Disney Exec’s Unreal Estate : New English Tudor Has the Illusion of Being Weathered
Seven years ago, Tony Baxter drove by a house in the hills and fell in love with its basic floor plan. Although he couldn’t afford to buy the home, the then chief designer of Disneyland’s Splash Mountain and Fantasyland kept its image in the back of his mind as he continued to channel his creative energies into other Disney dreams.
Three years later, after he was promoted to vice president of design for the future Euro Disney Magic Kingdom outside of Paris, Baxter was ready to begin developing his personal vision: a house similar in concept to the one he had seen, but enhanced with the fanciful touches for which he is known.
First, he purchased a 5/8-acre view parcel of land high in the Anaheim Hills.
Next, he developed a crude foam-core model to test his thoughts.
After discussing that model with designers and contractors, he spent two weeks building a refined quarter-inch scale edition with all the exterior minutiae--from a birdhouse and weather vane to miniature people.
Finally last year, Baxter began building the real thing--a 3,100-square-foot English Tudor cottage with peaked slate roof, arched dormer windows encased in stone, eight gables and a turret.
It’s been a manic-depressive experience ever since.
“I go through roles between being real excited and real depressed,” said Baxter, 43, sitting at a desk in the garage and fielding questions from workers who wandered in and out. “With so many decisions to make, it’s a labor of anxiety, not love.
“I thought I’d be in by summer, but it’s those Disney details that take so long.”
Those details also cost a lot more than he had originally planned, as the $500,000-estimate to build the structure quickly mushroomed to almost double that. And it’s those details that make some people think he’s demented, including workers and friends who say the house looks like a cross between a German Fantasyland and Mr. Toad’s residence.
“They laughed at first,” Baxter recalled. “It’s hard to translate these things to traditional trade groups, but the model was tremendously helpful.
“They still think I’m crazy, but with the model they see it can be done.”
The idea, Baxter said, is to create something that has “real-world integrity.”
Despite all the time, expense and anxiety, it’s worth it to know he’s succeeding, he said. “It’s all tricks,” he explained, adding that a builder recently came by and remarked that the house will look a century old when completed.
“That’s what I want--a house that looks like it has been there forever.”
On one side of the home, a portion of the wall is peeled back, giving the appearance of age. All wood looks old and worn. Hand-sculpted and painstakingly painted pieces of cement emulate other materials and create a softened patina that emulates the wear of water having run down its surface for 100 years.
Wood and cement are the building blocks of the illusion. Wood was specially hoed to look hand-hewn and then sandblasted. Cement was carved and treated to look like aged brick, wood, stone and stucco.
“I’m used to it because when we did Fantasyland we used the same techniques,” he said. “It’s a combination of theatrical architecture done for film and the realization of real-world structure. The main difference is that with a film set, you use plaster and hemp, and if what you create rots in six months, it doesn’t matter. In a house that has to last, you can use the same effects, but with a pallet of things used in traditional construction, like steel and wood.”
Although the house is just over 3,000 square feet in size, it looks much larger. That effect is created by reducing the scale of the upper floor, a technique employed for many Disneyland structures. The scale reduction also adds charm and a feeling of comfort, he said.
Baxter spent many long hours studying half-timbered design, a type of old-world construction in which large timbers form the basis of and actually support the structure.
“That was the structural system of that period,” he said. “Essentially they took a huge oak tree, smoothed it out, set it up and filled in with loose bits of stone and brick. But in today’s world, two things keep us from using it--building codes and the cost of huge timbers.”
An important factor of his home’s integrity, he stressed, is that the Cottage Tudor half-timbered look is carried through from the exterior to the interior with careful attention to reality-based principles of engineering and architecture. Therefore, unlike typical Tudor-style homes where pieces of wood are haphazardly slapped on to suggest half-timbered construction, the wood on Baxter’s house is designed and placed where it would actually carry the stresses of the building.
“You see tons of these California Tudors, just borrowing and pasting together forms,” he said. “It might look attractive I suppose, but there’s no structural integrity because it doesn’t add up to anything and you’re losing the original purpose of why it was done that way.
“When you see something structurally right, there’s integrity and you know it, so it bothers you when it’s not there. If you’re going to emulate a style, then idealize it, capture it and combine it all into some quintessential. If you just pick and choose bits and pieces and aren’t consistent, you’re not true to anything--you lose worth.”
To achieve that integrity, Baxter said, the house literally had to be built three times. The first time was to meet contemporary building codes. The second time was for the half-timbered look on the exterior. Finally, the half-timbered facade was carried through to the interior of the house.
Exterior materials are a combination of distressed wood, hand-troweled plaster and cement that is hand-sculpted then painted by veteran Disneyland scenic artist Steve Borowitz to simulate brickwork, rock or wood.
Brick, said Baxter, is relatively easy to emulate, although it still has to be tinted to get that old-world look. But achieving a realistic rock is much harder.
“It’s difficult to make rock look real,” he said. “What is interesting is if you look at a rock, you think it’s one color, say a brown rock. But look at it closely, and you see far more going on. That’s the flaw in trying to paint something one color because it won’t look real unless you show eight or nine things going on that optically blend into one color. It’s all pulled together with stains of browns, grays and greens. You can’t just paint it brown.”
Borowitz uses eight coats of paint, including three base coats plus brushed coats and splattered coats.
“The trick in applying paint is so that it lands on the surface naturally,” said Baxter, who painted samples for the artist. “The more you control the brush, the more contrived it looks. So you whisk, throw and splatter. You’re out of control and the random nature of the stone is in control.”
Baxter’s interest in Disney-type reality began about 35 years ago when the park first opened in Anaheim. He frequently rode his bike there and knew that he would “someday do something” with Disneyland.
At 15, he built a model of a Disneyland castle and entered it in the Orange County Fair. At 18, while a student majoring in theatrical design and landscape architecture, he went to work at the park, doing everything from scooping ice cream to operating rides. That training, the “school of practicality,” was the best education one could get, he said.
Upon graduation from college, Baxter applied and transferred to Glendale-based Walt Disney Imagineering as a model builder. In 1971, after installing attractions at Disney World in Florida, he went into the firm’s design department and worked on Big Thunder Mountain and Journey Into Imagination at the Florida park, plus Fantasyland, Star Tours and Splash Mountain at Anaheim. He then moved from the design role to the supervisor of design for Euro Disneyland.
Today, Baxter, is senior vice president of creative development for Disneyland, Euro Disneyland and the new California park planned for Long Beach or Anaheim.
“It’s intimidating to me,” said the soft-spoken Baxter of his job responsibilities. “I block it out. I get nervous. Where do I go from here? The next step is out.”
To the self-confessed workaholic, more anxious moments come at night and on weekends, as he plans and oversees construction of his private castle. The two-story house with views of Santa Ana Canyon, Palos Verdes Peninsula and, on clear summer nights, Disneyland fireworks, is still at least a month away from completion.
Outside, workers are busy grading, following another model that Baxter created. This model shows the side yard, an area that will be turned into a natural forest with a meandering garden path on which one can get lost, he said.
His use of existing trees, including five mature pines, a coral and an oak, is another trick to make the house look like it’s been there a long time.
“It makes the house look like it’s part of the land,” Baxter said. “At Disney, I have money to move trees but here I don’t. I also go to a lot of trouble to work with everything outside to achieve balance, to get warm vistas. To me, the whole sense of coming home is that everything feels right and has integrity.”
Walking to the side of the house, Baxter pointed to the portion of wall that appears to be disintegrating. “This was for fun,” he said. “It’s pure Disney. I wanted an area where the stucco looks so old that it’s peeling off and the brick is showing through. The end result is it will add more heart and conviction to the house. It’s a compliment to me when people say it looks like it has been here forever. With one of the walls falling off, you believe. “
In the back of the house is a sculpted cement turret that is open to the upstairs master bedroom. Topped with a 90-pound cast iron spire that Baxter found at a Paris swap meet and hauled through the streets and subways because no cab driver would take it, the turret is where he will read the Sunday paper, drink coffee, eat a bread stick and survey the view.
“It’s not an architectural feature that was needed,” he said. “But I’ve had castles in my blood since childhood, so I had to have it. It’s an homage to my romantic attachment to castles.”
On the right side of the house, a massive buttressed wall on the garage balances and strengthens the house.
“It’s totally non-conventional,” he said, laughing. “When you see it in plywood, it looks like the house is crooked. Having the model deterred a lot of quizzical looks.”
Inside, sketches drawn by Baxter line the walls, acting as blueprints for interior details such as mantels, hearth stonework, electronic gadgetry and placement of interior wood that carries the half-timbered motif through from the outside. Baxter has made more than 100 such drawings, always trying to keep three or four sketches ahead of Dennis Romans, a carpenter who has been working night and day on the house for more than a year.
“It’s a blast working on this house,” Romans said. “I’ve never seen detail to this extent. Building tract houses is like factory work, but you really have to use your head to work with Tony.”
Downstairs, a living room with fireplace and sculpted stone hearth is open to a two-story library with balcony and stained-glass window that depicts Thunder Mountain. The dining room is an octagon and will house an octagonal table. It has a wood-beamed ceiling with center medallion of oak. The cozy and bright kitchen has a cobblestone floor and open half-timbering that rises 16 feet.
In the media room, an English pub bar found in an Orange antique store sports carved heads, etched glass, oak and tile. Over the room’s mantel will hang a painting Baxter made of his “ultimate Fantasyland,” a painting he said served later as his inspiration for the real Fantasyland and now provides inspiration for the house.
A special closet between the media room and a workroom will house all wiring for future security systems, lighting, appliances, television, stereo, a ceiling-mounted projection system and a movie screen that drops down at the push of a button. Theater-type sound will be worked into the walls and the floor is stepped so that guests will have unobstructed movie screen views.
“I’m a high-tech nut in a historic house,” Baxter joked. “It’s all outrageous things. My hobby is film and I collect laser discs like a drug. It’s terrible.”
Upstairs, the master bedroom with turret has a little dormer that looks into the kitchen, a small patio and a fireplace with a lion centerpiece sculpted by Baxter one Saturday.
“I wanted a Gothic bedroom,” he said. “I’ve always admired the Sleeping Beauty film of 1969, that cottage in the glen with a Tudor overlay. This is reminiscent of that movie.”
A den has leaded windows and leads to a second bedroom with deck and coffered ceiling. In one bathroom, a string sculpture on the ceiling shows how beams will ultimately look. Baxter sighed as he surveyed construction litter on the floors. “I hoped to be in here by Christmas,” he said. “And after all this, there’s no possible way I’ll ever leave.”
He smiled.
“But then again, who knows?”
