North of Montana

Surrounded by beautiful homes and mansions, Montana avenue is the place to go in Santa Monica for upscale shopping and dining. You will see lots of families, single people and celebrities strolling down the street. It is my favorite part of the city.

If you can afford it, this is the place to buy a home. Schools are excellent, the location is great, and the real estate market has held its own.
This neighborhood is good for couples and families and even singles along San Vicente Blvd where you'll find a more dense area of condos and apartments. It's got the best of everything; Walking distance to the beach, the Third Street Promenade shopping, Montana shopping, the Santa Monica pier, and the beach!

North of Montana is an upscale neighborhood in Santa Monica that borders Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. The homes here are large Mission style mansions for the most part of the kind we expect in Beverly Hills. This is needless to say, an upscale neighborhood for the fabulously wealthy. Although median income for Santa Monica residents is about 70K there are a high percentage of North of Montana residents that are part of the 125K plus income set, this being the rich part of Santa Monica. For the most part, Santa Monica is a renter’s community similar to North Hollywood, but North of Montana is a home owner’s section of the city—many of the 30% of residents that own homes in Santa Monica own them here. As you might expect, this is also the safest section of Santa Monica with none of the 11 Santa Monica area murders crossing over to the streets north of Montana.

One of the central features of this neighborhood is the Santa Monica Stairs at 4th and Adalaide. They are a long set of steps that carry you down the side of a steep hill. At the top there is a beautiful view of Santa Monica and at the bottom you let out right onto the pleasant upscale streets of North of Montana. People use it as their personal outdoor gym jogging up and down the steep stairs. It has become such a destination that signs mark it off asking the joggers to stay quiet and not to litter so the surrounding home owners are not disturbed.

Along Pacific Coast Highway, by the beach, you begin to the get the sort of beach front homes that we have come to associate with the Santa Monica coastal area. These are beautiful homes of mixed architectural styles, most in the modernist vein that dates Santa Monica as one of the forward-looking post-war communities that grew in the 50’s and 60’s into what it is today. These boxy homes tend to have driveways and garage fronts that face PH1 as if this bustling traffic packed highway were just its alleyway, the real front of the homes being the sandy beaches. Along this stretch, you can also find several Mission style tile roves and even an occasional Cape Cod style home with Gambrelled roof, modified to western standards. Some of the beach side restaurants pop up in this area as well, with Back on the Beach café being a nice place to get sandwiches and salads. The Santa Monica hills that will turn into steep cliffs are just getting started in this area.

Just inland from PH-1, up the ever higher hills that build as you move south, you find Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica’s most famous street. This is the street that moves aslong the curving cliffs that overlook the Pacific, the panoramic view of blue sliced up by palms and cypress trees. It is here that joggers and roller bladers move are a constant sight. Several promontories jut out making for wonderful picnic spots or places to take in the view and have morning coffee with a friend. The vintage 1920’s style stone lamps just add to the atmosphere as do the many art deco style buildings that face the wide boulevard with its tree-lined center meridian. It has been seen so often, in so many films that I hardly need describe it. Right at the mouth of San Vicente Blvd. you can even find tall high rise apartments more reminiscent of Ipanema beach in Rio. San Vicente Boulevard is the main thoroughfare on the northern end of North of Montana and is mainly residential but where cars move more quickly than in the surface streets on their way to and from the beaches to Brentwood. The street has a wide meridian with beautiful sprawling trees and it road borders the Riviera Country Club (mostly in Pacific Palisades) with its large golf course and its tennis courts being right off of San Vicente.