From ‘Life as a House’ to a lodge for reading

It’s a plot worthy of a movie: An eleventh-hour rescue, persevering parents, an against-the-odds victory over skeptics and bureaucrats.

And, indeed, it started as a movie. A Craftsman-style house that sprang up as a film set on a picturesque ocean bluff has ended up reincarnated as a state-of-the-art school library in leafy Brentwood.

Flash back to February 2001. Soon after filming wrapped on “Life as a House,” a movie starring Kevin Kline as a terminally ill architect, the house that was the centerpiece of the movie was scheduled to be demolished and carted to a landfill.

Enter Molly Maginnis, the film’s costume designer and parent of a child at Kenter Canyon, a charter school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. So smitten was she with the Greene and Greene-inspired house that she couldn’t bear to see it razed. She contacted fellow parent Scott MacGillivray, an architect, in hopes they could figure out how to salvage and reuse the lumber.

MacGillivray visited the 1,100-square-foot house at its film location, on the grounds of the shuttered Marineland Aquarium on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and was wowed by the building’s craftsmanship.

He tapped another Kenter Canyon parent, Joseph Ferrari, an executive with a construction project management company, who spent two nail-biting weeks negotiating a deal with the film’s studio, New Line Cinema. The film company donated the lumber, but parents had just three days to clear the site.

Ferrari’s company hired 20 carpenters and laborers. “They finally let the guys in,” Ferrari recalled, “and it starts to rain.”

Undeterred, they labored from dawn to dark to dismantle the building timber by timber, carefully labeling each bit of high-quality lumber. They loaded the wood onto trucks, hauled it to Venice High School and transferred it to containers, where it would remain for two years.

Meanwhile, parents at Kenter began madly raising funds and untangling miles of district red tape.

There also was one glitch: The house was too small for Kenter Canyon’s purposes.

“We stretched it on three sides,” creating what would become a 1,700-square-foot space, said MacGillivray, who served as the managing architect on the project.

Because the structure was being built on a school campus, plans had to meet stringent seismic standards and pass muster with the state architect’s office, which required, for example, a full array of fire sprinklers.

Architect Janek Tabencki Dombrowa helped make initial design decisions, and Fields Devereaux Architects & Engineers did the construction drawings.

Just as Kline’s character battled bureaucrats and an angry neighbor, so did the Kenter contingent. One neighbor threatened to sue to halt the project. Some parents labeled the post-and-beam building an extravagance that siphoned off donations that could have gone for more burning needs.

Over their objections, construction began in December 2002. The building opened to students last month and will be formally dedicated Monday.

For all involved, the project provided a lesson in the economics of school construction. So far, said parent Laura Ullman Epstein, fundraisers have amassed more than $700,000, with an additional $80,000 to go. Big portions of the cost have come from philanthropists.

The school’s nearly 450 students are already enjoying the library’s light-filled main room and the cozy amphitheater, with its carpet-covered step seating.

From their seats at the eight solid cherrywood tables, pupils look up and out through clerestory windows. Just about all they see is a green canopy of trees that gives the place a woodsy feel. (Librarian Leah Suffin said being in the new library is “like working in a lodge in the mountains.”)

The exterior features a cross-gable roof with copper shingles and walls covered with cedar shingles. Beams are stained chestnut, and windows are trimmed in a light paint that MacGillivray dubbed buckskin.

Nestled snugly between two original school buildings, the new home for the school’s 7,000 library books moved 9-year-old Benjamin Marx to pen some verses. An excerpt (complete with creative spelling and punctuation):

It has it’s tables and the cranies and the nooks. It has Mrs. Suffin but most importantly, the books.

Without any parental nudging, third-grader Matthew Libby, 8, has spent many an afternoon doing homework at the library, which he views as a huge improvement over the cramped old one. “It’s like a miracle to our school,” he said. “It’s something to put in a history book.”