Full speed ahead

CALHOUN CHAPPELL felt the vibrations the minute he walked through the door in 1994. Not the seismic kind of vibrations that makes you anxious, but the cosmic variety that makes you feel at home. Perched on a hill with the Silver Lake reservoir shimmering in the distance, the 1936 Streamline Moderne treasure brought back childhood memories -- not only of the postwar redwood ranch that his architect father built on the St. Johns River in Florida, but also of the afternoons a young Calhoun spent watching old MGM movies on TV.

The house had everything he wanted. “It was private, but felt open,” says Chappell, a financial consultant. “It had a view of water and trees and a church. It was a peaceful place that I knew others would enjoy. The architectural integrity hit me first. The glamour came later.”

The glamour, he discovered, originated from William Kesling. During an 18-month span beginning in 1935, Kesling, who had no formal training as an architect, built about two dozen homes that are highly desirable for their expanses of windows, curved walls and ocean liner details. Kesling’s business skills were less visionary.

“He was always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and eventually he was indicted,” says Chappell, citing the 15 counts of “forgery of endorsement” detailed in Patrick Pascal’s 2002 book, “Kesling Modern Structures: Popularizing Modern Design in Southern California 1934-1962.”

“When I was pulling up the carpet,” Chappell says, “I found that part of the flooring was made from old orange crates.”

The book taught Chappell much about his home’s designer, who avoided jail time but was ruined by scandal. A recent restoration of the kitchen and master bath revealed even more.

“When I bought the house it was painted white,” he says. “But when we were tearing out cabinets, I saw walls painted cranberry red, coral pink and hospital waiting room green.”

Soon, the upper level of Chappell’s lovingly restored Depression-era dream house was ablaze with color. He pulled out all the stops in the lone bathroom on the two-bedroom house’s lower floor, where his design mantra was “luxurious but architecturally appropriate.”

“They say never mix metals unless you’re going to go all the way,” Chappell says. “That gave me permission to paint Roman and yellow gold, bronze and silver.”

He also added a water closet and copied a deep-tiled bathtub he had seen in Pascal’s book. The finished room is a masterful bath evocative of a bygone era. “It reminds me of a five-star Parisian hotel or a Pullman car on the Orient Express,” Chappell says. “And with the exhaust fan going or water running, it sounds like the water rushing underneath an ocean liner at sea.”

Here, Chappell (pictured above with his dog, Orbit) explains how he got his house shipshape.

David A. Keeps can be reached at david.keeps@latimes.com.