House of Design sparks speculation about former owner’s yearning for an elusive love

I don’t remember what Jay Gatsby’s house looked like, but I thought of Gatsby when I first saw this year’s Pasadena Showcase House of Design.

It is a white Mission Revival mansion in La Canada Flintridge, not Pasadena, and I am told that one of its early owners was a young bachelor who, like Gatsby, never obtained the woman of his dreams.

The house was built on speculation in 1916 by developer Frank Putnam Flint, a former U.S. senator who gave his name to Flintridge. Its first owner is known only as Briggs. No one knows who the architect was.

It stands on 10 acres in a horsy neighborhood on Berkshire Road. Its entrance is guarded by four white sphinxes. Palm trees tower above it.

As Showcase visitors will, I parked south of the Rose Bowl and was shuttled to the house. (Weekend visitors may park at the Jet Propulsion Lab.)

I suppose they will have hidden it before the Showcase opens to the public April 26 (through May 24), but I was astonished by the presence of a genuine World War I field artillery piece with two iron wheels and an eight-inch muzzle.

What fascinates me most about the Showcase houses, year after year, is the people who have lived in them. Some have been romantics, some idle rich, some social butterflies, some merely lonely.

Little is known about the most interesting owner of this house, except that he was a young man named William J. Connery, perhaps a film director. He bought it in 1925 from the family of a Scotsman, Alexander Dryborough, who had called it Dryborough Hall.

It is rumored that Connery’s four sisters, and the father of his Italian inamorata, kept him from marrying. I could imagine Connery languishing in his great house alone, yearning for his impossible love as Gatsby yearned for his. Whether it was he who acquired the field gun no one knows.

With less than four weeks to go, the house was in a frenzy of redecoration. Each room is assigned to a different interior designer, and the grounds are assigned to various landscapers.

The work was not far enough along yet for me to tell how it was going to look, but I can reveal that this year’s color is pink.

The enormous bare living room was warmed by its mahogany paneling. The door frames had been newly painted dark green.

“They’re going to be faux marble,” a Junior Phil assured me. I was glad that faux was back.

In the dining room an antique European crystal chandelier hung to within five feet of the floor. The rumor was that it had come from Versailles.

“When we told Bob Winter that,” one said, “he smiled and changed the subject.” (Robert Winter is the Occidental College history professor and architecture expert.)

We walked through a butler’s pantry as large as most kitchens and into a kitchen whose redwood beams had been painted yellow. The cooking island was covered with small tiles in colors that looked blue, pink and lavender to me, but which probably had decorator names.

What had been the breakfast room, facing north, was being made into a sitting room. “Winter said it faces the wrong way for a breakfast room.” The walls were pink wallpaper.

A solarium on the southwest corner had pink woodwork, and an old steam heater was painted pink. I couldn’t tell whether the wallpaper represented waves, birds or lips.

“I’m sure it’s birds,” someone said.

“I think it’s lips.’

“It’s mountains.”

In a bathroom the tub, toilet and lavatory looked old-fashioned but glowed like new porcelain. They had been sprayed with some “miracle” enamel and baked under infra-red.

Upstairs a room for “visiting bachelors” was being made to look masculine with brass-painted moldings and a gold dusted floor. “It’s going to have a gem collection,” someone said.

“This is going to be called the Twilight Retreat,” said one of my guides as we entered another upstairs room. “You’ll be able to sit in here and watch the sunset.”

It was a north view--the wrong direction for a sunset, I thought; but all is illusion.

In another upstairs room a young woman was standing on a ladder painting pastel flowers in a border around the ceiling. Someone was reminded of Michelangelo.

She was Lynne McDaniel. She said she was also going to paint a trompe l’oeil dog and cat in the kitchen and a full-size butler in the butler’s pantry.

The master bedroom had a pink wallpaper ceiling and a sky blue fireplace. The bathroom fixtures had been renewed with that miracle whip enamel. The walls and floors of the bathroom had been covered with pink and white tile.

A nearby guest room had been finished and furnished for a magazine layout. Half a dozen Impressionist paintings of the California scene had been commissioned for it. An enormous four-poster bed was made up with chintz curtains, a pink spread and nine enormous pillows.

“We all have urges to climb up there and try it, just once.”

Through a window we could see workmen giving a new swimming pool a plaster finish. It wasn’t pink. It was sage green.

We had lunch on the west patio. It was still in the stages of reconstruction. A marble caryatid had fallen on her face in a pile of dirt. Nearby a marble satyr was also down. There was an air of elegant decay about the scene.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”