There’s Always Room for Improvement
I drove out to Pasadena the other day for my annual preview of the Pasadena Showcase House of Design.
The house this year is a Monterey Colonial-style mansion, designed by the distinguished architect Reginald Johnson (who also designed the Santa Barbara Biltmore) and built in 1928 near the Huntington Gardens. It had 11 bedrooms for the original owners’ family of six and their nine servants.
The Showcase is a project of the Pasadena Junior Philharmonic Committee, which takes over a temporarily unoccupied house each year, then turns it over to a corps of interior and landscape designers, assigning one to each room and section of the garden. Flirting with a rather vague theme, these creative individualists redecorate and refurnish the entire estate, achieving a sometimes mischievous kind of harmony.
Each year the Junior Phils open the house to the public for four weeks. In 23 years, the committee has raised $2.5 million for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and other music groups.
I always inspect the house, deliberately, at the height of the renovation, when everything is in what appears to be hopeless chaos. This time there were just more than three weeks from opening day--April 17.
In the front yard workmen swarmed over what appeared to be a fountain in the making. Chunks of concrete and sacks of cement lay all about. Four pipes rising vertically from four pools hinted at its ultimate function. I doubted that it would be working by April 17.
A covey of Junior Phils met me at the door and showed me through the house, variously making comments along the way. In the entry hall stood a palette with six patches of color on it--green, blue, red, light beige, white and gray. “Those are our theme colors,” one of the Phils said. “Verdi, wedgwood, regency red, champagne, linen white and sterling. It took some time thinking up those names for green, blue, red, beige, white and gray.”
In theory, the use of those colors throughout the house was to produce a unity of interior design. Easier said than done.
Every room was in the throes of remodeling. Large cartons containing fixtures and appliances stood on the kitchen floor. In the dining room a woman in pink pants and a white T-shirt was pushing a vacuum cleaner back and forth. “This is the way we treat our working members,” said one of my escorts.
The room was being done over in Regency Red, with a frieze of hand-painted scrolls. The walls had once been covered by Western murals. They were long since gone without a trace.
The library gleamed with paneling in the original knotty pine. They had taken off the stain and varnish and were simply waxing the original wood. Sometimes the original is best.
The bookshelves were empty, but one of the women had a photograph of the library when the original owners were in residence. The books appeared to be large sets, as if the owner had called a bookstore and ordered four feet of red books and five feet of blue ones. Oh, well, a book is a book.
The library had once been served by a small bar and a large men’s room. The new designers had prudently switched premises, so that the bar now occupied the larger space.
The enormous living room overlooked patio, pool and tennis courts. Debris covered the patio. Paint cans, rubber gloves, brooms, tools, plastic containers. The pool was stained. Its coping had crumbled. A dismal slough covered the bottom. The pool was to be repaired and painted by April 17. I wasn’t betting on it.
Upstairs, off the master bedroom, the master’s bath was being redone in black: black fixtures, black walls, black floor. For the Black Knight?
In the woman’s bath a woman in blue jeans and a lavender T-shirt stood on a ladder applying white clouds to a blue ceiling with a sponge dipped in paint. In an adjoining sitting room a woman was applying a faux marble wainscoting.
“She sings while she works,” a Phil said.
“Yes,” the artist said. “Verdi. It helps the marble. Makes it more Italian.”
The little boy’s bedroom had been done over with black walls bearing a thunderbird design. A small square door in the wall opened into a laundry chute, which had a history.
Tuesday: A bad boy; a secret wine cellar.
