

Forbes

25-04-2025

High above the city's restless grid, a Beverly Hills hilltop residence turns Los Angeles into its own widescreen film, where every sunrise, email and swim feels like a scene-stealing shot.
Why do we crane our necks toward the ridgeline, yearning for a house that brushes the clouds? Maybe the urge to survey danger still thrums beneath our ribs, or maybe we just like the thrill of looking down on the city's quickened heartbeat. Whatever the reason, the pull endures.
Some simply call it a view. In Los Angeles, it's more a storyboard. Here, a window isn't just glass but a lens through which the city's perpetual script unfolds, frame by light-shifting frame. In a place that measures life in scenes, such a sweeping outlook turns idle seconds—pouring a coffee, letting the dog out—into moments of cinematic grandeur.
At the property's edge, boundaries dissolve. Water, canyon and western sky fuse into a single, unbroken plane.
Perched on a serpentine road above Beverly Hills, 1665 Summitridge understands that impulse with auteur precision. Its owner, cinematographer-turned-director Mikael Salomon—the visual mind behind The Abyss, Backdraft and episodes of Band of Brothers—knows how one frame can carry an entire plot. From his ridgeline property, the frame is Los Angeles itself: first the Holmby treetops, then the Santa Monica crease and finally the cobalt coast. On clear mornings, downtown towers seem to float. At night, the grid glows like scattered sequins. It's a scene that refuses to cut away.
Spanish Revival isn't just wardrobe—it's the entire set, with interiors playing the lead.
Turn the camera around and the home itself is a splendid scene. The hillside residence wears vintage Spanish Revival attire—barrel-tile roof, white stucco, arched openings. Completed in 1976, the 5,000-square-foot structure dodged the glass-box fever that later swept the hills. Yet it never fossilized into nostalgia. Its Revival touches—exposed beams, beehive fireplaces, hand-painted tiles—now feel fashion-forward again, trophies of texture in a city rediscovering tactility.
And the winner for best view? The primary-suite balcony wins the Oscar for horizon drama.
Fitting for a filmmaker, the interiors revel in sightlines. Twenty-two-foot ceilings lift the living room into cathedral-like scale, a lofted workstation perched overhead like a director on a crane. Three tall French doors form a tidy triptych, steering eyes to a saltwater pool poised on the cliff's lip. From the living room, a single arched corridor threads through the dining space and into a renovated kitchen, a visual dolly shot halted only when pocket doors slide shut for intimacy. Options of open or closed, spectacle or secrecy, speak to a faith in hidden spaces.
Everyday acts become, if not extraordinary, at least worthy of a close-up.
A paneled door beside the kitchen reveals a climate-controlled vault for four hundred bottles. Behind the main living area, a fireside den doubles as a snug retreat. A generous balcony off the primary suite, invisible from the motor court, becomes the favored perch for morning planning and evening reflection. Even the pool equipment hides below grade, sparing the ear its mechanical drone.
Arched openings frame more than rooms; they stage sweeping long shots down every corridor.
Then there's the theater—not a perfunctory bonus room but a subterranean chamber dropped three feet below grade to create true stadium seating. Fifteen speakers lurk behind acoustic fabric; nine sit directly behind a woven French Screen Research surface that lets full-range frequencies glide through untouched. Matte panels shift from Academy to CinemaScope widths with the deference of a seasoned stagehand.
Added on to the home's original footprint, the theater is a bold sequel.
Yet the house is hardly a shrine to gadgetry. Materials matter as much as tech: hand-troweled plaster, polished hardwood, hand-hewn wood pillars. Wrought-iron banisters trace the second-floor gallery and exterior balconies. Terracotta tiling rings the saltwater pool and wraps into an alfresco kitchen built for late-summer grilling. Newer builds crowd the ridge, glassy and grand, but few achieve such authored coherence.
Each shift in the sky provides a new act: morning haze fades in like soft focus, noon snaps to razor clarity and sunset rolls the credits in liquid gold.
Summitridge is less an object on display than a stylish frame through which the city below is edited, enlarged and—on special evenings—soft-focus perfect. It stages daily rituals—morning emails from the mezzanine, an eight-o'clock screening, a midnight swim—as if they were scene work. Everyday acts become, if not extraordinary, at least worthy of a close-up.
1665 Summitridge is on the market for $6.95 million with listing agent Nichole Shanfeld of Carolwood Estates, a member of Forbes Global Properties, an invitation-only network of top-tier brokerages worldwide and the exclusive real estate partner of Forbes.