For sale: Fixer. $1. The catch: U move it
Vincent LANDAY and Cheryl Clark dreamed of raising their family in “a big old house,” one with nooks and crannies and a mysterious past. But they also wanted to stay in Santa Monica, where big old houses are scarce and incredibly expensive. Especially those that have managed to maintain their integrity despite the design and architectural inclinations of a succession of well-meaning owners.
“We looked at old Craftsman houses and beach cottages,” Clark says, “but anything in our price range was sandwiched between two apartment buildings, poorly altered or converted into duplexes.”
The couple ended up buying a 1901 American Foursquare, a style that features a square footprint and four rooms both upstairs and down, but before they could live in it they had to move it — from its original Santa Monica location north of Wilshire to a lot a couple of miles south in Sunset Park.
Landay’s mother, a parishioner at St. Monica church, the congregation in Santa Monica where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his family worship, heard about the house first. The church was selling it for $1 with the condition that the buyer cart it away.
St. Monica’s had bought the house to tear down and build a parking lot, but when they applied for a demolition permit, they discovered that the Landmarks Commission had proclaimed it a “structure of merit.”
“That’s the lowest rung of historical designation,” Clark says. “It means you can move it but you can’t demolish it.”
Since a developer was also interested in the house, the Landays lobbied the church to sell it to them. “It wasn’t like we could offer $1.25 and outbid the other guy,” deadpans Landay, the producer of award-winning Hollywood films such as “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation.”
The couple provided the church administration with references and wrote letters describing their intention to restore the house, until a light went on and they realized the church couldn’t have cared less.
“They were going to demolish it,” Landay recalls. “That’s when we realized we needed to find a place to put it.”
With few choices, the Landays purchased a pathetically remodeled 1940s bungalow just for the land. The city wrote a letter to the church saying the Landays had permission to tear the house down, cinching the deal.
Nine months after they had first heard about the house, the couple prepared for the move. The contractor cut the utilities and moved the structure off its foundation and onto trailer wheels. Before he sawed the house in half, he removed all the old wood in the way of the cut, such as the 30-foot-long front porch railing, which is made of one piece of solid old-growth wood.
“Santa Monica didn’t even have printed permits for moving a house,” Clark says with a laugh. “They used a building permit, crossed out the word ‘building’ and wrote in ‘moving.’ ”
The Sunset Park bungalow had been demolished a couple of months before. “All we kept was the swimming pool and the palm tree in front,” Landay says, though the movers would probably have preferred to lose the palm, around which they had to jockey the house.
The actual move began at 11 p.m. to avoid causing any traffic jams. The two sections of the house were attached to semitruck cabs, and long curved wooden beams called “snooters” were affixed to the sides of the roof to raise the utility lines along the route.
The Landays followed on foot as the house slowly made its way south on Lincoln Boulevard. They held their breath as the procession inched its way up a steep incline on Pico and traveled east toward Sunset Park.
The drivers maneuvered around traffic signals. Phone, electric and cable company employees stood by to check the slack in the overhead lines; had they had to cut any of the lines during the move, the $5,000 the couple paid the utility companies to have personnel present would have escalated to 10 times that amount.
Five hours later, the house was positioned at its new location; the foundation would be built below it later. At daybreak, the Landays’ new neighbors came by with coffee and doughnuts. The movers exchanged high-fives.
But the real work had only just begun.
Even Landay, whose job as a producer is to anticipate and then deal with all sorts of curveballs, could never have foreseen all the challenges they would encounter. Like the time they removed the drywall in the living room and discovered that the second floor was bowing because of the way the plumbing had been installed in the upstairs bathroom.
“We had no idea how much work it would be,” Clark recalls. “The structural stuff was more than I ever could have imagined.”
“There were 1 million details to figure out, and we only had half a million of them figured out in advance,” Landay says.
In what was once the downstairs bedroom, the Landays added a family room, an office and a bathroom equipped with retrofitted salvaged features such as a pedestal sink and claw-foot tub. The white rectangular wall tiles are reproductions of the subway tiles used in bathrooms at the turn of the century.
They were able to keep the original wood floor in what is now the office, but had to install a new oak floor in the family room.
“Wood from 100 years ago has a very different grain pattern,” notes Clark, pointing to the juncture where the new and old floors meet. “There’s a lot more grain in the old floorboards, more swirls in the wood’s natural design.”
The Landays’ interest in “old stuff” came from Clark’s grandfather, who collected everything from old films to old toasters. The elderly man’s garage, filled with ancient appliances, was where Landay hung out on the weekends — an antidote to the Hollywood world where he works — and helped his wife’s grandfather fiddle and fix things.
“It made me realize they just don’t make things today like they used to,” Landay says.
Elements such as the old wood flooring and the original five-panel wooden doors are why they never considered building a reproduction of an old house. “I was worried there would be something fake about it, like a movie set,” Landay says.
“Though this house probably only cost a little less than building it from scratch,” Clark says, “a new one could never be the same.”
Once the house was on solid ground literally and structurally, the couple spent time at the Santa Monica library, poring over 100-year-old issues of House Beautiful and American Home to get decorating ideas. When they came across something they really liked — such as the built-in hutch for the dining room or the wooden mantel for the living room — Landay scanned the picture and sent it around to different salvage yards.
“That’s the best way to deal with those guys,” he counsels. “You need to be specific. You don’t just ask them what they have in the way of a 6-foot sink.”
Using the complete illustrated 1920 edition of the Sears Roebuck home builders catalog, reissued by Dover Publications, they hunted down hinges, doorknobs and light fixtures that might have been used originally.
“It’s what builders at the time bought their parts from,” Landay explains.
Even when they were forced to use reproductions, the Landays tried to imbue them with an original touch. Some of the windows in the rear of the house are reproductions, yet their vaguely rippled glass panes were cut from salvaged glass. The medicine chest in the downstairs bath is a reproduction to which Landay added old molding found elsewhere in the house.
One room of the house they didn’t want to restore to its original state was the kitchen.
“In the 1900s, kitchens were mostly furniture, wood countertops and a tile floor,” Clark explains.
“There was no way we were going to live without built-ins,” adds Landay. “We wanted cabinets.”
And cabinets they got. The new butter-yellow 1920s-style kitchen has 21 cabinets and a deep green linoleum floor. The room was built around the two-basin, 4-foot-long sink, acquired from a salvage yard in New Hampshire.
The four kitchen light fixtures are reproductions from Restoration Hardware. “It’s a lot easier to find salvage fixtures if you need one, not four,” Clark says.
The windows from the old downstairs bedroom are now in the kitchen. “The salvage items we had, we tried to put in the parts of the house that are original,” Landay explains.
The walkway is made of bricks from the original foundation, the yard planted with bushes from the original lot, the fence constructed of pickets found stowed under the house before the move.
A new covered porch with a redwood deck runs along the back of the house, facing west toward a newly constructed detached garage and the pool. The difference between the front and back porches is in the details. The back railing is a regulation 40 inches high. Conversely, the front porch railing is low enough to rest one’s feet on and conducive to conversations with the neighbors across the street.
“Cheryl said she’s going to be buried in the backyard,” Landay jokes, when asked if they’d ever undertake a project of this magnitude again. “The truth is, I don’t know if we would have done it if we knew what it would entail. But now we know we can move anywhere and take this house with us.”
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Resource list
In their restoration, the Landays were forced to hunt down hinges, doorknobs, light fixtures and other vintage items. Some of the businesses they relied on:
Architectural Detail
2449 White St.
Pasadena
(626) 844-6670
Used building materials
Architectural Salvage
3 Mill St.
Exeter, NH 03833
(603) 773-5635
https://www.oldhousesalvage.com
Antique doors, fixtures, mantels
Crown City
1047 N. Allen Ave.
Pasadena
(626) 794-1188
(800) 950-1047
Hardware reproductions to match original dimensions
Antique Stoves
10826 Venice Blvd., #108
Culver City
(310) 287-1910
Luminaria
(800) 638-5619
Antique and reproduction lighting
fixtures, lightbulbs for old fixtures
Mortarless Building Supply
2707 Fletcher Drive
Los Angeles
(323) 663-3293
Vintage tile, old soap dishes, towel racks
Santa Fe Wrecking
1600 S. Santa Fe Ave.
Los Angeles
(213) 623-3119
Salvaged building materials and plumbing fixtures
Square Deal Plumbing Supplies
2302 E. Florence Ave.
Huntington Park
(323) 587-8291
Bathtub and toilet fixtures; retrofit old salvaged pieces