Painting the Town

You’d think that this would be a city of color, since the very idea of Los Angeles--part Mexico, part Mediterranean, part Southeast Asia, part Central America--conjures up a kaleidoscopic landscape. True, if you look down from any of our hills, whether in Silver Lake or Ladera Heights or from Mulholland Drive, you see a metropolis brushed with swaths of green foliage and splattered with terra cotta. Yet at ground level, aside from murals, the odd Victorian or the Pacific Design Center, the joy of--what should one call it? Multi-colorism?--remains hidden.

So I decided to search for polychrome houses. My standard, though, was strict: they had to have at least four colors and could not be a “Painted Lady” (a tarted-up Victorian). An exceedingly difficult quest. In Silver Lake, I found a gray, sea green, blood red, blue-violet house called Mosswood. With four colors, it technically fit my specs, but the house was way too somber. In East Los Angeles, I spotted a number of houses with two or three colors, but none with four. And forget about Bel-Air, Hancock Park and Culver City. I did discover that Mosswood’s former owners, Sandra Golvin and Nazira de Marchi, had recently bought a duplex in Venice--”a gray and white box,” says Golvin. “It had no personality.” Now, with pale ochre walls, lavender doors, white window frames, lettuce green and deep coral trim, the house preens and struts. In Golvin’s words, the colors reveal “the box’s true character.”

Architecturally, Pam Klein and Bob Giacosie’s 1930s one-story home in South Carthay would be classified as a hybrid of Spanish Colonial Revival and Deco. Except that this doesn’t capture what the house looks like since they had it painted terra cotta, aquamarine, beryl, fuchsia, bougainvillea orange, taupe, black and pansy purple. (And that’s only on the outside; inside there are 26 more colors.) The house now resembles a matron dressed up for carnival in the Caribbean.

I then came upon a 10-color house in Mid-Wilshire, a two-story 1930s stucco that’s the home of furniture designer Harry Segil. It feels like a tropical bird straight out of a Henri Rousseau painting. Walls: Pepto-Bismol pink, sunshine yellow and cornflower blue. Eaves: Mint green with pink gutters. Balcony: Blue with purple-pink-teal-yellow-hot-red columns. Garage: Pink, blue and yellow. And the front door: Yellow and white chevrons with two-tone blue insets framed in red glitter. “In other parts of the world,” says Segil, who immigrated to Los Angeles from South Africa, “it’s not unusual to find colorful homes, but in our society, it’s not considered good taste. People think that color is only for playrooms and kids.”