A Touch of Viejo Mexico : After moving into their Lemon Heights home, a 1929 Monterrey-style <i> casita, </i> the Pearsons built a 3,600-square-foot house next door. The aesthetics are complementary, with the distinctive work of artisans adding character inside and out.
It is its imperfections that help make the Pearson home so distinctive, that confirm its ties to a time when the touch of human hands rather than the precision of machinery brought a house to life.
The home, atop a hill in Lemon Heights, is built in the style of Old Mexico. Like its residents, it is comfortable moving between the cultures of Mexico and the United States, between old and new.
A small sign reading “Casita de la Cuesta” (Little House on the Hill) is at the foot of the long, narrow brick driveway leading to the red-tile and white-stucco house. On both sides of the driveway are brightly flowered hibiscus trees and shrubs. The entrance to the home is through two massive wooden doors.
Patricia and Robert Pearson and their children, Julia and Bobby, make their home here, surrounded by hand-plastered walls and family heirlooms from Guadalajara, where Patricia grew up.
When the Pearsons bought the property 15 years ago, they moved into the casita, a 1,400-square-foot home built in 1929 as a guest house for another home higher on the hill. Eleven years ago, they built a new 3,600-square-foot house next door to the smaller one; Patricia’s mother now lives in the casita.
The new home was designed to complement the smaller house, which was built Monterrey-style.
“Monterrey-style means that the kitchen and living room are downstairs, but there is no internal stairwell,” explains Patricia Pearson. “You have to go outside and upstairs to get to the bedrooms.”
Although the new house is not Monterrey-style, the aesthetics are the same, says Robert Pearson.
“We kept to the tile roof, the double-thick walls,” he says. “Plus we had to work within the constraints of the narrow, pie-shaped lot” that was once part of a larger property.
The home reflects styles that left a deep impression on Patricia in her childhood.
“My father was a silver miner from California who met my mother in Honduras when he was living there. He married her and brought her to live in California until 1960. We then moved to Guadalajara when my father started to do business there,” says Patricia Pearson.
The company he started is the exclusive distributor in the United States for balloons from a Guadalajara factory that is the largest balloon manufacturer in the world. Patricia Pearson and her brother and sister still run the company their father founded nearly 30 years ago.
“It’s when I was living in Mexico that I came to love the Mexican colonial style of design,” she says. “I’ve converted my husband to this look that’s Mexican influenced by the French.”
The French influence on Mexican architecture, art and furniture in the late 1800s is associated with the short rule of Archduke Maximilian of Austria and his wife, Carlota, placed on the Mexican throne in 1861 at the behest of Napoleon III. Although Maximilian was shot in 1867, the influence of this ill-fated couple can still be felt in some areas of Mexico.
“The furniture has been in our family for years and was hand-carved in Guadalajara from nogal wood and then rubbed with motor oil to give it a luster,” says Patricia Pearson. “This Mexican colonial furniture has softer lines and more carving than other types of Mexican furniture.”
In the Pearsons’ living room, which vibrates with bold colors from Guatemalan fabrics, there are two antique side chairs from Guadalajara, a hand-carved wooden statue of the Virgin of Zapopan and a side table of nogal wood with a crack in it beneath a tin-framed Mexican mirror.
“Guadalajara is over 5,000 feet high, so the wood stays together there. Our tables have cracks in them because they’re at a lower altitude, so the wood reacts differently,” says Robert Pearson.
In the dining room are a hand-carved buffet holding Mexican pewter and a table and chairs from Mexico. The free-standing fireplace opens onto both the living room and the dining room. Over it on the dining room side is a painting by Mexican artist Jose Maria Servin.
The kitchen floor is made of Mexican pavers, while brightly colored weavings by the Huichole Indians adorn the walls.
All the tiles in the kitchen and the bathrooms come from Azulejos Teco on Calle Independencia in Tijuana.
“We spent two days there getting the tiles and the sinks,” recalls Patricia Pearson. “You can go to Tijuana and pick tiles already made, or you can tell them what you want and they’ll customize them for you. For example, we wanted the tree-of-life design in our bathroom, so we took a picture down and showed it to them. They re-created it on tile, numbered it, and then we had our artisan install it.”
A number of craftsmen put their talents to work in the home; often the Pearsons worked alongside.
“We were down in Tijuana looking for tile when we found out that a company called Marcos S.A. right on [Avenida] Revolucion has the contract to do all the big doors for the Catholic churches in Southern California,” says Robert Pearson. “So we got them to do ours.”
On both sides of the doors is cantera stone from Guadalajara.
“They are fossilized stones,” Pearson says. “They came up from Mexico in boxes all numbered and lettered since they were cut to our measurements. Then we had to take a masonry saw and trim them and put them together.”
One of the craftsmen actually lived on-site for six months. He was an accomplished tile setter, plasterer and roofer from Tijuana.
“He came and lived with us in the guest house for six months while he lathed and plastered the whole house. Every day he’d be up with the sunrise out here working,” says Pearson.
It is this obvious handcrafting that gives the house an authentic Old Mexico feeling.
“You know how when you go to Mexico, you walk the streets and there are just doors and you don’t really know what is behind them?” Patricia Pearson says. “I lived in an old Mexican colonial house in the city of Zapopan above Guadalajara that my parents restored that was one of those special houses.
“I loved that house, and that was the inspiration for this one.”
