Oasis Slated for Storage : Company’s Plan for Building to Topple Tarzana Statuary Business

Diane Phillips built a little paradise on Ventura Boulevard. But in a classic California twist, it was destined to be a paradise lost.

And now, “God’s little acre,” as one devotee calls it, is slated to be bulldozed for a public storage building.

The paradise in question is a business called Garden Statuary, located on a busy section of Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. Myrtle trees, pines and wisteria cover the property--a hushed domain of concrete goddesses and nymphs--and for 50 years a local landmark.

“It’s beautiful,” said neighbor Robert Heller. “It’s like a little oasis in the Valley.”

Phillips, 82, started the concrete-statue business in 1946, raised three children in a house on the property and always hoped she would pass it on to her grandchildren.

But the property ended up being purchased by Glendale-based Public Storage Inc., which plans to build a public storage facility on the site.

The story of how the statuary business’ founding family relinquished the homestead is perhaps nothing remarkable among family businesses, which often flounder in the second generation.

But this one has a peculiarly California spin: After cultivating the business when Tarzana was just a stretch of walnut groves, Phillips’ dream was lost in the whirl of dream-making that came with the Los Angeles real estate boom of the 1980s.

In a collision of opportunism and sentiment, her son, Dennis Dallugge, courted a developer to cash in on the land value, then got entangled in a disastrous legal battle because he didn’t want the trees that he had loved since boyhood cut down.

Phillips, who lives in Solvang, tries not to think about it now. “I just closed my mind to the whole thing. It’s too much tragedy.”

She’s not the only one to mourn the passing of the business. The current operators, Don and Judy Buksar, would like to keep it going. But because they own the business but not the property, they must move out upon being notified by Public Storage.

Some neighbors want city officials to preserve the site. The statuary business “is one of the last pieces of the old Valley . . . you want to hang on to one little piece,” said Daniel Green, city zoning administrator.

Phillips bought the property for about $5,000, and ran the business with her first husband, Rudolph Dallugge, she said. Back then, the area was scarcely inhabited.

In 1965, Dennis Dallugge, now 52, and brother Gary Dallugge, 55, took over and made the business highly successful.

The concrete statues were coveted by a host of new homeowners in the Valley, particularly by wealthy ones in the hills nearby. Celebrities stopped in, and the brothers soon grossed half a million dollars a year.

But when the 1980s hit, the temptation to cash in on the property’s skyrocketing value became irresistible, they said.

About that time, Dennis Dallugge also started taking drugs and drinking, he said.

He soon dropped out of the business he worked so hard to build, he said, adding: “My brother was running it, and he got fed up. I was just coming in to get money and go out and party again.”

Meanwhile, the family was deluged with offers. Someone offered them more than $2 million. Then someone else offered more than $3 million, Dennis Dallugge said.

hers began to let the business slide. “Already we were spoiled with the money we were going to get,” Dennis Dallugge said.

Eventually, family members entered into negotiations with Dennis Bass, a developer who asked for a ground lease of the property for up to 75 years to build a shopping center on it, according to court documents. At the time, ground leases were a popular alternative to purchasing property, and seemed to offer a means of keeping the statuary property in the family.

But just as the family was about to cash in on the deal, which would have netted them a $300,000 down payment and several thousand dollars per month for years to come, Dennis Dallugge balked.

Bass planned to cut down nearly all the trees, he said, so he refused to sign the final lease.

Bass sued, charging in court papers that Dallugge’s actions cost him thousands of dollars in pre-construction financing. The result was a legal judgment against Dallugge in 1989.

The damages were so great that Dallugge’s share of the property was foreclosed on by Bass, said Dallugge. Dennis Menke, attorney for Bass, confirmed these events.

Family members’ dreams of a giant windfall were fast fading. In the flurry of legal battles that followed, they racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, Gary Dallugge said.

The statuary business was transferred to the Buksars, who were family acquaintances.

The brothers’ parents, meanwhile, had split up. Diane Phillips remarried.

By then, the dizzying real estate market had peaked. No shopping center was built. Bass’ portion of the property was transferred to another developer.

Last January, the developer and Phillips, who still owned a part, agreed to sell the property, which has an assessed value of about $1.6 million, to Public Storage--”the first buyer who came along,” according to Marlene Dallugge, Phillips’ daughter.

Public Storage promises that the facility it plans there “will look like no storage facility you have ever seen,” said Jeff Stephens of CCA Associates, a consultant for the company.

The building will look like an office building, “and you will not see any orange doors,” he said.

Today, Marlene Dallugge is hoping she can still save the family house by moving it. But she knows there is little hope of saving the trees and the garden.

“We will never see that [real estate] boom again, and thank God,” she said. “It ruined a lot of things.”