In L.A., even Tudors get face-lifts

If authenticity were a big deal in Los Angeles, there would be no barbecue chicken pizza, Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean would still be chasing animatronic wenches and Pamela Anderson’s gravity-defying chest would not be so widely admired. But in the land of make-believe, almost anything goes, as long as it approximates someone’s fantasy.

For nearly a century, California homeowners have moved into mock Mayan temples, pseudo-chateaux and neo-Palladian villas. But our long-standing acceptance of the infinite variety of faux doesn’t mean architectural fancies aren’t subject to the whims of fashion. The dream house of one era is the eyesore of another. Fortunately, remodeling has become a nearly limitless art of the possible. A simple ranch house can sprout rooms like tumors until it turns into a 21st century American’s notion of a medieval Tuscan farmhouse.

Or a majestic Tudor-style house will be lightened up, its distinguishing characteristics rendered all but invisible. Traditional Tudor homes feature cream-colored stucco on which dark brown slats of wood, called half-timbers, are applied. (It’s been a long, long time since half-timbers were structurally necessary.) Steeply pitched roofs with gables and leaded windows of small glass panes are typical. Many residences in Hancock Park, Pasadena, Bel-Air, Los Feliz and Santa Monica display hallmarks of the style, whose origins hark to 15th and 16th century England.

But on a drive through those areas, an architectural pilgrim can also find a plethora of UnTudors. Boredom or misbegotten creativity could be behind some of these re-dos. What else could explain a house on which the stucco is painted baby blue, the half timbers kelly green? There is no record of the first UnTudor to defy custom, but it’s now easy to find half-timbers painted white, black, blue, green or gray. Stucco may be yellow, pink, blue, gray or tan, and red brick thoroughly whitewashed.

It’s hard to disapprove of the reinvention of an imitation. And the UnTudoring of L.A. is more about function than form. The beauty of Tudor homes is undeniable, but the most classic ones don’t fit the way most people like to live now. It is unlikely that Henry VIII could smack on some sunscreen and spend an afternoon in the backyard of dank old Hampton Court, lounging on a chaise, nursing a cold ale. An Angeleno can, and wants to fling open the doors and let the fresh air in. But first there must be doors to fling open. In the most radically altered Tudors, homeowners have added, subtracted, personalized and reconfigured. There is a range of stylistic amnesia among the UnTudors; some seem to have lost all memory of their past.

It was an illustrious history, a fact that makes the UnTudor trend somewhat surprising. In L.A., the first Tudor revival occurred at the turn of the last century. Some grand Tudor mansions built then in the West Adams district still survive. The next, and greatest, wave came in the 1920s, when such gifted local architects as Arthur C. Kelly and Paul R. Williams refined the style. The earlier Tudors had been big and blocky, resembling square English inns. Kelly, who worked for the Greene & Greene brothers before going out on his own, stretched out his Tudor floor plans, thinning out the structures in which great artisans were employed to create carved wooden beams and cast stone fireplaces he designed.

At the same time, Craftsman mega-bungalows, Moorish haciendas and French Norman castles were being built for house-proud Californians. But it was the country English homes that embodied unique pretensions and the scent of old money, no matter how new they were. Decades before Ralph Lauren built an empire marketing images of the British aristocracy to American commoners, a Tudor house let Anglophiles ape the manner of landed gentry, as if they were living on an estate in Somewhereshire.

“To have a Tudor house was like saying you’d come over on the Mayflower,” says Robert Timme, dean of the USC school of architecture. “The homes had a sense of elegance and harked back to a tradition L.A. didn’t have.”

Architectural historian Merry Ovnick’s parents came to Los Angeles during the Depression, refugees from the Dust Bowl. Her mother had been a teacher in Kansas, but in L.A., the only work she could find was waitressing and cleaning houses. One of the homes she worked in was a Tudor in north Glendale.

“My mother was overwhelmed by the desire to live in a Tudor house,” Ovnick says. “To her, they were the epitome of grandeur. They represented having arrived.” At first, the couple lived in a bungalow court in the Atwater district. A few years later they bought a tiny house in Pacoima, then moved into a World War II worker-era cracker box in Mar Vista. In 1952, when Ovnick’s father was employed by Douglas Aircraft, her parents bought a quaint Tudoresque home in south Santa Monica that was built in 1937, one of several in the neighborhood.

Fast forward to the new millennium. Suzanne Peterson Brogger and her husband, Greg, who work out of Coldwell Banker’s Brentwood office, bought a country English cottage in Santa Monica a year ago. The 1,800-square-foot house, built in 1927, had been UnTudored by previous owners: The stucco was painted yellow, the half-timbers white. “We saw it as a property that had some things going for it, but it needed an extra kick,” Suzanne says. When she “kicks” a house, the charm quotient increases. The couple successfully spiffed up a Santa Monica Canyon house whose Tudor DNA had been largely obliterated, and earned a tidy profit when it sold a year ago.

Work on their next house began after they moved in last June. Over the next six months, light oak floors were stained dark. A cobblestone driveway and path to the front door replaced a plain concrete driveway and front steps of red brick. A gray-green wooden fence was put up where a black wrought iron gate had been, bordered by Suzanne’s interpretation of an English garden. The yellow stucco was lightened several shades, and a small deck overlooking the backyard, covered with Astroturf, grew into a generous, slate-covered patio. French doors now lead from the patio to the family room and master bedroom, and matching doors in the living room open to the frontyard.

“The details before were straight-on Ethan Allen, which isn’t our taste, things that would work in an older, darker place,” says Greg Brogger. “We tried to keep some of the character of the house, but put in the elements we like.” The cozy romanticism of the English style is retained, but the mood has changed from somber to cheerful.

The Broggers’ remodeling efforts have brought the openness most contemporary homeowners look for to a house built before indoor-outdoor living became an established California prerogative. Solidity once made Tudor homes desirable. In the 1930s and ‘40s, so many financial professionals chose the style that realtors called the homes “stockbroker Tudors.” But local chambers of commerce had been luring people from around the country to California with promises of an outdoor paradise. Houses with Spanish antecedents, with their courtyards and patios, were more suited to the informal way of life L.A. offered.

“The Tudor houses tended to be enclosed, not oriented to the outdoors as much as a number of other styles,” says Crosby Doe, of Mossler, Deasy & Doe. “By the 1930s they tended to be less popular than other styles, because they didn’t have an ideal relationship to the California garden. You close that solid oak front door of a Tudor house, and you’re in your castle.”

After World War II, Tudors were further eclipsed by modernist designs and ranch houses, and didn’t fit the ideal of a home for an average American family. An additional insult was lobbed when the style was badly bowdlerized in tracts of new homes where a style -- Mediterranean, Country English, Mafia Antebellum, etc. -- was applied to a basic floor plan much as icing is smeared on a cake. Nevertheless, Tudors enjoyed one more revival during the mansionization boom of the 1980s, a period generally considered L.A.’s architectural dark age. “The people building gigantic Tudor houses then didn’t understand the style or how to transform it,” says USC’s Timme. “They just built big, air-conditioned boxes.”

Early in his career, Malibu-based architect James McGlothlin worked for tract home builders. “They did marketing surveys to understand what people most wanted to buy,” he says. “One thing they looked into was architectural styles. In the ‘80s, Tudor was always at the bottom of the list and Mediterranean or Spanish was number one.”

McGlothlin recently designed an UnTudor remodel in Brentwood, a redo of a late ‘40s structure of indeterminate style on which half-timbers had been planted. “The family who lived in the house since it was built hadn’t made any changes, and it looked very dated,” says Caryn Thompson, an interior designer who bought the property as an investment. McGlothlin’s plan calls for an addition nearly the size of the original home. When it’s completed, with stacked stone detailing, wooden shutters and a pitched portico over the front door, the house will look like a Craftsman. House hunters will never know that before it became an UnTudor, it was an almost, sort of, inspired by, Tudoresque home.