HOME is Where The ART Is : New Decorative Center Run by ‘Evangelist for Good Taste’
Having shed his sport coat, Gephard Durenberger stood in the middle of the exhibit room with his hands on his hips and a pleased-as-punch grin on his face.
A truckload of 17th- and 18th-Century English and French antiques had just been unloaded at the new Center for the Study of Decorative Arts in San Juan Capistrano and volunteer Patricia Wheeler was asking center director Durenberger what he thought of placing a hanging cupboard in a corner of the room devoted to early English-country antiques and already filling with such treasures as a collection of 18th-Century pewter and porcelain.
“Why not? I’d love it,” Durenberger said with characteristic enthusiasm, moving into the next room where volunteer Suzanne Cecil was setting up an exhibit devoted to formal English drawing-room furniture.
“I think this is great,” exclaimed Durenberger, grinning mischievously: “See what talent we have here? And these women all charge at least $100 an hour. And look at the quality! People in the East think we (Californians) all have Melmac and junk.”
The antiques for the exhibits that Wheeler and Cecil were helping to set up are on loan from 20 California collectors for the center’s inaugural exhibition, “California Style: Collectors and Collections.” The exhibition, which features two period room settings and five vignettes, opens Tuesday and will run through May 6.
The choice of spotlighting California collections is a fitting one for the new study center, the first of its kind on the West Coast and one that is already being compared to Cooper-Hewitt, the nationally acclaimed decorative arts museum and school in New York.
While Cooper-Hewitt is in an old private mansion, the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts is housed in a uniquely California setting: A compound of early California-style buildings that enclose a tree-shaded patio and fountain.
The rough-hewn, homey atmosphere of the center is an ideal environment for the study of the decorative arts, a term which, as Durenberger explains, “is synonymous with ‘home.’ ”
“It’s everything we deal with in our everyday life--furniture, china, textiles, ceramics, silver--including the house and the garden it sits in,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we’re about at the study center: To offer study collections and lectures and classes whereby everyone--and we mean everybody--will have an opportunity to understand better the way we lived in the past and how we can apply those lessons to today and, hopefully, for our future generations.”
Located next to the architecturally acclaimed San Juan Capistrano Regional Library on Camino Capistrano, the nonprofit study center includes a fireside reading room and study loft stocked with books and magazines on the decorative arts.
The center is the culmination of 5 years of cultural activities staged at the library by its parent organization, Libros y Artes, a cultural support group for which Durenberger, a longtime Capistrano antique dealer, serves as president.
The study center is also a culmination of sorts for the 52-year-old Durenberger, a summation of both his professional and personal growth since arriving in Orange County from the Midwest in the late 1950s and landing a job as an apprentice with the respected antiquarian Carl Yeakel of Laguna Beach.
Durenberger not only has deeded the quarter-acre study center property to the city--the 4,000 square feet of exhibit space formerly housed his antique shop, which has been moved down the street--but he has been a guiding light in San Juan Capistrano’s growing emergence as a cosmopolitan cultural oasis.
Since he joined a group of citizens protesting the proposed installation of a Kentucky Fried Chicken “bucket in the sky” in 1969, Durenberger has devoted a good portion of his time to civic activities. He served as founding president of San Juan Beautiful, president of the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society and the south county’s representative on the Orange County Historical Commission.
But it is for the Durenberger Series, a series of study tours abroad and lectures on architecture and the decorative arts held at Folie Gep, the Gothic guest house on the grounds of his showcase Capistrano Beach home, that Durenberger sealed his reputation for being what one admirer described as an “evangelist for good taste.”
A vibrant personality with boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm, Durenberger is indeed a man of impeccable taste. But “Gep,” as his legion of friends call him, remains as unpretentious as his Midwestern roots. He would just as soon be out digging weeds in his back yard or donning the pair of old corduroy pants and work shoes that he brought with him to the center to help set up the exhibition.
Described by a magazine writer several years ago as having almost “movie-star-ish good looks,” the tall, dark-haired Durenberger has a playful, frequently self-deprecating sense of humor. That is evident when, asked his age, he had to think twice and then good-naturedly added: “I’m an aging, balding, middle-aged gent.”
Art Birtcher, a general partner of Birtcher, the Laguna Niguel-based real estate development company who is serving on the center’s board of trustees, views the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts as something that will become “a very important portion of the social fabric of not only Orange County but entire Southern California.”
A longtime friend of Durenberger’s, Birtcher added: “Gep has brought the enthusiasm and the concept, with the city, into being and will be the heartbeat of the center’s future.”
San Juan Capistrano City Manager Stephen B. Julian, who has worked with Durenberger on plans for the center, agrees.
“It’s interesting,” he said. “If I had to say something about Gep and where this thing is going, I’d have to say that in Japan they treat artists and (creative) people as sort of national treasures. In that sense, Mr. Durenberger is one of our treasures.”
As for Durenberger, he commends the city for having had the foresight to initiate the idea of Libros y Artes.
“But neither the city nor I could have foreseen it would blossom into a proper study center and museum,” he said. “And I think the city fathers were pleasantly surprised not only by the (support of the) design community but the general public. It’s that mix of the design community, the city fathers and the general public that made it sing.”
And now that the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts has become a reality, Durenberger himself is downright lyrical.
“I’m over the moon!” he exclaimed, standing amid the pre-opening confusion and clutter. With a grin, he added: “If I weren’t so tired, I’d really be enjoying it.”
Durenberger’s Capistrano Beach home has been featured in Town and Country magazine, the World of Interiors, House and Garden (twice) and, in April, it will appear on the cover of House Beautiful. In fact, his home has appeared in so many magazines and newspapers that Durenberger wryly remarks, “I feel like a public stripper.”
Despite his impressively appointed surroundings, Durenberger describes his home as “humble” and insists that he is not a man “of means.” “No, I’m not,” he says, “it’s a sham, and an illusion.”
A most impressive illusion, however.
And what better place to discuss the decorative arts with Gep Durenberger than in his own home.
There are two ways to enter Durenberger’s domain. One is through the small, single-story, Mediterranean-style main house. The other is through the more imposing, 2-story 18th-Century Gothic Revival guest house, Folie Gep, which Durenberger built on the back of his half-acre property in 1981 to conduct his decorative arts lecture series. ( Folie, Durenberger explains, is a French word for a building that was not built as a residence but for entertaining, or as a place to rest while hunting.)
The street-side front door of the folie sets the tone for the building, which incorporates architectural elements brought back from buying trips to France and England: A 6-inch-thick Gothic Revival wooden door from England, complete with original hinges, handles and door frame.
Inside the large foyer, visitors first encounter a sedan chair from the English Regency period. Directly ahead is a stairway leading to three bedrooms and a bath; to the left of the stairs, through a pair of 18th-Century French wooden doors, is the antique-filled main room.
Durenberger calls it “the schoolroom.”
It’s here where a host of guest lecturers such as Desmond Guinness, chairman of the Irish Georgian Society, and Edward Saunders of the National Trust of Great Britain have discoursed on period architecture and the decorative arts.
Viewed from above, “the schoolroom” portion of the folie resembles a cross. The room is a 16-foot-square cube topped by a pyramid-shaped roof 27 feet above and framed on the sides by four half-cubes. Below the pyramid are Gothic clerestory windows; the gray plaster walls are scored and painted to simulate cut stone.
Guests who have stayed in the folie over the years include everyone from New York fashion designer Bill Blass and Lady (Slim) Keith to Gillian Wilson, curator of decorative arts at the Getty Museum, and William Rieder, curator of decorative arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art--and any number of Durenberger’s 19 godchildren. “I’m never without people,” he says. “It’s a dull home when it’s an empty home.”
For the study center’s opening gala tonight, Durenberger’s home has been filling up all week with assorted family and friends, including his sister, Rita Dobbins of New York, interior designer John Saladino (a former college classmate), and Stanley Barrows, dean emeritus of the Parsons School of Design in New York. Barrows will stay over to deliver a lecture next Saturday on “California Style: Origins and Antecedants,” the first in the study center’s “Collectors and Collections” lecture series.
Wearing a white monogrammed shirt with rolled-up sleeves, slacks and tasseled loafers with argyle socks, Durenberger led his visitors out the glazed French doors of the folie and into the garden: a wonderfully blended conglomeration of trees (pine, pepper and a Hawaiian “shower tree”), hedges, shrubs, grass, gravel pathways and two arbors. A glassed-in “garden shed,” where Durenberger often serves lunch to guests, overlooks a small, rectangular swimming pool with a statue of St. Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners, at one end. (“I found him in England and I’m just mad about him.”)
While Durenberger has incorporated many ideas gleaned from visits to the great gardens of England and Europe, the overall feeling of his home and grounds is a combination of Mediterranean and early California. Adding to that feeling is the fact that the living room, dining room and his bedroom all have doors that open onto the garden, and the doors are usually left wide open. Past visitors have described Durenberger’s airy home and garden variously as having an “Old World ambiance” and being a “romantic, insolated world.”
Its origins are more prosaic.
The two-bedroom main house is a former beach cottage, one of six built in the late ‘20s, along with a beach club and a mansion for Los Angeles oil millionaire Edward L. Doheny Jr.
Durenberger bought the small house, which had been badly neglected, in 1971 for $30,000. “And I was really stretching to buy it,” he said. Being raised in the Midwest, where Mediterranean architecture is unknown, he said, “I just knew that was the house I wanted. It was such a natural response I felt toward this architecture in this climate.”
Before moving in, Durenberger spent a year making repairs, knocking out walls and adding personal touches: He resurfaced the walls in the living room and his bedroom in the style of a Mediterranean cottage: unpainted plaster with straw in it. He also installed Cotswold cottage windows--”It’s so much more fun looking out a window with great character”--painted the plank floor in the living room to resemble parquet and installed Mexican pavers in the dining room.
An outdoor courtyard was converted into a glass-domed atrium (“It’s wonderful for having dinner in on a rainy night”), and the exterior of the house has a Mediterranean, peeled-paint look. Durenberger relishes telling the story of the time he was weeding out front and a neighbor, not knowing she was talking to the owner, clucked: “It’s such a shame. They’ve worked so hard and it looks so shabby.”
“It is,” Durenberger concedes with a grin, “very much an eccentric house.”
The Mediterranean style of the architecture lends itself to the collection of 17th- and 18th-Century English and French antiques Durenberger has amassed over the years. Indeed, except for the refrigerator and stove in the kitchen, there is little that is 20th Century.
“I guess I find that furniture that’s already been used by someone else has a lot more character and soul and I rather enjoy that association,” Durenberger said, seated on a 17th-Century French wing chair in the living room. “And since I love history, these things are more than just sentimental attachments. I love to consider their historical association and how that’s being recycled in the 20th Century. It is nice, really, sitting in a chair that gave pleasure 300 years ago and served all those generations.”
The overall effect of his house is tasteful yet unpretentious--not unlike the owner himself.
But it hasn’t come without great effort. That, he believes, more than how much money someone has to spend on turning a house into a home, is what really counts.
“We all know people born with great taste and love for their environment (who) didn’t have great means. You’re talking to one,” he said. “To have a bit of money, of course, is a great advantage, no doubt about it. But I don’t think one is limited because of a lack of money from having a beautiful environment. I’ve known so many people with very limited incomes who have lived in the most attractive homes. They might do their own muslin curtains, but the results are sensational.
“What I’ve put together has been done with a minimal amount of money and a maximum amount of loving energy. And I think that’s why people love to come to my home. When one equates the value of their home with financial value, then we are really running into trouble. I don’t think that was as often the case in the past when people rooted and stayed there for generations.”
Durenberger laments the fact that in today’s upwardly mobile society, a home is considered as disposable as an automobile. “It’s hard to establish a sense of home when you’re moving every 2 years,” he said.
Durenberger comes by his appreciation of antiques and the decorative arts via his childhood, growing up in LeSueur, Minn. His childhood home was an 1859 brick house filled with 19th-Century antiques.
“We were the only people in town that didn’t have wall-to-wall carpeting,” he said. “My father was in bulk oil, but he had this great sensitivity for the decorative arts. He was following the lead of my mother, who had amazing taste.”
A Notre Dame liberal arts graduate, Durenberger moved to California in 1958. An uncle, who was an executive for J.C. Penney, had arranged for him to enter a junior management training program in the Santa Ana store. He quit after a year. By then he had met antiquarian Carl Yeakel, who hired him as an apprentice in his Laguna Beach shop.
“He was a first-class dealer and to be trained by him was a rare treat,” Durenberger said. “As I befriended Mr. Yeakel, he gave me a lot of important advice, the most important being to pursue a career that I truly love. And it was apparent this is what I enjoy the most and do the best.”
In 1967, Durenberger struck out on his own. With savings and money borrowed from his parents, he bought an old bungalow that had once been part of a defunct hot springs colony off Ortega Highway for $18,000 and established his San Juan Capistrano antique shop.
At the time, he said, “no one had ever had a shop down here, but I felt strongly about the community. It’s where I wanted to live. It was very agricultural and with my Minnesota background, I felt strongly about that. This community had a definite flavor and character. It had old houses and new houses, rich and poor living side by side; it had that homogeneous quality that is sometimes difficult to find in other communities.”
As his reputation as an antiquarian grew, so did his shop. “Every time I scraped together a few thousand dollars I didn’t need for merchandise, I added a room,” he said.
But by the mid-’70s, having turned 40, Durenberger underwent what he amusingly refers to as a mid-life crisis.
“It was certainly not full of angst, “ he said. “It was just a period of re-evaluation, which I think people have to go through. What I had set out to do was done. I had not given myself sufficient goals that would sustain me for a lifetime and I was looking for a new challenge.”
A turning point came in 1977 when he was accepted for a study course at the Center for the Study of Fine and Decorative Arts based at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
“I just realized how much I didn’t know” about the decorative arts, he said. “Equally important, I found all these bits and pieces I did know came together.” He said he learned how to put his knowledge of furniture, porcelain and other decorative arts into historical perspective, to understand why, for example, Gothic novels were being written at the same time that Gothic Revival houses were being built.
With the enthusiasm of his many English friends, Durenberger said, he conceived the idea of starting a lecture program on the decorative arts in California. To that end, he built the folie “and off we went. That was in 1981 and there’s been no looking back.”
In 1983, city officials asked him to head the new cultural support group Libros y Artes. Commissioned to bring to the community a wide range of cultural experiences, Libros y Artes offered films, lectures, seminars and musical events at the library. And every time they offered a lecture on the decorative arts, Durenberger noted, “we got a barn-burner response.”
“When you consider the amount of shelter magazines and home tours and the great interest the general public has in their environment, it’s not such a shock,” he said. “We just all want to learn how to live graciously and in order to do that, you have to have knowledge. It’s just that simple. Creating a home is an art. There’s no doubt about it.”
When Melville Martin of Palos Verdes bequeathed his first-class collection of 18th-Century English and Irish antiques to Libros y Artes, the prospect of one day having to house the collection spurred the organization to establish an independent facility.
The resulting study center, Durenberger said, “married the Libros y Artes and Durenberger Series under one umbrella.”
Although Libros y Artes receives an annual $10,000 grant from the city, the center is funded primarily by private donations and membership fees. Until the center receives the Martin collection and other donated items, Durenberger said it will depend entirely on loans from private collections for its exhibits.
But like gardeners who love to share their planting tips or clippings, Durenberger said, “people in decorative arts tend to be generous in spirit. I think all of us who have been exposed to beautiful things and have been privileged to live with them like to share that joy with other people.”
With the establishment of the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts, Durenberger said, “I hope we’re going to be able to open all sorts of new avenues for people so they can enjoy their home more and understand it better and provide a better environment for themselves and their friends.”
His own home would serve as an ideal case study.
“I think when people come into my very humble house and see nice things, I think it encourages them (and conveys the idea) that living with beautiful things is not out of the reach of the ordinary household income. And that’s what we’re really about at the center. Education is the message.