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The Story of our House
1969
Barbara found our first house in the rain-drenched winter of 1968/69. We had to vacate the beautiful garden house in Mandeville Canyon, which we had rented from the Hoffmans, who were returning from a two-year stint in Washington. It was the worst time to find a place to buy. For months it had been raining in torrents all through the winter, and right and left houses were sliding – a neighbor was killed when his house slipped into the canyon. The banks would not make loans until the situation had stabilized – and we had very limited funds. We searched for 2 months, even made bids on some run-down, safe places, but thank god they did not work out. Finally we rented a temporary place on Kingsport Drive in Malibu, where we were stranded by a landslide on Pacific Coast Highway for two weeks in February – we had to drive through Topanga Canyon to get home, or walk from the Getty Villa along the beach!
One day in April Barbara called me at work, she had, she thought, found a house for us: close enough to the Palisades' village center that the children could walk to school by themselves, and she could do all necessary shopping on foot, on the western dead end of Albright Street. I drove by there on my way home. I will not forget the sunny evening. A huge, half-wild sycamore overshadowing a very ordinary looking, one story house, located on a bluff 20 meters above the dead end. One had to walk up a driveway and then had a view of 200 degrees over the Pacific, the village, and Santa Monica, Palos Verdes and Catalia Island at the horizon. The property fell steeply into Temescal Canyon to the west, the only close neighbors were hidden by the bushes in its back garden.
There was nobody at home. I was tempted to climb through an open widow in back, but decided against it - it was too easy. One would have to keep that widow closed. There was a neglected back porch with a corrugated plastic roof. It must go, was my first thought. At the center of the back yard stood a Greek olive tree amid blooming azaleas. I peered through the windows. The living room had large picture windows towards the west shaded by the sycamore. From her kitchen stove Barbara would look out into the Santa Monica Hills.
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How much? Was my first question that night. “The owners are asking $53 000. It has just gone on the market,” said Barbara. “The realtors haven't seen it yet. Do you like it?” I knew I had to see the inside before I could make a decision. She called Mr. and Mrs. Ash, the owners and made an appointment for the next afternoon.
The visit revealed four small bedrooms and 1+3/4 baths on an L-shaped layout obviously built in stages on a concrete slab-foundation. The shape would give it extra earthquake stability. - Everything was, if petit bourgeois in taste, solidly made (1952) by the original owners, who ran a hardware store in the Palisades. The surprise was hot water heating in the floor, like in Mandeville Canyon. It would be a little cool but the most comfortable heating system. There existed two fireplaces to help keep us warm, back to back, one in the livingroom another in the adjoining breakfast room.
Would they consider to extend a second mortgage over three years? I asked Mrs. Ash. Well, yes, provided we could get a first bank loan. I spend the next few days negotiating a 30-years first of $40 400 with the Ash's lender. We contributed $5000 plus incidental expenses, all we could afford. The owners carried a $3800 second, and good Julia Euling lent us another $3800 unsecured. We would be hard strapped for a while, but Barbara was an excellent economist. For years we paid $283 per month on the first loan which was $120 less than what we had paid the Hoffmans in Mandeville Canyon.
On May 28, 1969 we moved in with a rental truck and the help of a number of colleagues from work.
1969
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We knew how to make a new place our own: Within a couple of weeks our few pieces of furniture – many made by me during the past 3 years: our bed, another one for Susanne, my easy chair, an elegant side table – had together with the rosewood leather chair, the diningtable and chairs found their places, where some of them still stand today. The dark “breakfast room” next to the kitchen served as dining room. The carpeting in the livingroom was not to good, we covered it with the Polish rug from Boston. Picasso prints and a large Marimekko wall-hanging gave the last personal touch to the livingroom.
Barbara and I used the small room out front, which today is Barbara's room, as our bedroom. For a while Susanne and Cornelius slept in the two halves of a “Jack-and-Jill” in back - today our bedroom. Susanne (10) was growing alarmingly fast and Cornelius (5), who had just learned how to tie his shoes, became a nuisance to her. I looked at our new place and decided that I had to convert the two-car garage into a room for Susanne big enough for the growing girl.
1970- 72
On July 4, 1970 Barbara and I heaved the huge garage door off its hinges, and I a began learning all the skiills of capentry, plastery, setting glass widows required of a construction man. Every free hour at night, every weekend I worked at this project for the better part of a year. I put in a new wall to partion off a third bathroom and a laundy room next to the kitchen.
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Whilst I put in the widows Cornelius took up lodging in our trashcans. Notice the BMW 1600, which I had bought to replace our blue VW-Bug.
This hard manual labor was also a counter-weight to an increasingly tight situation at work. We had been successfully selling my invention of a continuous chemical laser to the Air Force and the jealous rivalries between groups and people grew proportionally. I began to suffer heart palpitations, fainting spells, and high blood pressure. The doctors prescribed diuretics, but I knew that I had to get out of this rat race for a while, cost it what it may. At this point Karl Kompa from the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich offered me a guest research position for a year. I accepted and persuaded Wally Warren, my boss at Aerospace Corporation to give me a year's leave of absence. In the end he even paid for the difference in salary between Los Angeles and Munich. I was detrermind to make the best out of this Bavarian year for all four of us....
Susanne's room was not finished when we left for Munich on August 5, 1971. We hid all our cherished china, the Polish rug, and better furniture in Susanne's unfinished bathroom and rented the house through a trusted realtor to strangers we never met.
In 1970 we also had the two typical Californian experiences: a brushfiire and an earthquake. The hills were burning near Mandville Canyon, far enough to the east to shower us only with ashes. The earthqake woke us at 4 am. Both of us rushed out to rescue our children into the open. The house stood firm, we didn't even lose any glassware. Another, stronger earthquake shook West Los Angles in 1972, when we were in Munich. Frantic calls to the renters assured us that our place had not suffered any damage, whilst Traudl's apartment in Brentwood had been devastated. Since then we have been convinced that earthquakes could not affect us....
1973 - 1974
We returned from Munich to celebrate Christmas 1972 in our own house. The carpet in the livingroom had been chewed to shreds by the dog of the last renters. The open beamed ceiling was painted battleship gray, and Susanne's room had to be finished. Barbara and I washed the paint off the ceiling and oiled it with linseed oil. A plumber put a bathtub and toilet into Susanne's bathroom, and I worked for several more weeks to finish it. I also took off all doors on the shelves in the livingroom and of the partition betwen kitchen and breakfast room. Then we put new wall-to-wall carpeting into all rooms.
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Susanne's room kept om changing. She had outgrown the box-bed I had made for her and needed a new one, it wandered from the long wall into the back corner, where her desk had been. We found her a new higher, more stable desk for the big window. A second Marimeko wall hanging caught the visitors eyes from the kitchen. The opened kitchen closet, besides integrating kitchen and dining area let light into the dark dining room. Small changes like this and the opened book shelves had dramatic effects on space and light.
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For many years I tried various changes on paper. Removing the porch and integrating it with the living room under an extended open wood ceiling occupied me the longest time. But the year of remodeling the garage had taught me to leave my hands off such major reconstructions. They would have to wait until we could afford a contractor to do the work.
Finally we had an own place, which we were beginning to remodel to our tastes and needs. One I had promised Barbara when I married her, was that it would be an open house to our friends from around the world. The first to visit us – twice in 1973 - were Barbara's young Lattmann nephews from Hamburg. Ecki and Gerd brought their friend Reinhard along, all of whom Susanne knew well by now.
Susanne's Lattmann Cousins visitng with Reinhard, September 1973
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It became a turbulent time with excursions to the beach, Disneyland, and a Prokul Harum concert at the Greek Theater in Hollywod. Sparks were flying all around between Ecki and Susanne and her and Reinhard....
My Parents Second Visit, 1974
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The next visitors were my parents for the second time in February and March 1974. They came on a Condor charterflight arrving at Long Beach Airport. My father was 73 mother would turn 75 in August. Father, disturbed by his “American”-turned children kept very much to himself. Only Barbara could charm him out of his musings. Mother, already overweight, consoled herself with whipped cream – her old remedy. Four years later in 1978 they would stay with us once more.
Their 1974 visit would be the last time they saw my brother Gerhard. Gerhard had been overworked for a couple of years. He was physically and emtionally seriously run down unable to rescue himself from a deep depression. -
Heike stays with us - Gerhard's Death, 1975-1976
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In October 1975 Gerhard and Anneliese had been on a whale-watching trip and while stopping on their way home by our house, Gerhard suffered a physical breakdown with serious pain in his abdomen. I gave him two Gelonida which allowed them to drive home to Palos Verdes. A week later the doctors diagnosed a large, inoperable liver cancer which had already metasticized. His situation was hopeless. In and out of hospitals he struggled for over a year with his deterioration bones. He died at Long Beach Hospital on December 5, 1976.
Our saving angel was Heike Rönitz, a YFU-exchange student from Wittmund, Germany. Heike arrived in August 1976. She roomed with Susanne, went to same high school with her, and took part in all our activities. She became a wonderful companion to all of us during that difficult year.
Many relatives and friends stayed with us in the next 8 years. I recorded their visits together with our travels and adventures in my diaries.
One scary happening which nearly wiped out the house was
The Great Fire, in September 1979
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There were clouds of black smoke rising directly behind Pacific Palisades. One could see them from Aerospace. I raced home. The police blocked Sunset and Temescal Canyon Rd, a helicopter had landed behind Pali High. There were no fire engines in sight. The flames were just coming across the mountain ridge behind our house. It had never been so close before. The wind from the hill became fierce. With a roar like big jet engines the fire raced downhill. Cornelius and I climbed on our roof and tried to water it down. Ashes and glowing embers were raining on us. Susanne was paralysed by fear. I sent her to load the tent, sleeping bags, and all our camping gear into the car and drive it into the dead end of Albright St. Barbara was in the kitchen cooking a transportable meal for us.
As the fire came closer it burned through the chapparal on the other side of Temescal Canyon. A house - whose owners, the Holbergs, were in Germany - exploded in a shower of sparks. The heat on the roof became unbearable. And then the shingles of old Barnaba's house below us caught fire. Together with Herb Crew, our other next-door neigbor we dragged a ladder to the Barnaba house. The fire had already burned a 6-foot hole into the shingles. While we doused the flames on their roof, Barbara and Susanne evacuated the confusedly babbling Mrs Barnaba and her husband in his befuddled tails and hat. I had to call his reluctant son in law and shout at him to come and pick up the old couple. Barely had we pushed them into their son-in-law's car, the Maestro jumped out again and ran into the house to rescue his precious music. When he reappeared he carried a hastily collected bundle of sheet music and two plaster busts of Verdi and of Beethoven.....
Because of this frantic effort we had not noticed that the wind had
suddenly died. I remember vividly how I became aware of the crackling
of the burning trees at the bottom of the canyon below. A complete
calm settled on us. The danger had passed - in the very last
minute..... We sat down to dinner. The fire crackled all night.
After
this experience I installed a sprinkler system on our roof, which
could be turned on from below. We never had to use it.
1979-1984
In 1979 Susanne was accepted at Art Center and moved to Pasadena to
study photography, and Barbara became an escort guiding German groups
touring the West. During her often 3-week-long absences Cornelius and
I lived alone in the house.
In March 1981 my father died and
mother six month later.
Susanne
and John leaving for Boulder, Colorado 1982
Susanne had met John Wood at Art Center and got engaged to him on a
summer trip to Italy in 1981. They graduated from Art Center together
and got married at the Wayfarers' chapel in Palos Verdes in March
1982. Afterwards we had a big party for all of her and our friends at
our house. A few days later they packed all their belongings into a
VW camper and a souped-up VW bug and drove off to Boulder, Colorado
where John had found a job in the art department of Coors.
Cornelius
graduated from Pali High 1983 and moved to Berkeley. The house was
suddenly empty.
Rebuilding the House, September-December 1984
Now was the time to put my architectural skills to the test. I spent $1000 on an architect friend to have a floor plan drawn up by his shop with all the changes I wanted:
The wall between living room and the porch would be taken out and the roof of the living and breakfast room be extended the full width of the porch. The slope of the new roof would be broken over a heavy new beam to come down from 11 feet to a 9-foot-high glass wall with two french doors into the back garden. Like in Mandeville Canyon clerestory windows on top would provide for ventilation. The Jack-and-Jill bedroom would lose its central, dividing closet and one window in back to make it into a large future bedroom for Barbara and me. New closets would be made in the now dead space between it and the living room. The fireplace in the breakfast room was to be walled off, and the passage from it to the living room opened to expose the rafters and the full wood ceiling. More heating coils would have to be installed in the floor of the former porch. A larger, modern furnace was needed for the heating system, additional electric outlets were required. And the roof needed an R-11 insulation to keep us warm. There were a few smaller needs, like double-glassed widows in the new garden wall and new surface coverings in the kitchen. All of these changes would bring the lived-in area of the house to 2200 square feet without changing the original foot print of the house – the basis for the property taxes we had to pay....
I knew exactly what I wanted and found myself an exceptionally nice, responsive young contractor, Glenn Berk. The first thing he demanded was that I dismiss the architect. He pointed at a number of glitches in the plan. He would do all I wanted, but the architect did not know his business well. Oh, said Glenn, you'll need a new carport or the city will not approve this plan. I had forgotten about that. A couple of weeks later Glenn came back with a detailed estimate of $110 000 for parts and labor....
I was easily able to refinace the first mortgage. We had been responsible customers, and the price of the property had gone up to $500 000!
We moved into the modified garage of friends a few blocks east. Glenn started mid September.
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I would drive by every other night to check on Glenn's progress. One
Saturday morning they had laid out all the beams that would carry the
new roof above the dining area. The beams would be open and visible.
Glenn asked me whether I wanted them aligned with the existing beams
or equally spaced. After a few minutes of doubt I told him to align
them. An hour later they were all nailed in - and nobody ever noticed
that they are not equally spaced....
Less easily accepted was
another vision of mine. I wanted the puny door to the southern, front
part of house opened up to the full height of the hallway. Glenn
balked, that could bring down the wall between the living room and
Barbara's new study. I told him, that I would pay for the repair, if
that happened. It never did, and the enlarged hallway became the
architectural clue of the new living room. Nobody noticed, but Glenn
was sufficiently impressed by the effect, that from then on he did
everything for me. And there were sevaral glitches they made which he
reversed without charging me; one of the french doors was set at the
wrong place, a new skylight in the breakfast room was misplaced,
another skylight his men broke, the painters painted the living room
in an ice-cold gray instead of Navajo white and so on...
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By late September the New House was ready to be moved in. We slept the first night on a matress in the dining-living room: the space and the light were so beautiful, that I feared some mishap was bound to happen....
And then Barbara came home with an extravagant Ingo Maurer Lamp, which, many times re-papered, has ever since floated over our new dining table.
Many changes have taken place: we added a few carefully selected pieces of furniture, Barbara has moved into her study and I into the large front bedroom, the back bedroom has become a guest room, a new kitchen stove, refrigerator and washing machine have replaced the old ones - the basic layout has remained the same for 30 years! Space and light are still precious to us.
I add a few photos taken in more recent times.
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Dinner
for Two December 2012
This “surrealist” photo has baffled most people I sent it to, yet it is a fitting symbol of our love with its many refractions and reflections. It was taken during dinner one night – I hold the camera – through the big window into the dark garden, where the lights in the olive tree, that Jenny had artistically arranged, were glowing. The scene in our beloved glasshouse is reflected on each surface of the two double-widow panes – the photo is not blurred by my hands' shaking. As it is, the opposite windows towards the sea reflect the lights in the olive tree, the Christmas tree, and all the candles in the room twice more. One of the beauties of the house at Christmas
Pacific Palisades, June 2013
