Chateau Dominates Surroundings : Ventura Boulevard Aristocrat
Crowning Chalk Hill in Woodland Hills, commanding the neighboring Ventura Freeway and the surrounding beaneries the way medieval castles commanded the king’s road and the serfs’ hovels, an aristocrat of a building is nearing completion.
But is there a place in the West San Fernando Valley in 1985 for an aristocrat?
Danny Howard thinks so.
Howard, a Tarzana real estate financier, is building The Chateau, an office building designed as a replica of a 196-year-old chateau in Saverne, France, that was once the palace of the prince-bishops of Strasbourg.
‘A Powerful Statement’
Along a stretch of burger stands and glass-walled banks, the building stands out like an ermine coat in a soup line.
“I believe in powerful statements,” Howard said. “I’d rather be a powerful statement in the neighborhood than get lost in the woodwork.”
Fat chance of that.
The building, 400 feet wide and 70 feet high, gleaming in wedding-cake white, is ringed with 100 columns topped with ornate capitals, and circled by bands of concrete lion heads and draped bunting. The columns, built at a cost of $700 each, support long, balustraded balconies.
It could be the Supreme Court building of Ruritania, one of literature’s imaginary kingdoms.
“I wanted to do something different from the thousands of black boxes that everybody else is building on Ventura Boulevard today,” Howard said.
“From a marketing standpoint, some people may not like to lease space in a building that’s so different, but those who do like it have few alternatives. This is the only building around here that looks like that.”
The 80,000-square-foot building is also being advertised for sale for $12.6 million, but Howard said he doesn’t really expect to sell it “and I don’t care if I don’t.”
The James R. Gary & Co. real estate agency contacted him and said they might be able to sell it, he said. He responded that, if anyone wanted to come up with $12.6 million, “I’d entertain the offer.” He would not say exactly how much the building cost, except that it was more than $10 million.
James Honore, an agent for Gary, said the agency “is considering a couple of offers” from buyers who “are highly impressed, architecture-wise.
‘It’s Unique’
“It’s unique--something on Ventura Boulevard you’d expect to see in Washington, D.C.,” Honore said.
Howard said he is proceeding with plans to lease the building, opening it for occupancy in June. Although no tenants have signed yet, he said, he is talking to many prospects, including “some attorneys, a title insurance company, a major national accounting firm, a savings and loan and a well-known Tarzana restaurant.”
A random sample of neighbors found most of them liked the building.
“It’s great,” commented Dick Johnson of Canoga Park, bartender at the neighboring Bonkers restaurant. “It’s different, and it’ll give the neighborhood a little class.”
“It’ll be a landmark,” said Gene Gidcumb, manager of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Assembly Hall across the street, who lives on the grounds. “Anyone who’s looking for the Assembly Hall, I’ll just tell them to look for that thing. They’ll never miss it.”
Joyce Babcock of Westlake Village, a secretary at the Assembly Hall, differed. “It’s so huge and overwhelming that it just dominates everything around here,” she said. “It’s an architecture we’re not used to seeing in Southern California.”
Jack Wurster, a Woodland Hills builder who can see The Chateau from his home, commented, “Dennis Platt is the only man in California who could build a thing like that. Most builders couldn’t figure out what it would cost so they could come up with a realistic bid.”
Platt, who built the columns and distinctive facade, is a Canoga Park contractor who specializes in unusual designs. His headquarters is a bright blue Victorian gingerbread mansion at Sherman Way and Corbin Avenue.
Paul Gleye, a Pasadena city planner and president of the Southern California chapter of the Society of Architecture Historians, said The Chateau suffers because of its location.
“It’s awfully flat,” he said of the building, calling the wings too shallow for the width of the structure. In fact, the structure had to be squeezed into a narrow lot between the boulevard and the freeway.
‘Setting Very Important’
“A characteristic of the historic chateau was that the setting was very important. They were set among gardens and greenery, and you first viewed the chateau from some distance away, along an axis, a formal approach like a tree-lined drive.
“This building is sited along an auto street and it suddenly looms at you, without time to contemplate it as you approach.
“What we have here is not a convincing historic chateau, but maybe it doesn’t need to be. It’s not a chateau after all, but a Southern California office building in the 20th Century that takes on a new architectural character of its own, and it should be judged on its merits.
“I don’t know what to think yet. I’m reserving judgment until I see it finished.”
