‘Sod Father’ Digs Life Under Lawn
Kenneth Cowans knew exactly what to do when the house next door caught fire and sent flaming wood shingles raining down on his Encino home.
He climbed onto his roof and turned on his lawn sprinklers.
Cowans lives in what is believed to be the San Fernando Valley’s only grass-roofed home. Despite the intensity of his neighbor’s $750,000 blaze Monday night, not one blade on his house was scorched.
Chalk up another testimonial to the tenacity of crabgrass.
Cowans and his wife, JoAnn, have been growing grass on their roof since 1979. They water their house twice a day and mow it every other week.
“We’ve always been sort of kooky,” Cowans, 54, said Wednesday.
Restoration Project
Although the Cowans joke about it now, there was a serious side to their decision to pile 70 tons of dirt on top of their three-bedroom Greenleaf Street residence. The planting was part of a restoration project.
The house was built in 1938 as a sod-roofed Norwegian-style bachelor pad for comedian Ben Blue, poker-faced master of mime who appeared in films and owned a Santa Monica supper club. The cottage was enlarged a few years later when Blue married. But, because of wartime shortages, a cheaper, conventional roof replaced the grass one.
When the Cowans purchased the home from its third owner 14 years ago, they discovered paintings and photographs showing its original grass roof and ornate Norwegian flower paintings, known as rosemal a ng , inside the house.
Their first step was to restore the thousands of fading flowers painted for Blue on walls, fireplaces and open-beamed ceilings.
“The first painters we had finally just freaked out. They told us when they left that they just had to paint something white for a while,” said JoAnn Cowans, an artist.
Then came the outside. After a lengthy search, the Cowans found a roofer willing to install grass.
“It was a mind-boggler,” the roofing contractor, C. John Thomas of Pasadena, recalled Wednesday. “I had mixed feelings about it.”
Thomas experimented with waterproofing material that would hold up to the sod. He settled on asbestos sheeting, then bolted a network of drain pipes and a sprinkler system to the top.
After that, three inches of dirt were spread over the 3,500-square-foot roof, topped with an inch-thick layer of pre-grown bluegrass sod.
Everyone held his breath when the sprinklers were first turned on.
Happily, the drains didn’t clog, the dirt and grass didn’t wash off.
The roof requires constant maintenance.
Periodic leaks occur when crabgrass roots wiggle through the asbestos and wooden ceiling boards, the couple says. Sprinklers break, drains fill up and birds spread weed seeds on top of the house.
After 10 years, crabgrass has all but taken over the roof. Thomas’ roofers are dispatched every three months or so to repair leaks and erosion.
‘Ran Out in Time’
“One morning, Ken looked up from breakfast and saw a gardener carrying a pickax up the ladder,” JoAnn Cowans said. “He ran out in time to stop him from chopping through the roof.”
Cowans, who owns a commercial diving equipment company, said he is sometimes called the “Sod Father” since he put on the roof for $15,000 eight years ago, an event accompanied by considerable publicity.
Passers-by and busloads of tourists still stop sometimes to gawk at the house, particularly when gardeners or the Cowans’ 18-year-old son, Willy, trim the lawn with a lightweight electric mower.
Despite the green, green grass of home, Kenneth Cowans has kept a down-to-earth view of life underground.
“I detest gardening,” he said.
