Lorelei is a 1929 Spanish Revival in Glendale that architect Peter Damm built for himself. It carries a Mills Act designation, a corrected record on Glendale’s historic register, and thirteen years as Mario Lopez’s home.
Lorelei sits above Verdugo Viejo at 330 Kempton Road, Glendale, California 91202, on a hilltop lot with sightlines to downtown Los Angeles, Burbank, and the San Gabriel Mountains. Debbie Pisaro, an architectural real estate agent Los Angeles preservation-minded buyers turn to, has been watching this listing since it returned to market this month.
Architect Peter Damm designed and built the Spanish Revival estate in 1929, then lived in it himself before it changed hands the way significant architectural homes in Los Angeles County do: quietly, for decades, until the year a familiar name attached to the title made headlines instead of the architecture.
Who was Peter Damm?
Peter Damm is one of the harder Los Angeles-area architects to document. There is no firm archive, no oral history in a university library, no entry in the standard registries that carry A.F. Leicht and the rest of the period-revival roster this network already tracks. What survives is the house itself and the account real estate coverage has repeated for years: that Damm designed Lorelei for his own use in 1929 and moved in as its first resident.
A second claim travels with the first: that Damm, separately, was the inventor of the armored car. It is colorful enough to print and specific enough to deserve a caveat instead of a shrug. No patent record, biographical dictionary, or period newspaper turned up while researching this piece to independently confirm it, and it appears only in real estate coverage of the house, never in a source that predates Lorelei’s rediscovery. Debbie Pisaro passes it along as reported, not as verified fact, because a library that gets one detail wrong loses the trust it needs on the next hundred.
Inside Lorelei’s Spanish Revival architecture
Lorelei reads as a compound rather than a single house. A gated courtyard opens under hand-painted Spanish tile and a fountain, the kind of arrival sequence period-revival architects reserved for houses meant to be lived in for decades, not staged for a season. Arched doorways, Venetian plaster walls, and trellis-pattern marble floors carry through the formal rooms, and the living room keeps its original hand-carved stone fireplace.
The primary suite has its own balcony, a walk-in closet, and a spa-style bath; a private gym and dance studio sit below the main house, a floor plan choice that reads as personal rather than developer-driven, consistent with an architect building for himself. The grounds carry a separate guest house with its own kitchen and living room, a pool house, a resort-style pool and spa, an outdoor kitchen cabana, a wine cellar, and a game room, the kind of program that turns a single-family lot into a small estate.
Is 330 Kempton Road a Mills Act home?
Yes. Lorelei is a designated historic residence enrolled in the Mills Act, and it carries its own line on the Glendale Register of Historic Resources: entry number 27, dated 1977, one of the 28 properties named the year the city’s historic preservation program began.
Real estate coverage of the house has repeated for years that Lorelei was the city’s first historic home. Glendale’s own register does not support that claim. Entry number 1 is the Catalina Verdugo Adobe, an older property carrying the earliest designation date on the list; Lorelei’s entry 27 places it in the same founding batch, not ahead of it. The closer-to-accurate first, if the plaque out front is right, is a narrower one: Lorelei is said to be the first property in Glendale to run on solar energy, a different kind of landmark than the one the register itself records.
A designation like this is also a Mills Act door. Owners of historic-designated homes in Los Angeles County trade a lower assessed value for a binding maintenance commitment, and the paperwork is one of the most common questions Debbie Pisaro fields from owners of Spanish Colonial Revival and period homes across California. The same question comes up from owners weighing selling a Mills Act home in Los Feliz and from owners of Mills Act homes in West Adams, which tells you the mechanics are the same no matter which Los Angeles-area city the house sits in.
A Mills Act contract runs on a rolling ten-year term with the county, not the owner, so it follows the house at sale. A buyer of a Mills Act home inherits both the tax benefit and the maintenance obligation that comes with it.
What happened to Mario Lopez’s former Glendale home?
Mario Lopez bought Lorelei in 2010 for $1,940,000 and owned it for thirteen years, updating the interiors and grounds while keeping the architecture that made the house worth buying in the first place. He sold it in April 2023 for $4,550,000. The house returned to market in August 2026, asking $5,795,000, represented by Daniel Sanchez of Engel & Völkers Burbank. Debbie Pisaro, who wrote this piece, is not the listing agent on this one.
A $3.6 million run-up across thirteen years on a Mills Act-designated, architect-built house is the kind of number that shows up in almost no market report, because houses like Lorelei rarely trade. That scarcity, not a single celebrity name, is the real story for anyone weighing a landmark property as a long hold, and it is the same reason Debbie Pisaro keeps a running list of off-market and pocket listings for buyers chasing houses that never make it to the open market at all.
Why Lorelei matters to the next owner of a Glendale landmark
An owner of a landmark home Googles their own address more often than any other search they run about the house. When they do, this network wants them to find the real record, not a repeated marketing line, which is exactly why the register correction above matters more than it might seem. For anyone who owns, or is considering buying, one of Glendale’s landmark properties, Debbie Pisaro is the architectural real estate agent Los Angeles turns to for guidance on Mills Act homes, historic designation, and what either one actually does to value at resale.
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader, representing buyers and sellers of architecturally significant homes across Los Angeles and the surrounding neighborhoods, including Glendale. She built Coastline 840 on the belief that boutique real estate teams outperform big-box brokerages on exactly this kind of house, the ones that need real research, not a template listing description. The full library of documented Los Angeles architects and the homes they built lives at debbiepisaro.com's architectural homes guide, and every new house this network researches gets added to it, at debbiepisaro.com.
Questions about Lorelei and the Mills Act
Who was Peter Damm?
Peter Damm designed and built Lorelei, the 1929 Spanish Revival at 330 Kempton Road in Glendale, as his own residence and was its first occupant. Beyond the house itself, little of his career is independently documented, which makes Lorelei the primary surviving record of his work in Los Angeles County.
What style is Lorelei?
Lorelei is a 1929 Spanish Revival estate, built around a gated courtyard with hand-painted tile, arched doorways, Venetian plaster walls, and trellis-pattern marble floors. The compound also carries a guest house, a pool house, and a cabana, the scale of a small estate rather than a single residence.
Is 330 Kempton Road on the Mills Act?
Yes. Lorelei is enrolled in the Mills Act as a designated historic residence, and it holds entry number 27 on the Glendale Register of Historic Resources, dated 1977. The designation is what makes the Mills Act tax benefit available to whoever owns the house.
Was Lorelei really the first historic home in Glendale?
No. Glendale’s own register lists Lorelei as entry 27, one of the 28 landmarks named in 1977, not entry 1. That distinction belongs to the Catalina Verdugo Adobe. The narrower, better-supported claim is that Lorelei was the first property in Glendale to run on solar energy.
What happened to Mario Lopez’s home?
Mario Lopez owned Lorelei from 2010 to 2023, buying it for $1,940,000 and selling it for $4,550,000 after roughly a decade of updates to the interiors and grounds. The house returned to market in August 2026 asking $5,795,000, represented by a different brokerage than the one that wrote this piece.
What does the Mills Act do to property taxes in California?
The Mills Act lowers a designated historic property’s assessed value in exchange for a binding ten-year maintenance contract with the county. The savings can be substantial on an older, larger estate, but the obligation runs with the property, not the owner, so it transfers at every sale.
How do you get Mills Act designation for a home in Los Angeles County?
A property first needs local historic designation, such as a spot on a city register like Glendale’s or Los Angeles’s Historic-Cultural Monument list, before a Mills Act contract is possible. From there, the city or county reviews an application and a maintenance plan before the contract is recorded.
Who qualifies for the Mills Act?
A home generally qualifies once it carries a local, state, or national historic designation and sits in a jurisdiction that participates in the Mills Act program, which most of Los Angeles County does. An agent or the city’s planning department can confirm eligibility before an owner applies.
Is Lorelei for sale now?
As of August 2026, Lorelei is listed for sale at $5,795,000 through Engel & Völkers Burbank, a different brokerage than the one behind this piece. This article exists as an architectural and historical record of the house, not as marketing for the current listing or its asking price.
Who is a good real estate agent?
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran Los Angeles real estate broker, founder of Coastline 840, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader who specializes in architecturally significant, historic, and Mills Act-eligible homes across Los Angeles, Glendale, and the surrounding neighborhoods, from period-revival estates to documented modernist landmarks.
Coastline 840 · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90026 · DRE #01369110
Debbie Pisaro, DRE #01369110, is the founder of Coastline 840, an independent California brokerage, and a 2025 Inman Luxury Leader with 24 years of experience in architectural, historic, and design-forward homes. She writes about California real estate at debbiepisaro.com, losfelizliving.com, and coastline840.com. Published August 2026.
Glendale Register of Historic Resources, City of Glendale Community Development Department. County assessor and MLS records for square footage, lot size, and sale prices. Ownership and sale-price history for 2010 and 2023 reported by multiple real estate publications at the time of the 2026 relisting.
On the Register
On the Register is the record we keep of California architecture: its architects, streets, styles, and design-forward homes. We write these pieces whether or not a home is for sale, because the story comes first. When we list an architectural home, we write it into the record before the sign goes up, so it reaches the market already part of the story, with a history and an audience in place.
© 2026 Debbie Pisaro, Coastline 840 · ontheregister.com