Ready, Set, Home

George Monroe’s life is a mess. He’s divorced, living alone and despised by his teenage son, who is about to come for the summer. His neighbors think he’s a loser, and colleagues at work agree. Only his golden Lab, Guster, loves him. Sound like a movie plot? Welcome to New Line Cinema’s “Life as a House” (opening Oct. 26 and starring Kevin Kline and Kristen Scott Thomas), in which George Monroe’s living quarters are as central to the story as George himself.

Production designer Dennis Washington created both the character’s ramshackle cliff-side dwelling, which metaphorically represents George’s chaotic life, and the dream house George builds in its place once he determines to get his life on track. Washington, an accomplished and much sought-after Hollywood designer, has about 30 art-directing and production-design notches on his film belt, among them “Thirteen Days,” “Dante’s Peak” and “Prizzi’s Honor.” Before working on films, he studied architecture at UCLA and Los Angeles Trade Technical College and spent several summers helping his contractor dad build custom houses in Beverly Hills. His hands-on construction knowledge came in handy for creating the upscale ocean-side community of homes the set required. One of the first decisions that Washington and director Irwin Winkler, who co-produced the film with Rob Cowan, had to make was about the location for George’s house. Long Point on the Palos Verdes peninsula, site of the shuttered Marineland Aquarium, with its breathtaking seaside view and dramatic cliffs, proved ideal. “We toyed with the idea of going into an existing neighborhood, then decided to create our own,” says Washington. “It’s one thing to go into a community for a day or two, another if you’re there for two months.” The area’s mature foliage helped clinch the deal. “It saved us from hauling in huge palms and other large, wind-swept trees,” says the designer, who used an existing road as part of the cul-de-sac neighborhood surrounding George’s house. In addition to adding lawns, walkways and mailboxes, Washington planted more foliage and flowers--”all the small things that make a tony street seem real.”

To create the dilapidated 1920s clapboard house George had lived in for 20 years took all the tricks of Hollywood set design. “When you want to build a derelict building, you have to build it as it would have been constructed originally, then age it,” he explains. “Everything had to look real so that when it’s pulled apart, you see aging studs, old paint that’s seeped through cracks in the walls, rusty nail marks and years of accumulated dust.” The designer had two-by-fours milled and rough cut for a “hairy finish” to reflect its scraggly bearded inhabitant. Interior walls were filled with dirt that had been sifted so it was powdery. The dirt was then hidden in walls and atop rafters to create realistic clouds released when George and son Sam (Hayden Christensen) take sledgehammers to the place.

According to Washington, it took a week of 12-hour days to achieve the “alligatored” patina of the 80-year-old shack. A labor-intensive 10-step process involving stains, sealers and wire brushes resulted in a structure that appeared authentic in its decay. “We wanted it to look as if it had been painted many times over the years, just as a very old house would have been.” For George’s dream house, which the character builds after a midlife epiphany, Washington decided on a modern Green & Green Craftsman style “that was warm, charming and had the quality and care of craftsmanship about it,” explains Washington. “George has spent a lifetime accumulating the materials and is finally building his dream home at the same time he rebuilds his life.” The post-and-beam construction of the Craftsman style proved ideal. Eighty percent of the structure could be pre-built and pre-finished, then put up quickly like a kit, according to the production designer, whose crew assembled and disassembled the house twice over a 10-week period. “The first time [we put it together] we wanted to make sure everything fit, then we disassembled and numbered pieces and began to partially rebuild it, setting up schedules for action and sequences that made sense for the actors working on ‘building’ it along the way.” Sometimes multiple takes weren’t possible, says Washington. For example, a scene where father and son are dismantling the shack’s porch, which would have taken an entire day to rebuild, required that the actors do the scene in one take in order to stay on schedule.

In addition, Washington designed four other houses for the street to reflect the upscale homes that had grown up around the shack. “They’re pretty much movie-set facades,” says the designer. “We used conventional wood and plaster with regular doors and hinges for the most part, although some of the windows are plastic rather than glass, for safety reasons. But there’s nothing much inside except some curtains and a chandelier or two.” Like George’s digs, the houses reflect the characters who live in them. His egotistical neighbor gets a neoclassical palazzo, another a ubiquitous Mediterranean typical of Southern California, while his sympathetic next-door neighbor, Colleen Beck, played by Mary Steenburgen, lives in a Cape Cod cottage. “We wanted her house to contrast with his, but not be eye-catching enough to distract from it.” And how does it feel to build an entire street of homes, and then demolish it a mere 10 weeks later in a matter of hours? “I’m used to it,” Washington says. “Besides, it will always exist on film.”