Mere Real Estate It Is Not
Crosby Doe started his career in real estate by knocking on doors. He cruised the tamed hillsides of Hollywood, where residential surprises, good and bad, lay around every switchback. One day he’d discover a little witchypoo cottage nestled between a neo-Palladian villa and a crumbling stucco hacienda. Another excursion would take him past mansions festooned like wedding cakes, only to arrive at a perfectly disciplined Craftsman bungalow. One spring afternoon in 1974, he parked his red Rover sedan in Nichols Canyon, across from a sleek, flat-roofed box of a house with glass walls. He recognized it as the work of Richard Neutra, the Viennese architect whose style of California Modernism has become a brand around the world.
Doe knocked on the spruce wood door, more excited by the prospect of seeing the home’s interior than worried about meeting rejection. A dapper, soft-spoken man of average height with a sandy pompadour and a groomed mustache, Doe wouldn’t be the type to startle an unsuspecting homeowner. After spending a few hours with the owner, choreographer Eugene Loring, who’d lived in the house since it was completed in 1958, he persuaded Loring to let him sell the house. It was Doe’s first listing, and it sold for $100,000.
That was before real estate prices joined plastic surgery and box office grosses as a fail-safe small talk topic. Before a star architect’s name on a house could carry as much currency as a Hollywood pedigree. Before the 1990s, when international tastemakers like Gucci designer Tom Ford would scour Los Angeles for the right Neutra, ultimately paying $2 million for a place in Bel-Air he would spend more than a year restoring. It was just before Doe invented a marketing niche, concentrating on historic and architecturally significant properties. It has become his life’s great cause, a focus that is as much crusade as business, and which has helped preserve the landscape of Los Angeles.
“I was considered a kook at the beginning, because a lot of architectural styles that have become popular weren’t appreciated then,” Doe says. Yet in the years since he began tracking down houses listed in a Los Angeles County Museum of Art guide from the ‘60s, a number of competitors who once just thought he’d come up with a useful gimmick have also taken to calling themselves mavens.
Most active among them is Barry Sloane, an Australian-born television director and producer who bought two homes from Doe, then decided to make a career change. The pair are now gentlemanly rivals who’ve benefited from the steadily growing interest in mid-century Modernism.
No other American city markets its fine architecture with such vigor and scholarship. George Ballantyne, executive vice president of Sotheby’s International Realty in New England, has a graduate degree in architectural history and sells many historic properties, but that’s inevitable in his area, he says, where the bulk of luxury homes was built before 1900. Leave it to L.A. to elevate all that is stylish and quirky, to put architects’ names above the title, so to speak. “Six rooms, ocean view” becomes “Gregory Ain beauty in the hills.”
“People who really care about architecture go to Crosby, because he’s the most knowledgeable,” says Julius Shulman, the 91-year-old photographer whose architectural photographs have become iconic. “Barry is serious, too. But the other firms who are calling themselves architectural specialists just followed Crosby’s lead. He was a genuine pioneer, and because of him a lot of the high-quality Modernist architecture has come back.”
Ron Radziner, a partner in the Santa Monica-based architectural firm Marmol & Radziner, which specializes in restoring modern homes, says, “They have helped build the appreciation for the wonderful private architecture in this city. It isn’t always about money for them. They care.” Doe, 55, and Sloane, 53, serve as high priests to a congregation of true believers, devout preservationists who recognize that Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of distinguished domestic architecture in the country. The cognoscenti have heard all the snide cliches: that there is no respect for history here; that whatever culture exists is disposable; that there is a lot of taste in Los Angeles, all of it bad. Sitting in a serene Bauhaus showplace or behind the Andalusian gates of a sublime Moorish estate, they know better.
They understand that Doe and Sloane are businessmen. But they’re also grateful that these specialty real estate agents and the proud buyers who shun nouveau starter castles on the Westside to seek out hidden treasures in Silver Lake, Pasadena and Los Feliz have become custodians of L.A.’s unique heritage.
David Zander, the managing partner of MJZ, a music video and commercial production company, was a New York transplant who found real estate in Los Angeles so underwhelming when he moved west in 1991 that he lived at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for three years. Doe and Zander had been house-hunting for six months when, in 1996, Doe invited him to look at La Miniatura, a 1923 Frank Lloyd Wright textile block house in Pasadena that Sloane was selling.
“There isn’t an ounce of bull in Crosby,” Zander says. “He said, ‘David, this is one of the great houses in L.A., but it needs work.’ Good old Crosby changed my life. He opened my eyes to the architecture in L.A. and in the world.”
Zander is undertaking a four-year, $4-million restoration of La Miniatura with Marmol & Radziner. “Crosby had an instinct that I would be a good baby-sitter for this house. He knows how maniacal I am. Every bolt, every screw will be replaced. When this restoration is done, it will last another 200 or 300 years, and that’s a good thing.”
When Doe found his calling, Los Angeles was at the beginning of an unprecedented real estate boom, a period when homeowners throughout the city would see prices increase 20% a year. (A late ‘80s joke went that you could guess someone’s net worth in L.A. if you knew the year they’d bought their house.) Like many bright ideas, Doe’s notion that good design could be a valuable sales tool was forehead-smackingly simple. It was also the right concept for this city, where single-family homes have always been more plentiful than apartment buildings, where a mild climate made the dream of indoor-outdoor living possible and a frontier spirit fostered stylistic adventurousness.
“There was always an openness in Los Angeles that encouraged breaking away from traditional, cluttered spaces,” says architectural historian Alastair Gordon. “In California in the 20th century, Modernist architects were defining a new American vernacular. It was a culture in which you could pretty much exercise your fantasies in a way you couldn’t in many other parts of the country, and that was reflected in people’s homes.”
The classic Spanish house Doe and his wife, Linda, have lived in since 1981 could inspire any number of daydreams. Built in 1927 by an oilman who claimed to have been an Indian scout, it sits atop a knoll above Lake Hollywood, in command of vistas to the ocean, downtown and the San Gabriel mountains. The only blight on the view is Madonna’s former house, less than a hundred yards to the southeast. Doe sold that house, a grand 1924 John de Lario Spanish known as Castillo del Lago, to three successive buyers who worked to gradually restore it. Then Madonna and her decorator brother got their hands on it and, according to Doe, “molested” it.
A perfectionist who would prefer not to have air conditioning in his house rather than defile its architecture, Doe harbors unbridled contempt for interior designers and homeowners who don’t respect the integrity of a house.
“I grew up in Pasadena, which was full of fine houses,” he says. “When I decided to specialize in historic and architecturally important houses, something clicked. Renovation should be banned from the vocabulary. Half my career has been trying to get people to put houses back the way they were meant to be. When clients have done their own thing, to the detriment of a house, I feel I’ve failed.”
For several years, Doe tried to sell his idea to a big, established firm. None got it, so in 1980 he and fellow architecture buff Michael Deasy, who had a master’s degree in city planning from Yale, and David Mossler, who’d worked as a talent agent, founded Mossler, Deasy & Doe. The Beverly Hills-based company now has 15 associates, three of them architects, and they handle a range of homes. Their calling card is that they maintain a database of 3,500 homes they consider architecturally significant. A few agents who once worked with Doe left to extend their mentor’s franchise.
“It makes what I do tougher, because we’re all dealing with a limited supply,” he says. “But the competition is good, and we all work together. If there are people out there who think these houses are important enough to be treated as a separate market, it’s better for the houses.”
Doe and Sloane have heard the same wish list from prospective buyers so often they could recite it in their sleep. “What I really want is a mid-century box with walls of glass by a good architect with a city view and a pool,” say clients who have dreams of living in a black-and-white Shulman photograph. Only three of the Frank Lloyd Wright homes in this region are privately owned, so they tend to be priced about twice as high as other houses of comparable size. The premium on Neutras is 25% to 50%, Doe says. Then there’s the celebrity premium. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston bought a Norman-style Wallace Neff house, so Neff is now in demand.
Both Doe and Sloane have worked with celebrity clients, many of whom require confidentiality agreements. Doe attracts clients who share his reverence for good design and authenticity, people in advertising and the visual arts, studio brats and writers. Sloane says he has the battle scars to show that handling entertainment industry folk should be a specialty in itself. He’s sold a house to Eric Clapton and has worked with Ellen DeGeneres, Courtney Love and two Red Hot Chili Peppers. Many homes by celebrated architects don’t fit the description of luxury dwellings--no maid’s rooms or home gyms.
“A 1,200-square-foot, one-bedroom house in not the greatest condition, in not the most desirable part of the city, starts at $500,000 now if it’s a Neutra or Rudolf Schindler,” Doe says. “In order to find houses mere mortals can afford, I’m having to go further afield, to Claremont or La Crescenta. The demand is so great that the supply has dried up and the prices are accelerating.” What’s the upper range? Courteney Cox Arquette recently paid $10 million for a Lautner on the beach in Malibu.
And yet, two Schindler houses were torn down in the past year, Doe complains, as if he were reporting a rape in the neighborhood. “There have been museum shows and 20 books on Schindler, and that’s still happening!”
With mock self-deprecation, Sloane claims the role of Eve Harrington in L.A.’s real estate drama, the ingenue in the classic movie “All About Eve” who insinuates herself into the life of an established but aging star. Yet Sloane didn’t resort to dirty tricks to gain his share of the market. He worked hard, beginning at Doulton, Brown & Long in 1988. In 1996, he inaugurated a historical and architectural properties division at Fred Sands. Two years ago, he moved to the Beverly Hills office of Sotheby’s International Realty, taking along his carefully assembled mailing list of clients, art collectors and dealers, real estate groupies and freelance gossips to whom he regularly sends color postcards, each handsomely depicting a house described in breathless copy that he writes himself.
The latest of 15 L.A. houses he’s lived in is a dramatic Spanish Gothic farmhouse built in 1924 on a densely settled Los Feliz street. It comes by its movie-star style honestly: Sloane bought it from Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman three years ago. His edgy Contemporary art collection is displayed throughout the house, even in the basement billiard room, along with antique religious artifacts and Louis XV and XVI furniture. With his pencil-thin mustache, vaguely Anglo accent and wry sense of humor, the lanky Sloane appears David Nivenesque, the world-weary but all-knowing sophisticate who loves to dish.
What do Sloane and Doe have in common? A love of houses that makes them as much matchmakers as salesmen. Songwriter and music producer Glenn Ballard and his wife, Liv, looked for 10 years before Sloane showed them a Spanish house built by architect Roy Price in 1926.
“After 30 seconds, I knew this was the place,” Ballard says. “It needed a tremendous amount of structural work, a lot of it underground. Barry would have been loath to sell it to someone who would tear it down and put up a vanilla and cream mausoleum. This house has amazing vistas and secrets you don’t find in modern houses. We’re so proud that we saved it.”
Kathy Guild’s interest in modern architecture is so strong that she opened Patio, a store on La Brea, to sell outdoor furniture that would complement Modernist houses. Doe found her a neglected 1948 J.R. Davidson house in Silver Lake, which she restored. “Crosby said to me once, ‘I pray that my clients with taste get money and my clients with money get taste.’ He cares so deeply that the right person gets the right house.”
Both men are highly evolved snobs who realize they deal with a tiny fraction of the house-buying market. The casual observer might see beautiful old homes lining the streets of Hancock Park. Doe focuses on the damage wrought by the passion for upholstered walls and used brick in the ‘70s. “Maybe one house out of 10 in Los Angeles has great heart and soul, no matter what its style or price category,” he says.
Sloane sniffs at a Paul Williams house for sale in Encino. “I wouldn’t get the call for that. Neither would Crosby.” He handles few houses under $450,000, he says, “because there isn’t anything. You have to remember that half the real estate that’s sold in greater L.A. is dreadful anyway. The great unwashed out there are very happy in their tedious houses that I would slash my wrists if I had to live in.”
Like many in real estate, Sloane is a tireless networker, an expert in the art of the schmooze. “So tell me,” he says to an agent who’s called to find out if he knows of anything suitable for some picky European clients. “Are they POAs?”
Prisoners of architecture: homeowners who feel that the bragging rights to a house designed by a marquee name are worth the hassles. Most Schindler houses, for example, are didactic structures that demand you live in them the way the architect intended. They weren’t meant to be cluttered, and built-in storage and furniture dictate how the space is used.
John Solomon, an executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, discovered the same challenge in the 1961 Neutra house in Glendale Doe found for him, but he’s welcomed it. “The house has a certain flow and a dynamic that you can’t really work against,” he says. His mother is a well-known New York art dealer, but most of his extensive art collection is now in storage.
“I had to edit down my life to its barest essentials when I moved here. The house helped me decide what I really wanted to live with.” Sitting in his living room, Solomon seems to bask under the branches of a 300-year-old California live oak tree that dominates the patio. “This space helps me relax and feel calm. I can tune chaos out.”
Solomon acquired the house in mint condition. He expects to replace the pipes and the roof in the next five years but considers himself lucky. The dirty secret about many of L.A.’s historic homes is they can be maintenance monsters. Some can be downright hard to love, like a Lautner house in the Hollywood Hills whose bedroom can’t be reached from the living room or kitchen without going outdoors.
“When you get into any piece of architecture, there are always some compromises,” Doe says. “If you’re buying an older home, take it as you find it and love it. That’s my gospel.”
Architect Radziner says, “These modern homes were pushing the bounds of the technology at the time they were built. A lot of these houses are notorious for leaking, and it’s something we can address now in a more sophisticated way than was possible when they were built.”
It can all be worth it--the scary prices and safaris into neighborhoods unknown, the absence of bidets and Jacuzzis and the failings of the experimental materials of yesteryear. The enthusiastic buyers who have been guided by Sloane and Doe feel they’ve uncovered the city’s mystery. They are entranced by the romance of L.A.’s house pride, an infatuation fed by the peculiar power of a building to convey that the people who live within it are anything but ordinary.
