Historic Hollywood

YAMASHIRO
ADAPTED BY
NATALIE DUNBAR
Yamashiro has been an integral part of
Hollywood history for nine decades. The
restaurant and grounds, nestled in the Hollywood
Hills, have become a favorite place to experience
and enjoy.
Yamashiro’s success is the result of its
commitment “to amaze each guest with cuttingedge
CalAsian cuisine and personal, detailoriented
service.” The road to its transformation
from a picturesque private estate to a notable and
unique destination is rich with Hollywood lore.
Yamashiro means “Mountain Palace” in
Japanese. Its creation was borne of a dream of
brothers, Adolph and Eugene Bernheimer, who
built the hilltop mansion in 1914 to house their
priceless collection of Asian treasures.
The Bernheimers’ brought hundreds of skilled
craftsmen from the Orient to recreate an exact
replica of a sixteenth century palace located in
the mountains near Kyoto, Japan. The resulting
structure included a ten-room teak and cedar
mansion, featuring carved rafters lacquered in
gold and tipped with bronze dragons, and an
exquisite exterior with superbly landscaped
Japanese gardens, koi pond, and a six-hundredyear
old pagoda imported from Japan.
The Inner Courtyard filled with sculptured
plants, stone hewn pools, and rare fish formed a
lovely garden in the center of the building. The
court provided light and air to the surrounding
rooms where the walls were covered with
lustrous silks and hung with antique tapestries.
The $2-million landscaping effort on
Yamashiro’s grounds resulted in one of California’s
foremost Japanese gardens, complete with hillside
terraces filled with thirty thousand varieties of
trees and shrubs, waterfalls, hundreds of goldfish,
and a private zoo of exotic birds and monkeys.
In the late 1920s, Yamashiro served as
headquarters for the ultra-exclusive “400 Club.”
Created for the elite of Hollywood’s motion
picture industry, Yamashiro provided Hollywood
with its first celebrity hangout. Here Bebe
Daniels, Frank Elliott, Lilian Gish, Ramon
Navarro, and a “Who’s Who” of actors, writers,
54 ✦ HISTORIC HOLLYWOOD