Couple See Historic House as a ‘Labor of Love’

When Carol and Earl Fisher make such domestic decisions as whether to install solar heating in their Santa Monica home, they think first of the impact the change might have on their historic house.

Preserving the original beauty of the house is their top priority, they said.

Designed by distinguished Santa Monica architect John Byers in 1922, the adobe residence with two-foot-thick walls is listed in architectural guidebooks as one of the designs that helped establish his reputation as a proponent of the Spanish Colonial Revivalist style.

The home, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is cited as an example of meticulous restoration by officials at the Los Angeles Conservancy, an organization that works on behalf of historic preservation.

“You shouldn’t buy a historic property unless you are willing to maintain it in the way that is required,” said Earl Fisher, owner of a stock brokerage company in Los Angeles. He and his wife, an artist and third-year graduate student in architecture at UCLA, bought the house 3 1/2 years ago. They declined to disclose the purchase price but said they budget $5,000 annually for maintainence.

Fisher said that before they bought the Byers house, his closest contact with historic properties was as a singer performing in centuries-old European opera houses in the 1960s. He still sings with the Palisades Symphony Orchestra twice a year, he said.

Much of the structural restoration on the Byers house had been done by previous owners, Charles and Peggy Grace, Fisher said.

The four-bedroom home, with fireplaces and 12-foot-high beamed ceilings, looks much as it does in pictures taken in the 1920s, although the Fishers have furnished it with their own European antiques.

The residence, built around a central courtyard, was inspired by a home in Toledo, Spain, which was designed for the 16th-Century painter El Greco, Fisher said. He produced drawings of the El Greco home and photographs of his own to show that the designs are nearly identical.

A highlight of the Fisher home is a carved oak staircase with two-inch-thick solid wood steps.

The dining room has decades-old photographs, taken when the home was just about the only one on the bluffs overlooking Pacific Coast Highway at the northern end of Santa Monica. The Byers house predated the Marion Davies house, which was built on the beach in 1929 and named a city landmark in 1980.

Fisher said that in making decisions about modernizing the house, he and his wife have put aesthetic principles first.

For that reason, they decided against installing a cable television aerial atop the house and will not install solar panels to heat their swimming pool unless they can find a way to keep them hidden from view.

Maintenance of a historic home is costly, Fisher said.

For example, they have to paint the exterior every two years or so, he said, to protect the adobe from the weather. This alone costs about $10,000, he said.

But the Fishers said maintaining the home is a labor of love.

“You have to have a sensitivity to the house, a respect for its beauty and integrity.” he said. “It is expensive to maintain a home of this kind, but if you maintain it well, it is going to give you a great deal of satisfaction.”