Hollywood Refinishing takes on kitchen cabinet refinishing in Hancock Park — the 1920s Period Revival neighborhood bounded by Melrose Avenue on the north, Wilshire Boulevard on the south, Highland Avenue on the west and Rossmore Avenue on the east, wrapped around the grounds of the Wilshire Country Club. From our shop on Sherman Way in North Hollywood it is a straight run over the Cahuenga Pass and down Highland — which matters, because doors and drawer fronts travel to a spray shop and back.
This is a neighborhood where refinishing is usually the right call rather than a compromise. The subdivision was developed in the 1920s by G. Allan Hancock, and the houses went up as two-story Period Revival homes — Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival — built with real cabinetry: inset doors, solid stiles and rails, each door fitted to its own opening. When one of these kitchens looks tired, the failure is almost always in the finish and the hardware, not in the wood underneath.
What follows is what we actually deal with in these houses: the fifty-foot setbacks, the side driveways, the century-old shellac, and the kitchens where we tell people refinishing is the wrong answer.
Hancock Park holds roughly 1,200 homes, and the Hancock Park Homeowners Association states that 90 percent of them retain the original design of their street-facing facades, dating from the early 1920s. That figure describes facades, not kitchens — but it tells you something true about the place: original material survived here, because for most of a century nobody had a strong reason to tear it out.
In our experience that carries inside. The cabinetry and millwork we take the hardware off of in these houses is usually solid fir or oak, cut from stock nobody can buy today, least of all inside a flat-pack box. Pulling sound fir or oak out of a house on Muirfield Road and putting particleboard in its place is a downgrade dressed as an upgrade.
The honest counterweight: not every cabinet in Hancock Park is original. Plenty of these kitchens were redone in the 1980s and 1990s, and what is in them now is builder-grade oak or thermofoil over MDF. Those get judged on their own merits, not on the age of the house, and sometimes they are not worth refinishing at all. Our cabinet refinishing service covers both cases.
The first thing we do in an old Hancock Park kitchen is work out what finish is already on the wood, because that decides everything after it. A few drops of denatured alcohol on an inconspicuous spot will soften shellac and turn it sticky — shellac was a popular finish before about 1920 and still turns up in houses of this era. If alcohol does nothing and lacquer thinner makes the surface almost flow, it is lacquer. Get that wrong and you either fight a coating that will not accept a new one, or you dissolve a finish that could have been saved and re-flowed in place.
The second thing is grease. A century of cooking in a small original kitchen leaves a film on the uppers near the range that no amount of scuff-sanding gets through. Degreasing comes before abrasives, always, and it is the step the DIY kits skip — which is why those jobs peel at the stiles first.
After that it is the specifics of the house: loose mortise-and-tenon joints in door frames; original butt hinges and cupboard latches worth rehanging rather than swapping for soft-close hardware that will not fit the same mortise; a butler’s pantry whose glass-front uppers are usually in far better shape than the kitchen, because nothing ever fried in there; and paint stacked several layers deep over fir that was originally stained and varnished. The same work carries past the kitchen into wood refinishing and staining on doors, mantels and built-ins.
Hancock Park was adopted as a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone by Los Angeles City Council in 2008. It sits in Council District 5, across the Wilshire and Hollywood community plan areas, and the Hancock Park HPOZ Board meets on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month at Marlborough School, 250 South Rossmore Avenue.
We do not offer opinions on what your project does or does not require. Confirm the scope with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning’s Office of Historic Resources — theirs is the only answer that counts.
What the neighborhood unambiguously changes is logistics. The vast majority of Hancock Park residences are set back fifty feet from the street, as G. Allan Hancock insisted, with side driveways generally leading through a porte cochere to a rear garage. Lovely to look at, awkward to work around: a box truck does not park at the front door. Doors and drawer fronts get carried the length of that setback, or down a narrow side driveway under a porte cochere a van roof will not always clear, and mature parkway trees limit what can stage at the curb. On the good side, a detached rear garage is often the cleanest place in the city to build a temporary spray enclosure — we will ask about yours early.
We start with a test panel on a real door from your kitchen, not a sample chip. That tells us the substrate, the existing finish, how the wood takes color, and whether a repair problem is hiding under the coating. On original 1920s cabinetry it also tells us whether the sensible route is a full strip and refinish, or a scuff, seal and topcoat that keeps the patina.
Hardware comes off and gets bagged and labeled by opening — hinges and latches from these houses are not interchangeable, and the mortises were cut one at a time. Doors and drawer fronts go to the shop, staged out through the side driveway. Boxes, face frames and built-ins stay put and get finished on site behind containment, which is the part that dictates how the kitchen feels while work runs.
Repairs come before finish, not after: re-gluing loose rails, filling old hardware mortises where a previous owner changed hinge types, patching veneer chips from decades of drawer fronts knocking together. Then a bonding primer or sealer chosen against what the test panel told us, then the topcoat. Cure time is chemistry, not scheduling — a coating is dry to the touch long before it is hard enough to resist a fingernail. Wider work on the room falls under kitchen refinishing.
If the original doors are long gone and what remains is a 1990s remodel on sound plywood boxes, refinishing is the wrong tool and cabinet refacing is the right one: new doors and drawer fronts, new veneer on the face frames and exposed ends, existing boxes kept. It gets you a door profile that suits a Period Revival house whose surrounding millwork is still original, without a demolition.
We also say no. Thermofoil that has already delaminated from its MDF core will not hold a coating. Particleboard boxes that swelled under a sink leak are structurally finished, and no finish schedule fixes that — that is a rebuild, or a water damage restoration conversation first.
Houses of this vintage tend to need the same things at once, and doing them together means the setup and containment happen once. Original cast-iron tubs and the colored wall tile that came with them are worth keeping, and bathtub, tile and shower reglazing returns a 1920s bathroom to a clean, uniform surface without disturbing the tile layout. Oak strip flooring hiding under later carpet is a common find in houses of this era and responds well to hardwood floor refinishing. Worn or dated work surfaces fall under countertop refinishing.
Our services index lists the full range, and the contact page is the fastest way to book a look. Hollywood Refinishing is licensed in California under CSLB #818749, is 4.9-star rated on Yelp and 5.0 on Google, and works out of 13151 Sherman Way, Unit G-H, North Hollywood, CA 91605. The number is (818) 988-4240.
Hollywood Refinishing is a licensed California contractor, CSLB #818749, working out of 13151 Sherman Way, Unit G-H, North Hollywood. Refinishing is the whole business, not a sideline — cabinets, bathtubs, tile, floors, countertops and furniture. We are 4.9-star rated on Yelp and 5.0 on Google, every estimate is free and on site, and we will tell you when a surface is past refinishing rather than sell you a finish that will not hold.
That is not our call and we will not guess at it. The Hancock Park HPOZ is administered by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning's Office of Historic Resources, and the Hancock Park HPOZ Board meets on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month at Marlborough School, 250 South Rossmore Avenue. Confirm the scope of your project with City Planning before you plan around any assumption. We will describe the work in writing so you have something concrete to show them.
It should not, if the finish is identified first. Much of what looks like damage on century-old shellac or lacquer is the coating failing, not the wood. Where the substrate is sound we prefer the least invasive route that still gets a durable result, which keeps original tool marks and grain rather than sanding the character out of them. Where a previous owner already stripped and painted, that decision has largely been made for us.
Matching to existing millwork is a normal part of the work in these houses. We take the target from the actual woodwork — a door casing, a dining room built-in, the butler's pantry — and build the sample against it under the light in that room, because fir and oak do not take the same stain the same way. Approval happens on a physical sample, not a photograph.
Yes. Those neighborhoods sit directly against Hancock Park — Larchmont and Windsor Square to the east, Fremont Place to the southeast, Brookside to the southwest — and we work in all of them. Hancock Park addresses fall across the 90004, 90005, 90010, 90020 and 90036 ZIP codes.
Free, on-site estimates across Hancock Park and the wider Los Angeles area.
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13151 Sherman Way Unit G-H North Hollywood, CA 91605
818-988-4240