The Surf and The Tides are landlocked in the heart of arid Sepulveda. Green Court is painted brown. : No Room for Reality in Apartment Name Game

The Villa Madrid is a massive apartment house of sun-washed stucco and red-tile roofs. Colored flags blow gaily in the breeze above heavy wooden doors that lead into the building. A carved Spanish chest dominates one wall of the apartment’s tiled entryway and earthen shrubbery pots sit in the corners. One can almost hear flamenco music in the distance.

But life at the Villa Madrid is not what the name, or the facade, implies.

“The most Spanish thing about the Villa Madrid is the El Salvadoran gardener,” said Rob Nelson, a resident at the apartment house for more than a year. “This place doesn’t remind me of Spain at all.”

Mary Ellen Kelly, the manager of the Villa Madrid since 1974, confirmed that living at the Villa is not even remotely like living in Madrid.

sh ‘No Significance’

“I don’t have the least idea where they got the name. There’s no significance to it.”

The Villa Madrid is but a single drop in a sea of apartment houses with names that have little or nothing to do with what the buildings themselves are like. At least the Villa looks Spanish. Among the estimated 25,000 apartment buildings in the San Fernando Valley are far more grievous misnomers.

The Cahuenga Towers in North Hollywood are only three stories high. There is no fountain in the Fountain Apartments in Van Nuys. Down Sepulveda Boulevard a ways, the Fantasie hardly looks like one. The Surf and The Tides are landlocked in the heart of arid Sepulveda. Green Court is painted brown.

There are no federal guidelines governing the names of apartment houses. There are no municipal laws to protect consumers from misleading monikers. So, who is responsible for naming a Thousand Oaks building the Biltmore-Pavilion? The apartment house owners, that’s who. And they are free to name at will.

“There is a myriad of ways people name buildings, or it could be pulled out of a hat,” said Gary Holme, executive vice president of the Beaumont Co., which manages 6,000 rental units in the Valley.

“A lot of it is ego related,” he said. “We had a client whose name was Green and every one of his buildings had the word verde (Spanish for green) in the name. In some cases, owners will use their family name. Those are usually small builders. The large developers use the architectural design.”

sh Adding an Exotic Flavor

Traditionally, apartment house names have been chosen to add an exotic flavor to the building or give it a touch of class, Holme said. The Wentworth House harkens back to merry old England. It’s really in Glendale.

“A name implies something, an identity or an image,” Holme said.

That image is a historical one at The Balboa House and El Cortes in Northridge. Wood plaques bearing likenesses of the Spanish explorers grace the fronts of the adjoining buildings. Do residents there feel a certain sense of adventure from this connection with the past?

“Hey listen, I’ve got too many problems in my life. I just got off a divorce, a bankruptcy in my business. I don’t want to talk about it,” said one resident, who wore a Greek fisherman’s cap and refused to give his name.

Marvin Eleid, who has lived in The Balboa House three years, hadn’t given the name much thought either.

“I think it’s quiet here, that’s all,” Eleid, 22, said.

Indeed, the mood inside both apartment buildings was deathly still. No one walked the halls. All the doors were shut. Several doorbells went unanswered. Perhaps all the tenants were out on the high seas.

Conflicting Images

The mere mention of the Kimberly Woods apartments in Canoga Park evokes a far different image--the smell of pine and cool, moist forest air. The apartments themselves are blockish, brown structures with scattered bushes, a sculpted hedge here and there, small, manicured strips of lawn and exactly seven trees along the front of the building. The trees aren’t much. They have been pruned drastically and carry few branches or leaves.

The Kimberly Woods may well have been named for the flora and fauna it displaced.

“Let’s see,” said resident Connie Downing, 29, as she walked toward the middle of the complex. “There are some trees. It’s kind of like the woods. Maybe their daughter’s name was Kimberly.”

Down the block is Tara Woods. There are no more “woods” at Tara Woods than there are at Kimberly Woods. There are also no white sculpted pillars, no graceful weeping willows. And the early-Maginot Line architecture hardly conjures up visions of Tara, the Southern mansion in “Gone With The Wind.”

Most of the residents just laugh and shake their heads when the connection is mentioned.

“I’ve never even seen that movie,” said one, a bus driver, as she rushed off to work.

Exotic building names may be fading into the past. Holme said more and more new buildings aren’t being named at all. Developers don’t want to limit the appeal of the building by labeling it with an image, he said. Such buildings simply sport the address written boldly across the front.

If this is true, the apartment houses of the future will be known by numbers, instead of names. To the people in the apartment building business, names are meaningless anyway.

“People don’t care about the name,” said Kelly, of the Villa Madrid. “They look at the price. That’s the bottom line.”

“I think the biggest thing people look for is how the building looks, the price, how clean it is and if it’s noisy,” Helen Woods, manager of The Surf, agreed. “I think the name is the last thing on the list.”

At The Perigee, in Chatsworth, the owners seem to have come full swing against self-aggrandizing titles. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines “perigee” as: “the point nearest to the earth in the orbit of the moon or of a man-made satellite” or, as more commonly used, “the lowest point.”