At 508 and 512 South Ivy Avenue, two houses from the same year stand side by side. The Blair House has projecting gables and Eastlake ornament. Next to it, the Arthur House is a plain two-story farmhouse with wood siding and a sturdy brick chimney. In the front gardens, yellow and red roses were planted to match the paint on each house. Both houses date to 1887. Both are City of Monrovia landmarks, numbers 166 and 167.
For most of Monrovia's preservation history, getting inside a house like this took an invitation or a ticket. The Monrovia Historic Preservation Group holds its annual historic home tour on the first Sunday in May. These two houses now open on a different schedule. Since this summer they have operated as the Arthur Blair Historic Inn, and the Arthur House holds Viola's, a bistro that serves brunch six days a week. Monrovia's two oldest landmark houses are no longer something you see once a year. You can walk in on a Monday morning.
Two Houses That Kept Moving
The houses have stood on Ivy Avenue together only since 1993, and neither one started there. Their addresses over the years, as traced by the historic-architecture site Etan Does LA:
- 1887: Luther Reed Blair, a Monrovia architect and builder, designs the Blair House as his family's home at the corner of Ivy and Olive.
- 1888: Bradford Arthur, a retired farmer from Michigan, buys the newly built John F. and Julia Brossart House, which then stood at 343 South Heliotrope, before John Brossart ever lives in it.
- After Bradford Arthur's death: the Brossart House moves to 202 East Lemon.
- 1909: it reaches 512 South Ivy, where Arthur's descendants would live for generations. For part of the years between 1909 and 1924, its rooms were rented out as apartments.
- 1927: the Blair House moves to 319 West Duarte Road.
- 1993: the preservationist Steve Baker acquires the Blair House to keep it from being demolished and moves it to 508 South Ivy, next door to his family's house.
The inn takes its name from that history. "Arthur Blair" was never one person. The name joins the Arthur House and the Blair House.
The Historian Who Kept Them Standing
Steve Baker was Monrovia's longtime city historian. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bradford Arthur was his great-grandfather, and Baker filled the Ivy Avenue property with thousands of antiques: nineteenth-century etched glass, antique plumbing fixtures, five pump organs and hundreds of oil lamps.
The Times also reported how the restoration team met him. In 2021, Joshua Cain and André Reyes had left the front door of their own restored 1887 Monrovia home open, and Baker walked in wearing his signature top hat. He had come to compliment their period-appropriate work and to ask where they had found redwood for their shingle roof. The three of them grew close as fellow members of the Monrovia Historic Preservation Group. After Baker's death in 2022, Cain and Reyes set out to carry through his idea of turning the house into an inn. With Cain's business partner Jeff Godbold, they bought the Arthur House and the Blair House next door. The project was carried out through Saxony Design Build.
The City Council approved landmark status for both houses on July 16, 2024. The Monrovia Historic Preservation Group reports that both are also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
A Restoration Measured in Porch Spindles
"It's very deliberate to call this a restoration and not a renovation," Reyes told the Los Angeles Times. The work bears that out. In the Arthur House, the team restored the original timber frame, an Italianate cast-iron mantelpiece and hand-fitted redwood millwork. They also put back features that had been removed over the decades, including original roofing, porches and even light switches.
The Blair House's porch spindles had disappeared. Cain found one original, had his carpenter copy it down to its crane cutouts, took the porch apart to install the copies, and painted them in eight colors. Inside, striped blue wallpaper that Baker had saved since the 1980s was hung by hand by Reyes and design assistant Jorge Ochoa.
The one new building follows the same approach. The Saxony Cottage is an ADA-compliant Victorian carpenter gothic cottage with board-and-batten siding, modeled on a 19th-century Sears kit house and built largely from salvaged materials. The project took almost three years. The inn welcomed the community inside on July 4, 2026, held its ribbon cutting on July 30, and was open for overnight stays by early August.
Which Rooms Are Open to Whom
The inn has 11 guest rooms across three buildings. Only the Arthur House is open to diners. The Blair House parlors and the Saxony Cottage are for overnight guests.
| Building | Built | What's inside | Who can enter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur House, 512 S. Ivy | 1887 | Viola's; a parlor with a pump organ guests can play; the Bradford Suite | Public, during Viola's hours |
| Blair House, 508 S. Ivy | 1887 | Two parlors with restored 1880s Eastlake mahogany sets; a circa 1874 Haine Brothers rosewood square grand piano; the Luther Reed and Ryder Suites | Inn guests |
| Saxony Cottage | New construction | Two rooms, one with a spiral staircase to an upstairs bedroom | Inn guests |
The suites are named for the families who lived in those rooms. In the back garden, guests have a 4-foot-deep cocktail pool edged in natural limestone. None of the buildings has a television. Guests can also borrow robin's-egg-blue Viribus bikes from beside the Blair House porch and ride into town.
Cain expects a particular kind of overnight guest. "Monrovia is not a tourist haven, so guests to our inn will be destination-oriented," he told the Los Angeles Times. For anyone in town with relatives coming for Thanksgiving, that means 11 rooms in two landmark houses and a new cottage. The inn's reservation page searches availability by check-in date, check-out date and party size, and the inn also takes bookings by phone at (626) 214-8549.
Viola's, Inside the Arthur House
For a resident, Viola's is the simplest way in. It is named after Baker's grandmother and serves its food on the vintage servingware he collected. The restaurant describes its offering as French-inspired cuisine, European wines and Southern hospitality, with wine served in the garden. Before opening, managing partner Casarah Gutierrez described the feel she was aiming for to WhatNow Los Angeles as "first date at Grandma's."
The hours currently posted on Viola's reservation page:
- Brunch: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., every day except Wednesday
- Dinner: 4 to 10 p.m., Thursday through Saturday
- Wednesday: closed
An August notice from the preservation group listed Tuesday as the closed day, so check the restaurant's page before you go. The online booking system holds a table for 10 minutes and schedules a 90-minute seating. The Toast listing gives a price range of $15 to $30. Because the restaurant is in the Arthur House, dining there also gets you into its parlor and up to the pump organ.
The Houses in Monrovia's Late-Fall Calendar
The inn now sits among several preservation and civic dates in the coming weeks, three in Monrovia and one in neighboring Duarte.
- Saturday, November 7, 10 a.m.: The Monrovia Historic Preservation Group's downtown walking tour meets at the southeast corner of Palm and Myrtle Avenues. It costs $5 per person and lasts two hours.
- Saturday, November 14, 1 p.m.: Sandra Snider speaks on "Lucky" Baldwin's adobe at Packard Hall, Westminster Gardens, in Duarte. Admission is free, per the group's October 2026 newsletter.
- Thursday, November 19, 5 to 8 p.m.: The City's free Thankful & Grateful Holiday Gathering fills Library Park, 321 South Myrtle Avenue, with live entertainment, library story times, community booths, horse-drawn carriage rides and the lighting of the Holiday Tree.
- Thursday, December 3, 7 p.m.: The City's Holiday Parade heads north on Myrtle Avenue from Walnut Avenue to Palm Avenue. Listed street closures run from 5 to 10 p.m.
The tree lighting and the parade both fall on Thursdays, when Viola's serves brunch and dinner. Event details can change as the dates get closer, so check the City and preservation group pages that week.
Old houses like these hold more history than one visit can show. If you own a historic Monrovia home and are thinking about how to present its history, Chelby Crawford brings an art historian's eye to architecturally significant properties across the foothills. Request a private market consultation.
