Compund Interest

For actor Orson Bean, the kitchen is the place to be.

For years, he had noticed that the kitchen is where everybody hangs out when there is a party, and Bean has always liked a good party.

And, so, soon after he married actress Alley Mills, they built a kitchen large enough for a grand piano--large enough, in fact, to be a house.

That’s because before the kitchen became a kitchen, it was a house. With two bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen and living room in 1,200 square feet, it was the smaller of two Venice houses that Bean owned before he and Mills were married in 1993.

That was a good year for Bean and Mills.

It was the year he landed the plum role of frontier storekeeper Loren Bray in the CBS western series “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” starring Jane Seymour.

And Mills, who played the mother on the ABC sitcom “The Wonder Years” (1988-1993), got the recurring part of Marjorie, Dr. Quinn’s sister.

About the same time, the newlyweds connected his two Venice houses with a glass walkway and gutted the smaller house, turning it into one room: the kitchen, with a stove and a refrigerator at one end, a couple of couches and the grand piano at the other. The small kitchen in the 2,400-square-foot house next door became an entry hall.

“Now Alley plays show tunes every night, and I sing,” Bean said. And they don’t have to worry about bothering the neighbors, because, as Bean put it, “we are the neighbors.”

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After they were married, Mills bought two more houses. So now the couple has a compound of four homes, built side by side during the 1920s.

“We love the little old cottages on the canals,” he said.

He was drawn to the area about 20 years ago, when he bought his first house there for $113,000.

He was living in New York at the time, making a living as a stand-up comic, Broadway actor and game-show panelist. Bean, now 70, moved to Venice in 1984.

Seven years ago, he bought his second house. “A friend of mine owned it, and I said, ‘Sell it to me,’ ” he recalled. Three of his four grown children were living in that house when he met Mills.

“When I met him, Orson was sleeping like a hermit in this little room,” she said, stepping into her meditation room near the glass walkway to the kitchen. Mills is a Buddhist.

She and Bean met at an evening of play readings for new authors. “I thought she was a fox,” Bean said of Mills, who is in her mid-40s.

When they met, she had just purchased a house in Hancock Park. “But we’re old hippies, and it was too big and formal for him,” she said.

“So she sold at a loss and moved in with me,” Bean explained.

After Mills sold her house in Hancock Park, she eventually bought the other two houses in the couple’s Venice compound. Each, except the first house, cost upward of $400,000, Bean remembered.

“They’re the kind of places most people rip down,” he said, “but we restored them and made the one house into one big room.”

It is their favorite room, the room where they spend the most time, except in the winter, when they frequently light a fire in their den and watch “The Simpsons” or read.

But even during the winter, they entertain at home and often have cast parties in their kitchen, which opens onto a canal.

“We go outside, throw some burgers on the grill and watch the [annual] boat parade,” Bean said.

Their sizable yard is filled with plants and flowers. “Alley is my gardener,” Bean said.

Mills also has an interest in art. While studying art history and drama at Yale, she discovered a lost painting by Frederick Church in the university’s cellar. The painting later sold for $1.5 million.

One of the paintings on the kitchen walls is a portrait of Bean by Venice artist Mike Alatza.

Nearby is such memorabilia as a life-size Frankenstein, which Mills bought for Bean on his birthday after he admired it in the window of a toy shop in Santa Monica.

“I always identified with Frankenstein because as a kid, I never got the girl,” he said.

Bean also has a stuffed life-size lion like one he bought for his young children at FAO Schwartz in New York for about $350 when, he said, he rarely had more than $25 in his pocket.

“His kids bought a new lion for him a few years ago, because the first one was threadbare,” Mills said. “They rode on it and played with it while they were growing up.” Bean’s children range in age from 26 to 33.

When family or friends come for an overnight visit, there is plenty of room in the compound with Mills’ additions.

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She bought the fourth house last year as a buffer against development or as “protection,” as she expressed it, “to keep someone from building there.” She rents out that house.

But she bought the third house strictly for guests and as a place for Bean to write.

Bean has written several books and adapted “A Christmas Carol” for the stage. He starred in the play, produced by Mills, over the holidays at the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice. He also has a leading role in the movie “On Being John Malkovich,” starring Cameron Diaz and John Cusack. The film is expected to be released this fall.

Among his books are his autobiography, “Too Much Is Not Enough”; the humorous “Me and the Orgone: One Man’s Sexual Revolution”; and “25 Ways to Cook a Mouse: Whisker-Licking Recipes for Your Gourmet Cat” (Carol Publishing, 1993).

Bean and Mills have two cats, Warlord and Lulu, who also seem to enjoy the kitchen and its grand piano. “When we go there to unwind, our cats love the music,” Bean said.