Neighbors Chafe as House Rises From Ashes

The home on the Studio City hillside looks like a gaily colored circus tent when the breeze sends its canvas roof billowing.

But there’s nothing festive about what’s underneath the huge orange tarp. It hides the charred remains of Chadyeane Ivans’ 47-year-old dream house.

The problem is, it doesn’t hide it well enough, according to neighbors along Fredonia Drive who have been waiting since Nov. 11 for repairs to be made to Ivans’ fire-gutted dwelling.

A toddler visiting the home that day started the blaze that raced through the two-story home, destroying artwork, decorative tile and unusual Italian marble wall coverings. Fire officials estimated the damage at $200,000.

Ivans and her late husband, George, had slowly built the house by hand after moving to the hillside in 1939.

May Take Another 2 Years

Now 75, Ivans is ready to do it all over again with the help of her son, who lived in the house until the fire and now lives nearby. To the dismay of neighbors, Ivans predicts that the do-it-yourself renovation will take another two years.

“I went out shopping for wooden beams yesterday,” she said Thursday. “The best price I could find was $60.13 apiece. We ordered 13 of them.”

The new rafters will be heavy-duty, just like the rest of the house designed by George Ivans, who was a movie studio artist.

“When he was younger, my husband built bridges in China for the English government,” she said. “He built this house with big 4-by-4s, not 2-by-4s like other houses have. You should have seen the foundation he put in. People said it could have held up City Hall.

“We both worked so hard in that place. The fire was absolutely devastating. It took me a long time before I even wanted to go inside and look at the damage.”

Tired of the View

Neighbors say that, when the breeze lifts the tarps, they get a good view of the damage. They say they are tired of looking at the burned house and its brightly colored covering.

“I built a patio cover specifically to hide the burned-out hulk and the tarps,” said Geoff Sorensen, who lives down the hill. “I don’t think they’re ever going to get it rebuilt. They own several other houses on this hill. If they sold one of them, they could, boom, fix it up right away.”

The orange-topped house is visible to hundreds of other residents in the expensive Studio City neighborhood and to passers-by on the nearby Hollywood Freeway. Occupants of high-rise office and hotel buildings in Universal City also look down on it.

“You’d think that in that neighborhood they’d get it cleaned up fast,” said lawyer Charles H. Paul, who watched the November fire from his 28th-floor Universal City office.

No Time Limit for Repairs

“It was just little puffs of smoke when I first saw it. The fire trucks were going up one street and down another trying to get to it. I was surprised anything was left of the house.”

A Los Angeles city building and safety official said Thursday that there is no time limit for repairs to a fire-damaged house “as long as work keeps progressing.” Building permits for such projects expire in two years, but can be renewed.

Chadyeane Ivans said neighbors will see an improvement when the orange tarp is replaced by a temporary roof. She doesn’t know when that will be, but plywood is stacked on a patio, ready to fill the gaps.

“What can they say?” she said of the critics. “We’re not going to bulldoze our house, that’s for sure.”