In the summer of 1948, Nat King Cole and his new wife, singer Maria Hawkins, made their way to the Los Angeles enclave of Hancock Park in search of a family home that would reflect his ascendant star power. And in Hancock Park, Cole found it: an earthy-brick Tudor-style estate priced at a then attainable $85,000.
“Had it been up to Maria, the couple would have settled in Connecticut or somewhere else in New England,” Cole’s biographer Daniel Mark Epstein says of Cole’s Boston-born bride, an accomplished jazz performer who had toured with Count Basie and Duke Ellington before marrying and raising five children. But, he adds, Cole “loved the California weather, and the nightclubs in the city provided steady employment. And at that time Hancock Park had the most beautiful homes in Los Angeles.”
