Stretching a Point : Even in the L.A. Area, Where the Unusual Is Usual, the Glass Pyramid House Has Kept People Wondering
When real estate agent Earl Gervais advertises an open house at 751 Oak Crest Drive in Sierra Madre, he isn’t kidding.
His listing is a glass pyramid perched in the foothills, with a view all the way to downtown L.A. It is a famous--or, some would argue, an infamous--landmark known to the local gentry simply as “the glass house.”
While there hasn’t been an acceptable offer, luring lookie-loos has not been a problem. The first time Gervais held an open house, “half of Sierra Madre came up just to see it. The driveway was like Highway 210. People have wondered about it for years. It’s kind of a museum.”
The first time he peeked inside, he says, he thought the house “was more than bizarre.” For starters, there was the four-foot plaster cobra perched on the black tile ledge that wraps around the living room.
There was a little of everything and, Gervais adds, “I took a lot of little everythings out to the trash. I didn’t want a haunted house attraction.”
Who built the house and why?
In 1972, Ellen McKinney and her husband, Romero, bought the one-acre view site. As Ellen McKinney recalls, it was his idea to build a glass pyramid and “we found an architect crazy enough to do it.”
She adds: “That was the time when the big thing was pyramid energy,” a belief in the spiritual powers of pyramids.
“The pyramid is built to the exact dimensions of the big pyramid (the Pyramid of Cheops, near Cairo, dating to 2680 B.C.). The master bedroom is where the king’s chamber was.
“It started out not to be all glass, but it just evolved,” she explains. “I always thought it was kind of strange.”
Soon, the McKinneys learned what the pharaohs learned when it comes to building pyramids. As months of construction dragged on, the bills mounted. One big delay was on special insulated glass made by Ford Motor Co. “It was supposed to be a $60,000 house,” McKinney says, but by 1978 when they finally moved in, costs were stratospheric.
“We couldn’t find a bank to loan us money,” McKinney says. “They all said, ‘We’d love to see the house when it’s finished, but. . . .’ ” To this day, it’s not quite finished.
The McKinneys, their two small children, three cats and a dog lived there rather quietly. Even though the couple divorced in 1987, they stayed another year in the house.
“I loved the house,” she says. “It was kind of hard in the summer. It got real hot in there. And when it was real cold, there was no heat. You just dressed up in your ski clothes.”
In those days, giant birds of paradise bloomed in a planter now filled with white gravel. The gilt spiral staircase was turquoise then, as was the giant built-in sofa. The McKinney kids used to turn somersaults on it. There were fish in the pond, and water lilies.
The furnishings were, she says, “real sparse. We never finished furnishing it.” There were no draperies, but she didn’t feel the need for any because “there weren’t any neighbors” at their level.
But there was a need to clean those windows. So every six months, McKinney would get out a tall ladder, prop it against the house and wash.
McKinney, who now lives in a more traditional place in Sierra Madre, misses being able to “look up and see the clouds and the sky. The nights were great.” But she doesn’t miss the abundance of “critters,” including raccoons that fished in the pond and made themselves at home in the house.
The house, she acknowledges, was not easy to sell. “You either walked in and you loved it or you walked in and you hated it.”
Now, it’s for sale again. Says McKinney: “I kind of hope no one tears it down.”
Earl Gervais leads a visitor through the house on a hot, sunny afternoon. “I thought about having an open house and dressing up like a mummy,” he says. After all, “People are thinking, ‘What is this--Pharaoh’s diner?’ ”
The pyramid has two bedrooms, two baths and a split-level living area with an arched fireplace and conversation pit. A skeleton of tubular steel supports the interior glass walls.
The openness of the main level is broken up by a rather incongruous kiosk of wormy chestnut that wraps around the kitchen and, above it, at the peak of the pyramid, the master bedroom. The latter is reached by a filigree spiral staircase painted gold.
“This stairway, I’m told, is out of the sewers of London,” Gervais says. At least, it is stamped, “Hayward Brothers. Union St. London.”
“This is the Conan the Barbarian door,” Gervais says, rolling aside a wooden round and stepping through a circle of black tiles to a fishless fishpond.
Back inside, he points out the painting of a naked Egyptian lady on a wall of the downstairs bath, the Art Deco plexiglass divides, the oversized built-in sofa in the living room--”It looks like a bed Godzilla could sleep in.”
Gervais knows this isn’t your basic fixer-upper. “It would take probably $100,000 to turn this into a gorgeous one-bedroom house for a couple.”
The lookers have offered some suggestions of their own. One told him he should “pick the pyramid up with a crane and toss it down the mountain.” He himself suggests that “maybe somebody would want to take off the top and have a conventional house.”
The last owners were a surgeon and his wife, who found themselves looking through all that glass, darkly. Last December, only 19 months after they bought the property for $640,000, it went into foreclosure.
As agent, Gervais represents Riverside-based Inner Broker Marketing--which deals exclusively in foreclosures. In five weeks, he says, he has had four offers on the pyramid. One was within negotiating distance of the asking price of $499,000, but the buyer did not qualify.
The house is a curiosity currently owned by a Dallas-based firm that acquired it last summer in a buy-out of another firm. A company spokesman, who has seen the house only in photographs, said in a bit of understatement: “Apparently this is a very unique property. Perhaps several people in Los Angeles will find it attractive.”
It only takes one, as they say in real estate lingo. Still, Gervais acknowledges, “if you’re married, with two children and two dogs, this is not for you.”
Sierra Madre is a fairly conservative city. Not everyone was thrilled when the pyramid started going up in the ‘70s.
“We lived right down below it,” recalls Harlan Pedersen, an architect now semi-retired and living in the San Juan Islands of Washington state. In his view, the glass house was “ill-conceived. It wasn’t the right thing for the neighborhood.” Indeed, its neighbors included his Spanish colonial and a large Tudor home.
Still, he adds, “we had a lot of fun talking about it” and whether the pyramid would increase the neighbors’ occult powers.
Pedersen, who at the time served on the city Planning Commission, did not oppose the construction. Ill-conceived and uneconomical it may have been, he says, but “we were attracted to the purity of design.”
The architect, the late John G. McKinney (no relation to the original owners) was, Pedersen says, “a very capable designer. We could see that it was an interesting structure,” even though “way out.” The moneylenders apparently didn’t see that, Pedersen says: “We’d see them walking out of the yard shaking their heads.”
He speaks of the site’s beauty and value, the “hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth” of infrastructure. But he concludes that it’s a tear-down and that’s “a pity. It’s not without merit, not in the least.”
Reginald Tollefson, a builder, and his wife, Cher, a real estate agent, built the Tudor house at the foot of the cul-de-sac and lived there during construction of the pyramid, which, Cher Tollefson recalls, “started and stopped a number of times.”
She laughs and says: “A lot of people thought the glass house was the greenhouse for our house.”
Rumors always swirled around the glass house. Once, it went around that it had been sold to Rod Serling of “Twilight Zone” fame.
Meanwhile, the curious come. They come in Mercedes and Volkswagens and pickups.
But so far, Earl Gervais says, he hasn’t heard a single joke about people who live in glass houses.
