Queen Victoria Road Home With an R. C. Duncan Connection Lists for $2.04 Million

4900 Queen Victoria Road in Woodland Hills — listing photo collage

At 4900 Queen Victoria Road in Woodland Hills, a home dating to 1959 carries a history of additions and remodeling that extends well beyond its original construction. Offered for $2.04 million, the property has five bedrooms, four bathrooms and 3,806 square feet on approximately 0.53 acres, according to the Redfin listing.

Quick facts

Address	4900 Queen Victoria Road, Woodland Hills, CA 91364
Neighborhood	Forest Hills
Asking price	$2,040,000
Year built	1959, per listing
Bedrooms / bathrooms	5 bedrooms / 4 bathrooms
Living area	3,806 square feet
Lot	Approximately 0.53 acres
Designer connection	R. C. Duncan, named in supplied permit research
Listing agent	Jacqueline Soto, ehomes

The home today

Today's listing describes a single-story home with a covered patio, a private backyard pool and a porte cochere at the entrance. Inside, the advertised features include a fireplace, a primary suite with two closets and a Jack-and-Jill bathroom connecting secondary bedrooms. Jacqueline Soto of ehomes represents the property. Listing details and photographs.

R. C. Duncan and the permit record

The permit research supplied for this post identifies R. C. Duncan as the designer listed on a permit. That name adds a thread to the home's architectural history, while the later permit entries provide a more detailed picture of how the property changed over time.

Robert Crane Duncan: a Van Nuys architectural career

A possible identification for the permit's initials is Robert Crane Duncan (1927–2016), a Southern California architect who lived in Van Nuys from 1950 to 1987. His 2016 obituary in The Press-Enterprise records architectural internships in Kansas City, Chicago and Los Angeles and attendance at USC's School of Architecture. It describes work encompassing churches, educational buildings, residences for seniors and college students, and recreation buildings for mobile-home parks.

His Valley connections included the First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, where he served as business administrator from 1973 to 1979. The obituary also credits him as architect of the church's Fickett Towers senior residence and records four years on its management board. Before his architectural career, Duncan served in the Army from 1945 to 1947, including duty on Okinawa, and attained the rank of corporal.

The obituary supplies biographical context but does not mention 4900 Queen Victoria Road. Matching Robert Crane Duncan conclusively to the permit's “R. C. Duncan” requires corroborating permit or professional records.

A permit dated August 16, 1974, describes an addition involving two bedrooms, a nook and a two-car garage. The supplied transcription records the bedroom portion as 20 by 12 feet, the nook as 9 by 9 feet, and the garage as 19 feet 6 inches by 20 feet. The bedroom notation does not establish whether those dimensions apply to each room or to the combined addition, so it should not be used to calculate an overall increase in living area.

The next chapter comes in 1997. A June 9, 1997, permit describes a 48-square-foot addition beneath an existing roof, 300 square feet of interior remodeling and installation of a new fireplace. It is a useful detail in the home's chronology: a small expansion accompanied by work within the existing house.

Later that year, a permit dated September 9, 1997, calls for a new 14-by-38-foot swimming pool. Together, the two 1997 entries document plans to change both the interior and the yard. These are permit dates; the supplied notes do not establish when construction was completed.

For readers interested in the Valley's residential history, the appeal here includes that sequence of changes: additional rooms and garage space in the 1974 permit, followed by interior work and a pool in the 1997 records. Those dates offer a starting point for looking through the listing photographs and considering how successive projects shaped the home seen today.

Forest Hills and the architecture of Queen Victoria Road

Queen Victoria Road is one of the principal streets of Forest Hills, a wooded enclave within Woodland Hills. Angeleno Living's neighborhood guide describes it as a 1950s tract once marketed as the “Bel Air of the Valley.” The guide identifies Queen Victoria Road, Queen Florence Lane and Deodar Lane as its core streets, noting mature tree cover, stone entrance pillars and stonework carried through the neighborhood.

The homes along Queen Victoria also show that postwar development here accommodated more than one architectural approach. 5012 Queen Victoria Road has a 1959 construction date in the property information displayed by Redfin. Farther along the same street, 5000 Queen Victoria Road, previously featured on SFV Blog, was designed and built by Ebbe Videriksen in 1965 as his own home and an early base for his architectural practice.

A different expression of the era appears at 4963 Queen Victoria Road. HistoricPlacesLA records a 1963 date and identifies the residence as an excellent example of Late Hollywood Regency architecture. Its city inventory status is Eligible; the record documents survey recognition and eligibility rather than establishing a completed landmark designation.

That mix of dates and designs gives useful context to 4900's own history. Its listed 1959 construction date places it within the neighborhood's midcentury development, while the later permits trace changes made to this particular house over the following decades.

Explore Queen Victoria Road

The Street View below places the property in its streetscape. Imagery may show a different date from the current listing photographs.

Nearby on Queen Florence Lane, the neighborhood’s earlier estate history is explored in our article on Gene Hackman’s former home at 4934 Queen Florence Lane, the 1928 Canoga Estate.

Continue reading with our feature on Ebbe Videriksen’s home and studio at 5000 Queen Victoria Road, or browse more homes and real estate stories in the SFV Blog Development & Architecture archive.