Duplications of Grandeur : Continental Styles Revived in a Boom of Private Estates
At first he was diffident, not wanting, he said, to draw unnecessary attention to his hearth-to-be.
But he soon warmed to his new role as lord of an emerging English country estate which, anyway, can already be seen for miles around, rising on a prominent hill in Chatsworth.
So, shaking off his concern, the manor’s owner and builder, semiretired Northridge lawyer Lawrence Weinreb, bounded down the framing of a spiral staircase to lead his first public tour.
It began in the 3,200-square-foot guest house, then moved on to his 12,500-square-foot masterpiece.
With boyish pride, Weinreb pointed out his favorite features, outlined only in 2-by-4s: the domed piano room, the step-down English pub, the eight-car garage, the bathtub with a picture-window view of the Valley and, his favorite, the inglenook.
The idea for the inglenook, an arched enclosure around a fireplace, came from a historical article in Architectural Digest, Weinreb said. In past centuries, he said, it was used in English homes to retain the fireplace heat.
A Nook of Distinction
In Weinreb’s house, its function would be mostly to provide distinction--that one quality most in evidence in half a dozen houses like Weinreb’s recently springing up in a private, gated northwest Valley community called Monteria Estates.
Though not the largest, Weinreb’s house, by virtue of its prominent position, is certainly the most conspicuous example of the changes being wrought by a building boom in one of the Valley’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
Hidden away at the north end of Winnetka Avenue between Devonshire Street and the Simi Valley Freeway, the 285-acre community has long retained the flavor of its beginnings as a postwar retreat for film industry people.
Legend has it that Veronica Lake, actor Dan Dailey and Sabu, the Elephant Boy, were among those who owned spacious, yet modest, Spanish adobes and ranch houses perfectly suited to the rolling, grassy foothills and the rock-strewn horizon of the Santa Susana Mountains.
But today, Monteria Estates is going Continental. Indigenous adobes are being overshadowed, in some cases simply torn down and replaced, by massive European mimics, a Country English here, a French Provincial there, an Italian villa or two in between.
36 Homes in Community
Seven such homes have been completed in the past year or are under construction in the 36-home community.
Some were built for profit. A 9,000-square-foot French country house built by developers Al and Murray Weintraub, for example, is on sale for $2.2 million. Murray Weintraub said the brothers plan to start two more houses once the first sells, and will probably raze the smaller Spanish adobe that was once at the center of the lot they subdivided.
Other homes have been built by people like Weinreb, who have acquired wealth without notoriety and are simply trying to enjoy it.
Weinreb said he isn’t sure what led him to build a house four times bigger than the one he lives in now.
“Where I live now is satisfactory for me,” he said. “I don’t even want a house that size. But I kind of got trapped into it with the magnitude of the property. The property is so spectacular and the views are so great that we had to design a house that was going to take advantage of all that.”
He said he bought the land nine years ago, when there were no English manors in the area, and had been flirting ever since with the idea of building one for his English wife.
“We always talked about a dream house and an English country manor and we never thought we’d do it,” Weinreb said.
Suddenly, he has become part of a trend.
The largest and most ostentatious example was commissioned by a Valley podiatrist who declined to discuss his home, saying he feared publicity might attract danger to his family.
Huge Spired Towers
The 14,000-square-foot, red-brick structure has been dubbed Firestone Castle after its architect, Ron Firestone, who designed several homes in the community. Its lavish appointments include massive spired towers, tall beveled-glass windows and a cobblestone driveway that forks around a freshly planted tree.
Firestone calls the effect “English Country Estate,” but admits that nothing about it is architecturally pure.
“It’s really a mixture of almost everything European,” he said. “All the architectural styles have been so bastardized that nothing is really true anymore.”
The style isn’t meant to say anything new architecturally. But, according to Robert Winter, an Occidental College history professor and author of “A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California,” it does place the northwest Valley community on par in taste with other centers of wealth such as Beverly Hills, where mock Mt. Vernons and Monticellos are popping up.
Winter characterizes the trend as a post-modernist escape from the intellectual bent of 20th-Century architecture. It is similar, he said, to the Victorian revival of the 1920s, reflecting “the point of view that people are tired of the discipline of modern architecture and they never did like it.”
Winter doesn’t scorn the 1980s revival, although he said it lacks the detail and stylistic integrity that makes ‘20s-era Victorians so prized today.
“Somehow, I kind of like it,” he said “It’s such bad taste. It reminds me of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was attending a burlesque show, which he liked very much, and said, ‘Thank God for the low American taste.’ That sort of describes it.”
An End to Open Space
For Winter, the dominant European countryside motif represents the conspicuous consumption of a vanishing resource--open space.
“That is the last remnant in the Valley of what everybody was seeking in going out there in the first place--the closeness with nature,” Winter said. “The rich are moving into country places as the country places are disappearing.”
Residents of Monteria Estates would agree. For them, the rural atmosphere of Chatsworth is the quality that makes it better than Beverly Hills.
“We feel out in the country,” said Menina Gamper, wife of former European boxing champion Reinhold Gamper.
Building a Ballroom
Several years ago, the Gampers moved from another home in Chatsworth into what Menina Gamper described as a barn-style house in Monteria Estates. They converted it into an ornate Italian villa to which they are adding a ballroom.
In spite of the luxury in which she lives, Menina Gamper still raises olives and figs as a hobby, and cures them in her kitchen.
Ray Mulokas, an architect who recently moved into an Italian-style villa that he built, also regards the rural surrounding as his prime asset.
“The nice thing is the serenity and the quietness and being close to the city,” Mulokas said.
Ironically, the building boom of which Mulokas is a part appears to be chipping away at that rural serenity.
Although precise numbers are disputed, residents expect to see many more mansions rise.
The community is divided into 44 parcels that vary in size from one acre to more than 10 acres.
City zoning laws allow one house for every two acres, but crowding of that kind is considered unlikely because of the area’s difficult terrain and the fact that many houses have been built on parcels larger than two acres.
30 New Homes Possible
Still, several large parcels are now on sale for subdivision. One resident estimates that as many as 30 more homes can be built.
In another community, that might be viewed as a threat. Not in Monteria Estates, where the laissez-faire philosophy thrives among a diverse collection of property owners. They include entertainment figures such as actor Chad Everett, newscaster Christine Lund and comedian Redd Foxx. There are also doctors, lawyers and businessmen, among them grocery store owner Bernard Gelson and Sirjang Lal Tandon, founder of a Chatsworth company that manufactures computer disk drives.
To a large extent, they govern their own civic affairs through the Monteria Estates Assn., which maintains the community’s private road system and provides security. A second association maintains a private, man-made lake.
Although land use is technically regulated by the City of Los Angeles, residents traditionally settle their own differences through a process that Everett, a longtime resident, described as “a good cracker-barrel democracy.”
Tolerance of Pretensions
Generally, residents take pride in a freewheeling, entrepreneurial spirit that tolerates one man’s English pretensions alongside another’s vicuna farm.
“If any of those people wanted to live in a very controlled environment, they would be moving into different parts of the Valley,” said Mulokas, who is president of the association. He contrasted Monteria Estates’ easygoing look to the uniform, genteel, thoroughbred-farm style of Hidden Valley.
“There are no architectural restrictions,” Mulokas said of Monteria. “That’s why you get the variety.”
Although Mulokas speaks from the viewpoint of a newcomer, Everett said he, too, welcomes the construction, believing it will strengthen the resistance to the one threat that is universally feared in Monteria Estates. That is the recurring efforts of outside agencies to extend public streets into the area.
Everett still recalls with a shiver the time in the mid-1970s when residents feared a city plan to run Chatsworth Street through their enclave.
“We felt threatened,” Everett said. “I could just see the whole thing being zoned for lots. I would have been drooling as a developer.”
Filmed the Neighborhood
Everett said his wife, Shelby, and two other women from the neighborhood attached a camera to a car and drove around, film rolling, to document the rural splendor that would be ruined by a road.
“We went down to the City Council chambers and we showed them the film,” Everett said. “When they saw that those plans would really mess up a beautiful area, they relented and found another way of doing things.”
A new crisis arose in 1982, when the California Department of Transportation ran the Simi Valley Freeway past the northern border of Monteria Estates, complete with an overpass, on-ramp and off-ramp at Winnetka Avenue. The plan was to extend Winnetka through Monteria Estates as a public street.
Residents of Monteria Estates have apparently fought off that proposal, too, having gained the strong backing of West Valley Councilman Hal Bernson. But the fear lingers.
And Everett doesn’t see how a few more multimillion-dollar homes can hurt the cause.
“I think the density, more or less, is probably going a long way toward securing the solidarity of the area,” he said.
And in time, it may even look authentic.
“It’s typical California,” Winter said. “You do some plantings and in a few years it looks like it’s been there forever.”
