Secret Garden Lies Just Few Magical Steps Up to Semi-Arid Wonderland
Passing through the heavy wooden gates allowing access to Richard Mouck’s house is something like discovering the key to the mythic Secret Garden of the popular children’s tale. Beyond a grape bower and up a flight of steep stone steps is a somewhat magical house and garden with the feeling of being almost taboo.
Mouck--an antique dealer, collector and sometime entrepreneur--has worked hard to create a private enclave in and around his six-bedroom Eagle Rock home. This October, his labor was rewarded with recognition. His garden took first place in a Water Conservation Gardens Contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The annual contest recognizes Los Angeles gardens that use a minimum amount of water.
Other Attractions
The garden is not the half of it. There is also a black and white Art Deco-style kitchen, a miniature movie theater that is a replica of the Hollywood film palaces of the 1920s, a living room decorated with more than $50,000 worth of mission-style furnishings, a bathroom with fixtures culled from a Pullman train, three jukeboxes, a player piano and countless other finds in every cranny and behind every door.
In the midst of it all is Mouck, gleefully opening a 250-pound oak door salvaged from a fire-ravaged church and showing off the fantasy home he has created in 15 years from a house once in disrepair.
“I am trying to create a place that reminds me of California in its heyday,” Mouck said. “It just seems to me there was more of a purity. There was less steel and glass and more stucco and tile back then. Don’t you agree?”
The prize Mouck won this fall--$1,000 and first place in one category of the DWP-sponsored contest--rewards frugality. But the rest of Mouck’s home is an unabashed celebration of flamboyance.
“The good life, the California good life. They don’t create this kind of thing anymore,” Mouck said. “It’s the romantic ‘20s, and I am definitely a romantic.”
Good life it is, with an old sign in the kitchen reading “Cocktail Lounge” lighting racks of liquor bottles, crystal pendants from old chandeliers and a vintage refrigerator. In the living room at least 10 clocks announce the hour and in one bathroom the floor is made of white onyx from Pakistan.
While the scope and style of Mouck’s collection is lavish, his home is also suffused with a sense of spirituality. Hundreds of crosses and icons everywhere and rosary beads are draped over statues of Jesus Christ. Buddhist statues seem to look down somberly on Indian headdresses. Mouck said he considers himself religious. He belongs to no established religion but speaks almost constantly of God and spirit.
“I believe in God, and I am constantly searching for the true spirituality of the self,” Mouck said. “The quest, the quest is for spiritual enlightenment, whether it’s in the beauty of nature or the beauty of London. There’s something to see in this world. We can’t see it all, but we just have to enjoy as much of it as we can.”
The garden Mouck has created is a 65-by-90-foot formal plot laid out in a cruciform pattern with a fountain at the intersection of two paths. Planted with oleander, yucca, crepe myrtle and cactus, it lies next to a patio, hot tub and tower Mouck designed and built.
Recognized by DWP
The garden was among 13 recognized by the DWP for its compatibility with Southern California’s semi-arid climate and its minimal use of water. The contest criteria rewarded plant selection, design and planning in addition to water conservation.
Since Mouck bought the 1928 Mission-style home, he has spent more than $100,000 on improvements, he said. A bargain hunter, he borrowed money to buy the property for $24,000 in 1969 and has continued to borrow and scrimp to restore it since.
“I just squirreled away enough that I was able to end up with lots of things,” Mouck said. “I act on the theory that you can’t take it with you so why wait till you’re too old or too decrepit to enjoy your own environment. Why not enjoy it now?”
Mouck is an energetic man of 46 who seems to have no trouble enjoying his home. A Southern California native who never finished college, he worked for years in the public relations office at the Los Angeles Music Center, he said, until he gave up the 9-to-5 routine for a more adventurous life.
“I decided I was going to do it on my own,” Mouck said. “I wanted to struggle and create what you see here today.”
Displaying a Wurlitzer player piano, he broke into song as the piano played by itself. After finishing the verse, he told of its acquisition.
“I bought this for $400 20 years ago from a guy who wanted to buy a stereo,” he said. “His wife was sick of this thing. But I never tire of it. It’s like getting a concert in your own home.”
