THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Going to the Wall : A house built <i> in </i> a rock? For architect Brion Jeannette, such one-of-a-kind commissions are all in a day’s work.
Architect Brion S. Jeannette is making his weekly inspection of works in progress: One is the Aliso Rock house, an unprecedented Laguna Beach project in which a three-bedroom home is going inside a hollowed-out, 27-foot boulder.
Another, a few miles up the coast, is the four-lot site of author Dean Koontz’s Italian Renaissance estate that eventually will have 255 doors, four laundry rooms and a library big enough to hold Koontz’s 35,000-book collection. It will command a 240-degree view of the Newport coast, and, at 60,000 square feet, it will eclipse in size the much-publicized Aaron Spelling house in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, which is the size of a football field.
In his 21st year as president of his Newport Beach firm, Jeannette, 48, enjoys a level of professional satisfaction matched only by a rewarding family and community life. His reputation for building unique, high-ticket homes--some of them on difficult, cliffhanger sites--is further cemented with each new project.
But even though Jeannette revels in the challenge of palatial designs for millionaire clients, he is no stranger to the other side of the tracks. He grew up in the blue-collar community of Bellflower, sharing a small bedroom with his three brothers.
In part because of this background, Jeannette refuses to turn a blind eye to the irony of building megamillion-dollar houses while homelessness is a problem just a few minutes’ drive away.
Through a Los Angeles nonprofit group called Watts 13, Jeannette has been able to help recycle about a dozen houses that otherwise would have been destroyed during remodeling projects. Members of the group remove doors, sinks, lumber and other material for use in low-income housing.
Jeannette’s staff of 11 includes his wife of 28 years, Bonnie, who serves as his business partner, financial and office manager, accountant and contract negotiator.
The efficiency of the staff “allows me to be an architect,” Brion Jeannette says.
Most of Jeannette’s work is in custom houses, particularly thematic designs such as New England Cape Cod, country French and Spanish, French and Italian Mediterranean. He has done 60 homes in the older part of Corona del Mar, where tight lots pose a particular challenge. His firm’s annual billings are in the high six figures.
Like a master juggler, Jeannette keeps a lot of balls in the air.
In addition to the Aliso Rock and Koontz homes, he is working on 20 other custom projects. He built the Rancho Santa Margarita library, which opened in December, and is sketching plans for the library in Aliso Viejo, near Laguna Hills.
Jeannette’s ongoing work with the local Jewish community--he volunteered to design the new Jewish Federation campus in Costa Mesa--was recognized by 265 friends, neighbors, former clients and business associates at a banquet in Santa Ana in December.
For the occasion, the Jeannettes’ son Erik, 22, flew in from the University of Colorado, where he is studying environmental engineering. Their other son, Jeff, 24, works as an architect at his parents’ firm and is engaged to an architect.
After the Northridge earthquake last year, Jeannette worked with the state Office of Emergency Services to assemble an emergency damage-assessment team of volunteer architects. His knowledge of seismic standards brought him to the attention of Rick Ranous, senior structural engineer with the OES. Ranous praised Jeannette’s help in writing repair standards for single-family residences damaged in the Northridge quake.
“His work has been all volunteer and very, very professional,” Ranous says. “It’s hard work, and he’s provided some valuable insights.”
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One of the more enjoyable aspects of being an architect, Jeannette says, is watching the projects take shape. He recently joined his contractors at the Aliso Rock house to inspect the roof in preparation for an immense concrete pour.
As they work, none of the builders so much as glance at the Pacific, shimmering like hammered gold just yards away. The ocean, in fact, seems irrelevant, even tawdry, in comparison with the ingenuity of this project, scheduled for completion in September.
To build the house, 1,200 cubic yards of earth were scooped out of the rock. Fourteen truckloads of extra-strength concrete were poured on the roof, enough for 100 garden-variety homes. The rock will eventually be recapped with artificial rock, the native foliage replanted.
The work site is now on the route of Orange County tour buses.
It is a project, in one of the architect’s favorite phrases, that has “really stretched the envelope.”
The phrase, in Jeannette’s day-to-day practice, serves as a type of contract to his clients and to himself.
For clients such as the Mary Bowler family, which had tried at various times over a 20-year period to develop the rock-studded Aliso Beach property, Jeannette’s philosophy guarantees that he will not back away from the challenging site before the project is completed. They have since sold the property to software maker Dennis Morin.
Jeannette recalls that the Laguna Beach Design Review Board members, some of whom wanted the landmark rock to remain untouched “laughed me out of the office when I first made the proposal” to build inside the rock.
“But I told them I wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. I made sure the owner was financially prepared to go all the way to the Supreme Court to be able to build,” he says.
Building codes and zoning rules are seen by Jeannette and his staff not as limitations but as tools; to make room for an underground pistol range or bowling alley, he will dig to the limit of the property line. Or, if he can raise a home’s upper floor six extra feet and still stay within the height limit, as he did for a 9,000-square-foot ocean-view house north of Laguna Beach, potential view impairments are moved that much farther out of sight.
“If we’re stretching the envelope, as a lot of planning and building departments tell me we are, the whole reason is to capture everything that site has to offer,” Jeannette says. “It’s exciting to me to reach to whatever length to take full advantage of the site. We don’t pierce the envelope, but we go as high as we can; we go as big as we can, we push it as far as we can.”
As building director for the city of Newport Beach, Raimar Schuller is accustomed to the firm’s aggressive approach.
“Brion Jeannette is unique in that he doesn’t take anybody’s word as the gospel truth on zoning. He figures it out for himself,” Schuller says. “He’ll file plans for a remodel, and then when you go see it, what you have is a project that’s maybe all the way down to the concrete slab, and maybe he’ll be rebuilding to the existing nonconforming specifications. He works hard for his clients.”
Schuller says that such regular testing of the codes, by Jeannette and other architects, keeps his office on its toes.
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Like many architects, Jeannette knew at an early age what his profession would be. He was 12 when the work of Frank Lloyd Wright first impressed him with its striking use of building environments, a quality Jeannette tries to emulate.
He was influenced by parents who were musical and artistic. His father, Al, was a bandleader, newspaper photographer and part-time inventor; Jeannette recalls him inventing the cab-over camper in 1959 as a way to give all six children a place to sleep during camping trips to Big Sur.
During the mid-1960s at Downey High School, where Jeannette was conference wrestling champion, he met his wife-to-be while they were both cheerleaders. After graduation and marriage, they moved to Tucson with just $50 between them. There they both worked while Brion studied architecture at the University of Arizona.
Jorlaine Cunningham of Newport Beach, a friend of the pair since high school, remembers them as “the perfect couple.”
“When I think back, it was always Bonnie supporting Brion, or vice versa, always a perfect complement, even in the business,” Cunningham says. “Bonnie runs a tight ship at the office, and what I remember about Brion was that, even as an adolescent . . . he was willing to donate his time and talent to the community.”
After graduation, Jeannette worked for about five years for other architects. In Tucson, he worked on a home whose eye-catching feature--faux snow on the roof--now makes him wince.
“It can be 120 degrees in Tucson, and there you see this snow on the roof. It’s somewhat comical,” Jeannette says, joking that “in architecture, it’s important to do your early practice in another city.”
After returning to California in 1971, the couple began to establish an Orange County reputation. Initially, Jeannette did a lot of back-yard trellises and landscaping work in his Newport Heights neighborhood, where he has since built more than two dozen homes and remodeled 25 more. The firm’s first remodeling project, for a friend and neighbor, financed the birth of the Jeannettes’ second son.
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Jeannette begins his day at 5:30 with a four-mile jog. Although he began running in 1978 as a way to get in shape, he has since qualified twice for the Boston Marathon and says his workout serves as a “cleansing” process for a mind that by necessity is packed with detail.
Like most architects, Jeannette regularly wears the hats not only of artist and mathematician, but also of geologist, physicist, politician and--when partners disagree on a remodeling project--marriage counselor.
His hectic schedule (“When I hit the sack you can hear my eyes slam shut,” he says) is balanced with regular vacations in Cabo San Lucas and at the family cabin at Arrowbear Lake. Weekends he reserves for family life at the home he designed and built within walking distance of the office.
When the Jeannettes built their roomy Southwestern-style home in 1985, friends and neighbors were invited to add character to the house with their ideas and skills.
Butch Witek, a friend and longtime contractor for Jeannette, made the doors and hand-hewed the 85 white fir beams on the ceilings, while a neighbor supplied willow branches for a curved banister. On a wall near the entry, a friend painted petroglyphic figures representing the Jeannette family--including the family pooch, Aspen, who was given an elevated dog run outside.
Some of the home’s energy-efficient features, such as belvedere windows that let in light without trapping heat, are echoed in Jeannette’s commercial projects. Such projects constitute about 10% of the firm’s work.
At the opening of the $6-million Rancho Santa Margarita library recently, Jeannette stood back “like a fly on the wall” to see how some of the 2,000 first-day visitors interacted with his design.
“The most satisfying thing you can do is create something like this and have people go through it and see their level of interest in the design,” he says. “I look at the library just like doing a custom residence. That attention to detail is just as important, but a lot of architects who do commercial work don’t put thought into what people live with in their daily lives.”
Jeannette says his commitment to environmentally sound design and construction (all his designs feature either active or passive solar systems) was influenced both by his late-’60s college years and by periods of economic recession, when cost-cutting designs were critical.
Before anyone could enter the Rancho Santa Margarita library, for example, Jeannette insisted that the finished building go through a full month of “off-gassing”--a period in which new materials leech off toxicity.
“The synergism of all the new carpets, paints and furniture off-gassing can be toxic, especially if the building’s airflow is poor,” Jeannette says. “It needs to air out. So we actually write into the specifications that the building must go through an off-gassing period before it’s used.”
An architect’s education, Jeannette says, never ends, and he’s proud of his firm’s devotion to energy efficiency and authenticity in design.
“I’m always thinking: How does this space relate to that space? How do all the spaces relate to (the) environment? What is the impact of the sun, wind and views on the plan?”
Jeannette says one of his most satisfying exercises in planning a home in a tight space came a couple of years ago, when the Los Angeles Times asked him to design a house that former President George Bush could conceivably build on an exceptionally narrow lot that the Bushes owned in Houston.
In the 1992 presidential campaign, Democrats claimed that Bush had no intention of building on the lot, which has a buildable area just 13 feet wide by 110 feet long. They charged that it was little more than a means for Bush to claim Texas residency as a state income tax dodge.
Jeannette sat down with his sketch pad and, through clever use of subterranean space, not only designed a house, but came up with a 10,000-square-foot estate that included quarters for the Secret Service, a 15-seat theater, walk-in closets, a 14-person dining room, an exercise room and wine cellar, plus a seven-car garage. The cost to build it, Jeannette says, would be $3 million.
(Bush did eventually build on the lot, after buying adjacent property, but it wasn’t Jeannette’s design. In 1993, the Bushes moved into a 4,000-square-foot, Georgian-style brick house on that property; the home and lot are appraised at $538,300.)
Jeannette’s sketch pad doesn’t stay home when he and Bonnie travel to Europe. Recent trips to southern France, Tuscany and Venice provided a firsthand education in authentic Italian Renaissance architecture for his Koontz project.
“When you get architecture in your blood, it’s almost scary how much time you can put into it,” Jeannette says. “It’s so consuming. We go on trips, and it’s looking at details, crowns, cornices, window trims, why doors are eight feet high or 10 feet high--you’re just dissecting all the time. Which is good, because it gives you an idea of how to make it relate to a project you have.”
Jeannette’s eyes light up at the prospect of working on the Koontz house, which he says will be “completely authentic” Italian Renaissance. Genuine carving and statuary, rather than molds, will be used for the ornate style throughout, and the building relief work will be accomplished with real stonework rather than wood framing.
Called the Palazzo Rospo by Koontz (in a reference to “Wind in the Willows”), the house, complete with two-story library and staff garage, is due to be completed by 1999. Four members of Jeannette’s staff will spend about 4,000 hours on the project’s technical drawings alone.
Although Jeannette enjoys being pushed to such heights by his clients, he says he strives for a balance both in his firm’s work and in how he uses his time.
Office phones are often used for volunteer work that Bonnie Jeannette organizes, including fund-raising for homeless shelters, abortion rights activism, food and blood drives, and produce picking with Orange County Harvest.
As a member of Temple Bat Yahm of Newport Beach, Jeannette joins his wife in these and other unpaid projects, such as his months of design work on the Jewish Federation complex.
As he inspects the site, which will include a preschool, Hebrew school, senior citizen center and offices, he is greeted fondly by the office staff and contractors.
“I can’t imagine doing anything other than this,” Jeannette says as he views the plans for the complex. “I have to say it’s the best job in the world, and the great thing is, it’s a family affair. We have to pinch ourselves often.”
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Brion S. Jeannette
Age: 48.
Native: Yes--born in Los Angeles; raised in Bellflower; lives in Newport Beach.
Family: Married to Bonnie; two sons, Jeff, 24, and Erik, 22.
Passions: Trout fishing, camping, traveling, skiing, running.
His biggest disappointment: After his firm was selected over dozens of others to design the UC Irvine chancellor’s house, the project was terminated because of funding problems and concerns over gnatcatcher habitat.
On remodeling and marriages: “We’ve only had one case that actually resulted in a divorce. Unless you really know how to handle not only the clients but the contractors . . . some people can just go sideways on you. I didn’t get training in marriage counseling in college. My job is to make sure that we level off these sticky or messy areas and get everyone working in the same direction.”
On working closely with family members: “Architecture is fluent in our house. It’s impossible to turn off. Bonnie is instrumental in the business; she understands it. She’s as absorbed as I am. Now, watching Jeff mature as an architect is extremely satisfying. We’re all in the industry in some sense.”
