Exterior Designer Collects Garden of Earthly Debris
Michelangelo had his “David.” Leonardo had his “Mona Lisa.” And Howard Juhl has his apartment buildings.
Granted, the buildings--with a Polynesian god statue in the front yard and a king-size brass bed on the garage roof--might not make the Louvre, but neighbors believe Juhl’s masterpieces are worthy of a little aesthetic criticism.
“The place looks like a junkyard,” says Thomas Bejarano, 71, who lives two doors down from Juhl’s two buildings, which sit side-by-side on South Rampart Boulevard near 2nd Street. “I don’t think it’s pretty, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Frances Zoila, who lives in Bejarano’s apartment building, begs to differ. “I think it is a pretty place. I don’t mind living on the same block with it.”
Aesthetic differences aside, most of the people who live on the quiet, tree-lined street agree on one thing: Juhl’s buildings are truly bizarre.
The hubbub centers around his offbeat style of decorating, which does not surprise him one bit.
Juhl, 71, has come to expect questions about the statue made of wagon wheels, the suit of armor and the hundreds and hundreds of drinking glasses that pepper every nook and cranny of his front yard.
He knows people are curious about the rusting farm machinery, wringer washing machine and lightning rods that crown his sagging garage roof.
Juhl’s attitude about the questions: Why ask why?
“When people ask what it all means, I tell them that they just answered their own dumb question,” he says. “It’s just a bunch of junk.”
Juhl has been experiencing the joy of junk since 1973, when he first started collecting. It happened the day he took a look at his two apartment buildings and decided that they needed sprucing up. Instead of buying a can of paint and a roller, though, Juhl bought a single milk-white drinking glass and placed it in the front yard.
“It looked nice and it was a personal satisfaction to me,” says Juhl, who owns a plumbing business.
That one glass sparked a flood of inspiration. He started scoping out auctions, bringing home kitchen kitsch, plastic doodads and metal knickknacks to arrange in the yard. When he ran out of ground space, he erected shelves in front of the two-story buildings to hold the burgeoning batch of garage sale ware. Shutters and statues sprang up alongside the sunflowers, bicycle rims and boards between the bougainvillea.
“I can see beauty in the trash that other people just throw away,” he says. “In the right context and put together properly, trash is beautiful.”
Today the buildings have a funky, cluttered, avant-garde look--the work of an artist whose feet are mostly rooted in Americana. The flatbed wagon, plows and pitchforks, says Juhl, serve as year-round reminders of the prairie farm he visits every summer in his native Nebraska.
Last August, Juhl made the evening news in Kearney by decorating a half-mile fence surrounding his property with plastic baubles in red, white and blue.
During the broadcast, he was lauded for donating 320 acres to the Prairie Institute, a local nature-preservation group. He also plans to use the 5,000 acres he just purchased in Harrison for another environmental project.
While his contributions to preservation were applauded, his contributions to the local art scene seemed to be just too L.A. for Nebraska, where Juhl spent his early years helping his father work their 1,000-acre farm.
He came to Los Angeles following a stretch as a Navy diver and welder during World War II. Along the way, he married twice, had three kids and bought the buildings on Rampart in 1963 for $100,000. He lived there for 10 years before the collecting bug bit.
Since then, Juhl has been approached by artists, students seeking essay material or just ordinary walkers-by, some eager to buy an unusual piece. “I don’t sell anything,” explains Juhl. “I buy one of everything. If I bought more than one, then I’d have to peddle something.”
He might rent, however. Once, he was approached by a “fly-by-night” movie company that wanted to rent his marble bust of Greek Muses for a movie. After he loaned it out, he says, he quickly changed his mind because the $3,500 sculpture was uninsured.
Indeed, not all of the stuff that Juhl collects can be termed junk. Among the “better” items that fill his antiques-cluttered apartment--which he shares with his dog, Clarabelle--are a bejeweled evening bag and a silver ladle from the Spanish-American War.
Juhl says some valuable objects have been taken from the front yard.
“Someone stole a suit of armor that I had sitting in the front,” he says. “From then on, anything of value I had, I placed high up out of reach.” (A new suit of armor is securely strapped to the second story of one building.)
Nicki Rantes, a tenant for the past 24 years, says she wouldn’t live anywhere else.
“I like it here because if I moved into another apartment, then all I would have to look at is bare walls,” says Rantes, whose rent is $490 a month. “That is not a problem here.”
Rantes, a collector herself, has at least 35 clocks--which were eventually silenced when the din of their hourly chimes ticked her off.
She is quick to point out that she--not Juhl--decorated her apartment. He limits his artistic expression to his own apartment and the outside.
And what will become of the Sultan of Secondhand’s domain?
Juhl says he probably will donate the buildings to charity.
“I could never sell this place,” he says. “What the hell would I do with all of this rubbish?”
