Killingsworth fan rescues ’58 classic

Andreas Stevens, a DJ and music producer known as Greyboy, has a passion for Edward Killingsworth architecture. In January of last year, he bought the badly neglected Opdahl house on the Naples canals of Long Beach, and since then he has been painstakingly, obsessively, restoring it.

“I’m not bringing back the house for me,” he says. “The house comes first. I’m adjusting my own needs to it. I’m putting back everything, down to the appliances and furnishings. And nothing that wasn’t in it before, even a microwave, will go in.”

A self-proclaimed expert on the Case Study House phenomenon, Stevens lived just one mile from three that the architect designed in La Jolla, and the more he saw of them, the more he wanted to own a Killingsworth. “He just had a refinement,” the 35-year-old Stevens says by way of summing it up.

So when he happened upon the 1958 Opdahl House, a modest steel structure designed for a small and challenging 30-by-80-foot lot, he knew he’d found the one. Even in its bastardized state, Stevens recognized its beauty and potential. The glitch was that it wasn’t for sale.

His real estate agent approached the owner and told her she had a client interested in buying. But the owner wasn’t interested in selling. A month later, Stevens tried again. The answer was the same. He persisted. “I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.” Two months after that, they finally struck a deal.

“I just felt like it was the right thing to do,” Stevens says about his determination to rescue the house. “It was in really bad shape. Everything was wrong. Termite damage and dry rot, mirrors glued to every plaster surface, ceramic tile on the floors where there was supposed to be carpet, water damage.”

Killingsworth passed along blueprints, photographs and articles about the house. The Opdahls, whom he tracked down in Huntington Beach, gave him more documentary photos. “The house had nothing original in it as far as colors, fixtures and furnishings,” he says.

He’s doing most of the work himself on the 1,200-square-foot house, and although he admits to having been ignorant of what it would take to resurrect his little masterpiece of a place, “it’s work you just don’t mind doing,” Stevens says. “Not when you love something this much.”

-- Cara Mullio and Jennifer M. Volland