A new-old look for a grand lady of Long Beach

Historian Stan Poe squinted upward at the castle-like Villa Riviera on Wednesday, pointing out what’s been lost and what’s about to be restored to the 1929 Long Beach landmark.

“The interior has been altered considerably,” said Poe, a member of the Long Beach Cultural Heritage Commission, who should know: He was given the Villa’s original brocade ballroom drapes by someone who bought them decades ago.

According to Poe and other research, silent movie actress Norma Talmadge and her studio boss husband bought the building in 1937, and she did her share of historically regrettable decorating.

But “she didn’t do too much to the outside,” Poe said of the 16-story tower.

Now the Villa’s 132 homeowners are about to give the facade a $4-million face-lift.

Starting this month, the Villa will undergo a yearlong overhaul that will return the exterior to its original splendor.

“You’re going to drive by it and say, ‘Wow,’ ” said Ann Dresselhaus, spokeswoman for Spectra Co., which will oversee the project and has worked on the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood and the Gamble House in Pasadena.

Six of the original 30 gargoyles, long missing and possibly chiseled down to provide better ocean views from the penthouse units, will be replaced. The walls of cement plaster will have 14 layers of old paint, some of it lead-based, removed in an exhaustive process that requires air-quality testing, said Villa homeowner association President Kevin McGuan.

Three new shades of paint will be exactly the same as the 1929 originals, which subtly graduated from dark to lighter hues of a yellowish gray meant to resemble stone, according to Martin Eli Weil, a historical architect working on the project.

It was the city’s order to seal or replace peeling lead-based paint, as required by a 2003 state law, that led homeowners to opt for doing the job right rather than facing -- because of the sun and marine exposure -- an expensive repainting in just a few short years.

At a cost of about $1.5 million, the painting is the most laborious and expensive part of the project, said McGuan, a Merrill Lynch executive. He said 90% of the members supported the restoration expenditures, which will be divided based on each unit’s square footage.

That can vary dramatically. Some residences are studios of 800 square feet, while others are much larger as a result of units being combined. The average cost, board members said, will be about $30,000, to be paid in 14 monthly installments.

“I see it as an investment,” said Greg Perrault, the board’s treasurer and a veterinarian who owns Cats & Dogs on Redondo Avenue. He shares his corner unit with a 130-pound English mastiff named Hamster and a pug named Stanley, whom he walks on a round patch of lawn 11 stories below.

“I downsized to move here from historic Carroll Park. It afforded me the ability to buy my practice.” The Villa has “been around before me; it will be around after me. So [I] feel a part of something, a part of history.”

As he glances out his wall of windows, his view is of the ocean from Ocean Boulevard and Alamitos Avenue, where the boundary ran between the Spanish land grants of Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos.

Several floors below is the McGuan residence, where he said silent movie legend Charlie Chaplin stayed or lived. Other historians had not heard that, but Chaplin did work with Balboa Studios of Long Beach before the Villa was built and with Talmadge.

What is not disputed is the architectural significance of the building.

Architect Richard D. King designed the structure based on 16th century French chateaux, said Poe and resident Pete Smay, who has extensively researched the Villa’s history and interviewed King’s children. Smay, who works in computer operations for Verizon, fell in love with the building 10 years ago, when he bought his studio unit that featured one of the few bathrooms with original everything.

He and other historians say that, after Los Angeles City Hall, the Villa was the tallest building in Southern California well into the 1950s. The Villa was among the first own-your-own co-operatives in the West.

Next door to the private Pacific Coast Club, flushed then with oil barons and land speculators after crude was struck big in nearby Signal Hill, the Villa Riviera was a posh residence whose units were fully and luxuriously furnished, right down to silver service and linens.

For decades, the building offered a complete ocean view south and west, where a grassy Victory Park and Victorian homes spread down Ocean Avenue about fives miles to the Los Angeles River.

“It is here, at the foot of Alamitos Avenue, on the most favored site on all picturesque Ocean Boulevard, that Villa Riviera, the finest and most modern of all California’s resident-owned apartment hotels, will soon add its towering campanile to the Long Beach skyline,” gushed the building’s 1929 brochure. “Like its palatial neighbor on the east, the Pacific Coast Club, Villa Riviera will be one of the most magnificent architectural examples in Southern California, if not in all America.”

But the Depression soon forced the conversion of the building into a hotel, and during World War II, it was used as elegant housing for admirals serving at the nearby naval station. The Villa’s 60-foot-tall tower above the copper roof was used as a Navy lookout post, Poe said.

In 1955, the building was returned to privately owned units. In 1996, it made the national historic registry. In 1989, homeowners forked out $2.5 million to have the structure seismically retrofitted, although it had survived the 1933 Long Beach earthquake with but a few plaster cracks, historians say.

Now, the building will be covered with scaffolding as the paint goes on and the lead gets removed, McGuan said.

Heidi Maerker, president of Herald Publications, which owns the El Segundo Herald, Inglewood News, Lawndale Tribune and Hawthorne Press Tribune, said she has never regretted moving into the building 20 years ago and embraces the price of restoring it.

“We are all proud to live here,” she said. “The cost is worth it.”

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nancy.wride@latimes.com