Simi Home Gives ‘Clean Living’ a New Meaning

When 60 guests shared a festive Christmas dinner at the palatial new home of Ed and Madeleine Landry, there were a few things they didn’t find under the tree.

Or on the switch plates. Or on the doors, or on the counters, or in the ice machines, or on the gleaming handles of the kitchen’s seven ovens, or in the air ducts that snake through the walls of the 11,000-square-foot mountainside manse overlooking Simi Valley.

Microbes didn’t attend the party, at least not in the numbers found in a more conventional dwelling.

Built largely of steel, the Landrys’ showplace is billed by the maker of its specially coated metal as the nation’s first antimicrobial home. It’s a distinction the couple bear with graceful resignation.

“We’re not germophobes,” said Ed Landry, a Los Angeles attorney who has handled estate matters for the likes of J. Paul Getty. “I resent being labeled as one. As long as air keeps coming through the ducts, I’m OK.”

Subjected to extensive publicity, the Landrys have been painted by some writers as the kind of clean-freaks who might wear rubber gloves to shake hands with strangers.

They aren’t. In fact, they are down-to-earth types who enjoyed a deep discount for using the kill-’em-dead steel and agreeing to open their house to scientists studying its purported germicidal properties.

The sand-colored structure, whose cost Landry would specify only as “several million,” is distinctive in other ways as well.

“It won’t rot,” he said. “It won’t fall down in an earthquake. It won’t burn in a fire. Termites won’t eat it. It won’t leak. Nothing on the outside will ever need to be painted.”

The Landrys call their 132-acre spread “Camino de Robles” for the 2,000 oaks set amid the sandstone and sage. Visitors wend their way up a half-mile private road, past boulders and terraces and constructed waterfalls. Deer drink from the fountains and, from time to time, bobcats pad through the brush.

The Landrys’ home and its nearby 1,600-square-foot guest house are built with fortress-like precautions.

A foot-thick slab of concrete beneath the ground floor is designed to thwart mold and mildew. Steel beams driven into bedrock are meant to minimize earthquake damage. Hermetic seals around the doorframes keep out wind and dust. With the structures perched on a bluff, flames roaring up the mountain would shoot over their roofs, Landry said.

Featuring curved walls, stainless-steel arbors and multiple patios, the main house has the look of a contemporary art museum plunked down in the wilderness. The design by Los Angeles architect David Martin won an award from the American Institute of Architects before ground was even broken.

But all that hasn’t excited as much interest as one of the home’s simpler attributes: Casa Landry is really, really clean.

About one-fifth of its 100 tons of steel is coated with a substance called AgION, a silver-based powder that is said to inhibit the growth of microbes. The treated metal is used on the Landrys’ doorknobs, in their refrigerators, on their banisters, in their elevator -- everywhere there might be germs to snuff out.

Socks and steering-wheel covers with antimicrobial fibers claim to do the same thing. But with the evening news delivering tales of untimely death due to everything from bad chicken to bioterror, Camino de Robles is said to be the first home with what amounts to its very own immune system.

“The market is driven by consumers,” said Alan McCoy, a spokesman for AK Steel, the Middletown, Ohio, manufacturer that supplied the Landrys’ steel. “There’s a great deal of interest in these types of products.”

Although the company touts the house as “setting the stage for the home of the future,” it also is careful to make no specific claims that its steel promotes good health. Scientists will test the surfaces and the air in the house periodically, McCoy said, but there are no plans to test the Landrys.

Some microbiologists are skeptical about the benefits of living the antimicrobial life.

Dr. Peter Katona, a UCLA infectious-disease expert, likened antimicrobial steel to antimicrobial soaps.

“They do cut bacteria down,” he said. “But in the vast majority of cases it doesn’t make any difference, compared with just washing your hands for 10 or 15 seconds. And in a house, people are constantly bringing in new bacteria -- on the skin, in their guts. At what point is the diminution of bacteria going to have an impact on health?”

Madeleine Landry suffers from asthma. She said she feels fine these days -- particularly with little need for the harsh cleaning fluids that she says can trigger an attack.

Ed Landry was sniffling from an unknown allergy one recent morning, but he didn’t figure that it had anything to do with the house.

Mainly, they are just glad to have their three-year project done.

They have owned the land for seven years, driving up to it from their former home in Northridge to knock around the property and picnic with the grandkids.

A student of architecture, Landry was so taken with the quiet and the contours of the land that building a house was almost inevitable.

“We decided we’d roll the dice and build something we could live in,” he said.

With 11 bathrooms, a 1,500-square-foot kitchen and a 6,000-bottle wine cellar, what emerged was something more than a cozy hideaway.

Active in a number of charities, the Landrys entertain lavishly.

Guests are likely to sit in a TV room under a Renaissance painting of Ignatius Loyola. They will wander by 18th century Japanese prints in the hallway, a gilded Venetian mirror in the foyer, a bathroom sink set in a marble slab that was a reject from the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

“My notion was to have something like the old English manor house,” Landry said. “When you invite someone over for dinner on Saturday night, you expect that they’ll stay over.”

In their few months living in the home, the couple have had numerous overnight guests, not counting the mouse that evidently sneaked past the hermetic seals and the alarm system whose voice barks out the location of open doors.

They have also had nine parties. That doesn’t count serving up gourmet chow to a battalion of firefighters, who bunked at the Landrys’ while battling the October blaze in Simi Valley.

In the middle of the night, the couple were transfixed by the towering flames, which crackled and popped within a half-mile down the mountain from Camino de Robles.

“Neither one of us had the slightest concern about the house,” Landry recalled. “I was extraordinarily confident in it. I just don’t believe it can burn.”