Chronicler of L.A.’s lost houses

SAM WATTERS owns a nice chunk of land in Venice, where he recently built a modern house. But he lives most of his mental life in homes of another era -- those built from 1885 to 1935, L.A.’s first golden age.

For the last six years, Watters has scoured public and private archives, assembled photos and floor plans, unearthed sagas of love and betrayal, bigotry and greed. What’s emerged is a riveting picture of this city’s wealthy early inhabitants -- merchants, industrialists, movie stars -- whose great homes and gardens have been underappreciated by the rest of the world, and by Angelenos themselves, Watters says.

He documents them all in “Houses of Los Angeles,” a dazzling two-volume pictorial history released this week by Acanthus Press. The author chafes at the notion that Modernism began out here with Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler and that everything else was just a copy of what had been built before somewhere else.

“Untrue,” says Watters, adding that early L.A. was an Eden of eclectic, inspired California design that predated and then coexisted with the work of those Modernist superstars. In fact, Watters says, the luster of Neutra and Schindler has dimmed a legacy left by less heralded masters -- the likes of Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, Irving Gill, Gordon Kaufmann, Roland Coate and Reginald D. Johnson -- whose works were contemporary and unique.

“When an inspired architect built a Mediterranean villa out here in 1915, it was just as modern as what Neutra and Schindler did,” Watters says. “It was designed for our climate, our indoor-outdoor life. Nobody had ever seen it in America before.”

Some of the greatest so-called “traditional” houses in early Los Angeles are really tradition turned upside-down, he adds.

“American Colonial, for example. People think they’re California copies of all those houses in Connecticut. Not at all,” Watters says. “The 1910 E.M. Taylor house in Altadena designed by Hunt and Grey was no copy. It’s an abstraction, an interpretation, specifically designed for California life. The house has no center hall; they eliminated it. You walk right into a room that is the precursor of what we today would call a great room, with big windows so you can see the gardens from everywhere. It’s very much like how we live now.”

In some cases, Watters spent months finding the names of architects who had designed homes he wanted to write about.

“That’s the thing about L.A., compared to the East Coast: We don’t just tear down our treasures. We toss out all written records about them as well,” he says. “In the East, they kept bills for every seed, awning or doorknob ever purchased.”

Watters had to sleuth out buried fragments and piece them together like a puzzle to learn who built what and why -- and what has happened to it all. He was not amused.

“Houses are the biography of a city. They tell what life was like, how it was lived at the moment they were built. They offer a visual cultural history,” he says. “Not all old houses are important. Some are enormously significant. Their designs were based on real thinking about this city, its climate, its functionality. So when we take that out, we take out something that illuminates the past and can inform decisions for the future. Houses are culture.”

More than half of the houses in his new books have disappeared. And more are going.

“Right now, on the Westside, a Wallace Neff is about to be torn down,” he says. “I’m getting phone calls about it.”

In Pasadena, the newest trend is to gut the homes and leave only the historic exteriors intact, he says.

“I know people want to live comfortable lives. Progress must be made. I’m just saying we don’t destroy great paintings. We don’t burn down sculpture. We preserve drawings. Why should architecture be subjected to such treatment?”

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WATTERS is expounding in his Frederick Fisher-designed home, flipping quickly back and forth through his new books, passionately extolling the virtues of Mediterranean villas, Colonial Revivals, Japanese palaces and crenelated castles along with long-gone lavish gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. and Edward Huntsman-Trout. His lanky frame is draped on an antique Chinese child’s chair suitable for a 4-year-old. No explanation why, except that it pleases him. His writing style is muted, but his personality is not. Eyes flash, arms wave, his voice dips and soars as if he’s practicing scales.

Watters is a cultural historian, a kind of forensic societal snoop. His area of expertise is homes and gardens of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the lives of those who created them. Since his student days at Yale, he has lived in Europe and traveled six continents, exploring excellence in residential architecture and landscape of the period. When he settled in L.A. 15 years ago, he expected to find nothing much extraordinary aside from the already well- known modernists.

“I went to the UCLA library,” he says, “found a 1965 first edition of a David Gebhard and Robert Winter guide to Los Angeles architecture. I copied it.”

First, he went to see three Neutra houses in Mandeville Canyon. They no longer were there.

“Every weekend I’d go with that early guide because it told me what had existed and what was now missing,” Watters says.

From then on, his course was set. He couldn’t restore what was gone but hoped to re-create it in books and possibly help reclaim for Los Angeles some sense of its own glorious past. And perhaps a sense of why more of it should be preserved for the future.

He is not a preservationist or an activist, he insists.

“If people want to tear down important houses, it’s not my business. It’s a free country,” he says. “I only hope my work will make them think a bit more before they act.”

Watters’ research uncovered all sorts of interesting sociological sidelights, including information on L.A.’s gay subculture at the time. William Andrews Clark Jr., for example, built an ornate early-1900s house and library in the Kinney Heights neighborhood of central L.A. The son of a U.S. senator, he was a twice-married lawyer, a father, an amateur violinist and an avid collector of rare books and music scores. He founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra in 1919 and, upon death, bequeathed much of his estate to UCLA. His library is still open to scholars.

Clark also amassed the world’s largest collection of Oscar Wilde materials and embellished his home with classical depictions of what might be considered homoerotic art. Although he appeared to live a married life, he also seems likely to have had a liaison with a younger man, his assistant librarian, Watters says. The young assistant drove a rare Rolls-Royce convertible and lived in a Mediterranean villa near Clark’s mansion, both of which were gifts from Clark, who named the assistant an executor in his will.

“Houses of Los Angeles” documents many of the great heartbreak homes -- magnificent architecture and gardens built to blend with extraordinary natural settings, all destroyed by developers, city governments and an assortment of tycoons. He traces the history of great houses built by the family of Arthur Letts, who founded the Broadway department store chain and opened the first Bullock’s.

“Letts built a fantastic house in Los Feliz,” Watters says. “His son built what is now the Playboy mansion. His daughter and son-in-law built a very well-known house with extraordinary, sophisticated gardens. That one was erased and replaced by Aaron Spelling’s mega-mansion.”

He cites the Enchanted Hill, a 1925 Mediterranean Revival house by Wallace Neff that he describes as “fantastical” and “very significant, very contemporary.” It had been built in Benedict Canyon by MGM screenwriter Frances Marion and her cowboy-star husband, Frederick Clifton Thomson, who also constructed a mahogany-floored stable for Thomson’s horse. All Watters’ adjectives seem inadequate compared with photos in the book of this poetic hilltop paradise, a timeless homage to the natural beauty that was once Los Angeles.

“Poof, it’s gone,” says Watters. Although he doesn’t name Paul Allen, it was the Microsoft co-founder who razed the landmark. Watters’ irritation shines through in his writing: “Although presented with the unique opportunity to restore one of Los Angeles’ few remaining intact Mediterranean Revival estates by one of the city’s acclaimed architects, the new owner chose to demolish Frances Marion and Fred Thomson’s hacienda in 2000 and to build a 55,000-square-foot architecturally eclectic palace that is visible for miles.”

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