Hay! That’s an Idea

Linda Sullivan has infinite patience and passion for things she likes--and near-zero tolerance for almost everything else. A small army of architects, designers and craftspeople--all hired and fired as Sullivan built her home--can attest to that.

What Sullivan likes, residentially speaking, is 200-year-old Vermont barns. She now lives in two of them, conjoined by a 38-foot-tall silo. This is not the usual habitat for hill-dwellers above Ventura Boulevard in the west San Fernando Valley. It’s not usual anywhere in L.A., where expensive homes are often worn, like gowns at the Oscars, as gaudy signatures of status.

Sullivan’s barns are just the opposite. From the street, you don’t know they’re there. From the outside of what looks like her simple gray house with red trim, you can’t tell that it is one of the most unique and ambitious residential structures in all of Los Angeles.

Once inside, you quickly get the picture. It’s a trip back in time to 1800, when two sturdy farmers settled near each other in Vermont, close to Canada’s border. To build their barns, they trudged to the nearby forests and chopped down 90-foot-tall cedar and fir trees.

Then they hacked and whittled at the huge timbers, creating posts and beams that locked together, without a single nail, in the manner of a child’s Lincoln Logs. Each piece fit so precisely and tightly into one another that the two barns would stand solid and useful through two centuries of howling blizzards and searing summers.

Such a rough-hewn place--vast, silent and sheltering--was where Sullivan had always fantasized she could live.

“It’s been with me forever,” Sullivan says, straining to recall childhood travels with her parents, when she first encountered the serenity of barns lit by slivers of sunlight and smelling of timber mixed with new-mown hay. And, of course, she associates barns with animals, “all species of which I adore.”

But she never dreamed she’d get the opportunity.

Disaster Forced Her to Make a Change

Fast forward to 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994. Sullivan is asleep in the rambling 1950s ranch on 4 1/2 acres where she has lived for 20 years. Suddenly, the Orient Express seems to be crashing through her living room with unearthly roars and rumbles. When Sullivan, who is divorced, realizes it is an earthquake and not a dream, she quickly phones to check on her loved ones--and check in with her contractor, Michael Russo.

Russo remembers it well. Awakened in his Palos Verdes home, he heard Sullivan hollering “Help!” and begging him to come over. He was in her driveway by 6 a.m., and he knew immediately, he says: The house, which he had just spent seven months improving, and on which Sullivan had just lavished a half-million dollars to achieve subtle increments of perfection, was literally split in half. Like Humpty Dumpty, it could not be put together again.

After a mighty duel with her insurance company, in which Sullivan reportedly won about $3 million, and a period of mourning for the ruined house she had loved so much (she had purchased it from the family who originally settled the property and built the house), she decided not to attempt to clone it. She’d build a barn instead.

Architects were hired to begin developing plans while scouts traveled the Vermont countryside. They found two working barns in perfect condition, which Sullivan purchased. She then hired Vermont experts to diagram and dismantle the barns, numbering each piece of wood so the barns could be reassembled.

The tons of wood, and the slate roofs that had topped them, were carefully transported by flatbed truck to the San Fernando Valley.

Meanwhile, another cadre of specialists toiled in L.A. to formulate plans to make Sullivan’s barn-house structurally impervious to any natural disaster.

“If there’s ever another earthquake, Sullivan’s house is where I want to be,” says Russo, a third-generation builder.

To understand what Russo calls “the enormity of this project,” he explains that the barn-house stands on a foundation topped by a truss floor joist (similar to the ones used to support bridges), which is topped by a platform, above which the floor of the house is built. The foundation consists of 57 caissons, 36 inches in diameter, going 60 feet down into the ground. These are webbed together with 750 cubic yards of structural concrete, which is approximately the equivalent of what would be used to build the foundations for about 10 homes, Russo says.

The barns arrived in neatly stacked pieces, each of which was tested for existing problems and treated to prevent future ones. The wood passed all tests with flying colors. But the multitude of architects and designers, who’d been working on plans for what to do with it, did not.

“They just didn’t get what I wanted,” Sullivan says. “So I got rid of them.” Ditto for the interior specialists who’d been assigned to come up with ideas for dividing the barns into living spaces.

“They wouldn’t listen to me,” Sullivan says. “So I got rid of them too.”

Free Rein to Make History

By the time construction started, on Aug. 1, 1995, Sullivan had dispatched all the specialists she had hired, except for the foundation experts--and contractor Russo.

Russo would listen, she knew from working with him before. She describes him as a man of integrity and intelligence and a “straight shooter.” They would build the barn-house together, she decided, with Russo in charge of the project, authorized to bring in all consulting experts as needed.

That was perfect for Russo, 58, who learned construction from his grandfather and father--and who is contractor-of-choice for many of L.A.’s old families. He says he had no trouble recruiting the finest talent: “This project was so seductive, so intriguing, such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that I had top people calling and asking to participate.”

To this day, he says, he gets calls from colleagues who want to know exactly how it was done and asking to see the finished product. He gives talks at the house to groups about once a month. A few weeks ago, Daniel Drackett, an heir to the family-owned chemical firm that made Windex and Drano, flew to Los Angeles from Ohio to tour Sullivan’s house. Drackett has bought five Vermont barns that he plans to convert into living quarters in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Every once in a while, Russo refers to Sullivan’s place as “our house,” meaning only that it was a true collaboration. Of Sullivan, he says: “She is a woman who knew what she wanted, had the money to do it, and who allowed me to run it the way it should be run. That is very, very rare.”

Working with drawings and wooden scale models, Russo arrived at the final configuration: a 7,000-square-foot house with three bedrooms (the master suite is 2,000 square feet) and four baths. The house is composed of an east-west living barn and north-south bedroom barn seamlessly linked together by the entry hall (silo) with 10-foot-tall double-entry doors.

The beauty of the final plan is that the house can feel cozy enough for a couple but is actually capacious enough for a family with two or three children. A gem-like two-story guest cottage (1,500 square feet), just a few feet from the main house, is what many would consider adequate for a permanent residence.

Look up anywhere in the main house, and you see the 37-foot-high original barn ceilings. In a space above them are hidden the home’s electrical wiring, a complete fire sprinkler system, and the air conditioning and heating systems. Above that space is a sturdy new roof, topped by the antique slate shingles from the original barns.

All the outside walls--which are 12 inches thick--are of new cedar siding, with the old barn structure tied securely to the new exterior structure. If the barns were removed totally, Russo explains, you would have a completely functional, ready-to-use house.

“It’s sort of like an airplane, with an impervious outer skin that functions independently of the interior,” he says.

The house has many sophisticated built-in economies: four heating and air conditioning systems make it possible to heat or cool any part independent of the others. It is so well insulated, he adds, that it can be cooled or heated quickly, and it will remain that way.

It took one year and two months--and about $5 million--to build the house. On Oct. 9, 1996, Sullivan moved in. During those 14 months, Russo says, Sullivan was with him at the construction site from four to eight hours a day. That allowed the pair to settle questions on the spot.

Sullivan says she enjoyed almost every minute of it--”but I would never do it again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of project.”

Final Touches Drawn From Nature

There were some interesting moments along the way, she recalls.

“I ordered a white kitchen, which Mike said I’d hate. After it was installed, I realized he was right. I said, ‘Tear it out, and let’s start again.’ ” A kitchen designer and custom woodworkers collaborated on the final version.

At one point, Sullivan saw some unused barn wood.

“Let’s build my bed out of that,” she said. Within two hours it was done. Her bedside tables are actually antique steel dog cages; her bedroom TV is hidden inside a huge, faux tin trash can, created by a local artisan to her specifications. The lid raises, along with the TV itself, at the click of the TV remote control.

“Where else does a TV belong?” she asks, with a smile.

Sullivan had no need to put her glass-top dining table on industrial rubber wheels, in case of another quake. But she did it anyway.

“I just like the idea that it would roll or bounce instead of breaking,” she says.

She has furnished her house with the same sense of humor, with arts and crafts collected over a lifetime. A glittery larger-than-life evening dress, made entirely of beer bottle tops, is suspended on a hanger from a ceiling beam in her bedroom. She purchased the sculpture from an art student in the Midwest.

But most evident throughout the house is Sullivan’s love of nature: animals crafted of clay, wood, porcelain and fabric roam on the grass, inhabit the luxuriant trees, relax in (or on) her furniture.

The barn wood itself is the most significant symbol of her passion for things made by nature.

“The wood is alive,” she says, “it changes with the seasons, and you can actually watch it continuing to mature.” She walks to a favorite post in the living room and points out the beauty of the markings. “It will outlast all of us.”

A source close to the barn project reports that Sullivan placed a time capsule deep in the earth during construction. It is supposed to contain information about the property, photos of the original house built on it, and an explanation of the barn-house--a history lesson for future generations. Sullivan would not comment on the capsule. And Russo would only say that “the whole house is a treasure trove of the unexpected--as is Linda Sullivan herself.”

Bettijane Levine may be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.