Homeowners Assn. Finds Something to Talk About

Jan and John Tilton have a nice new two-story home, which they bought last year.

A sparkling Pacific Ocean is close by. You can see it from the master bedroom, from the sun deck, the living room, the dining room and the back yard too. (More on this below.)

The house is stucco painted white, like everybody else’s in this gated Dana Point development, and very clean.

When I visit, John asks that I please remove my shoes because the carpeting is white. Ditto for the walls and furnishings. There are touches of gray, in subtle good taste, scattered here and there.

Correct, there are no children in this house.

(There is a dog, however. She is white and sadly, now blind in her elder years.)

“I love it indoors here,” Jan Tilton says, surveying the immaculate scene with her dark, flashing eyes.

Jan has just returned from work, as a fragrance company representative, and is settling down to talk about what she and John, a medical supplies salesman, discuss all the time.

“But as soon as I walk outside, I hate it,” she says. “I just hate it.”

“When you’re here at night, in the morning, it’s like you’re on vacation,” adds John. “But when I drive up to my house after work, I’m on pins and needles because of my neighbors. They don’t speak to me. They don’t wave. I have knots in my stomach. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling.”

And it seems the tension is getting worse.

“My wife and I sit here, for an hour every night,” John says. “She yells at me, ‘What are we going to do, John?’ I didn’t know you had to be a lawyer to live in a homeowners association.”

This is, of course, silly. You don’t really have to be a lawyer to live here. Although that might help, with expenses at least.

The Tiltons recently paid a lawyer $200--a discounted fee because the attorney said he shared their pain--for the advice to just go ahead with their home improvements and let the homeowners association sue if it likes.

But it has not come to that, just yet.

The problem has to do, mostly, with the Tiltons’ plans to build a small, elevated viewing deck in their back yard. The couple says their deck would be virtually identical to those of neighbors nearby.

(They have gone on surreptitious missions throughout the neighborhood, with measuring tape and camera, to document that this is so.)

Sitting on their proposed deck--which would be concrete, 16 inches high--the Tiltons figure they could see the ocean free and clear without having to look through the neighbors’ plexiglass walls, which, quite frankly, tend to spot.

The architectural committee of the homeowners association, however, has said no to the Tiltons’ plans.

“Please note that the Committee determined that the rear viewing deck would detract from the harmony of the surrounding structures,” the homeowners association’s management corporation said, via letter, as to why. This was in July.

There has been no further explanation, although several letters--some quite testy-- have been exchanged.

(The architectural committee, incidentally, speaks only through the management corporation. No meetings with supplicants, no phone calls, sort of like the wizard of Oz.)

Which, of course, appears to be driving the Tiltons just a little mad.

(And I’m not even going to get into the couple’s proposed front driveway extension. The architectural committee has nixed that too. But, alas, there is only so much pain that one newspaper column can explore.)

“Is this harmony?” John asks me, pointing to a color photograph of a neighbor’s viewing deck a few houses down. “Is this harmony? Is this? This ?”

By now John is flipping through photographs in a rather agitated state.

Then he shows me a neighborhood map. This guy has a Jacuzzi, that one--on the architectural committee!--has added on a room , this one’s got a viewing deck with a step up. The stack of documents before us is now spread across the dining room table. John’s glasses have slipped down his nose.

“In our first letter back to them, we wrote, ‘What is harmony? What would be in harmony?” he says. “And they never answered us.”

John, and Jan, could go on. And then they do. There is this, there is that.

Except then I tell them that they seem, uh, a little obsessed. Which, don’t get me wrong, I can completely understand .

“We are not doing anything wrong,” Jan says. “We’ve done nothing wrong. It’s very sad. I feel that (a certain architectural committee member) is prejudiced against us.”

“They just don’t like me,” John says.

Which, for the record, the Concord Management Corp. says is not true.

“It has nothing to do with him as an individual,” says Dusty Burgmans, the owner of said corporation, well acquainted with the Tilton case.

“It’s a subjective thing. When they decide to reject something it is because it is not in harmony. It’s a subjective response. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is.”

But there has been a breakthrough in the case. The board of the homeowner’s association has just reversed itself and agreed to allow John and Jan to discuss their problem at a meeting next month.

Harmony may be in the air, or at least the word. After that, all bets are off. Anybody have a cup of sugar they can spare?