Recycle, Reuse, Re-create

People in L.A. aren’t the only ones getting make-overs. Buildings are too. A church, power substation, firehouse dormitory, water tower, train car, movie theater and neighborhood market are all enjoying second lives as private homes. It’s part of a trend known in preservation parlance as adaptive reuse. Born again, these buildings give rise to unique dwellings with a lot of soul. They also make sound conservation sense, preserving resources and helping to put the brakes on regional sprawl. Evocative of other eras, these reincarnations are poised for 21st century sights, sounds and experiences. As one resident explained his passion for such buildings: “I like putting my mark on an old space and becoming part of its history.”

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Soulful Digs

Outside, it still looks like a church.

Inside is a different story.

Santa Monica architect and educator Anne Troutman had just about given up on finding a home with character when her prayers were answered--an 1875 Carpenter Gothic church had appeared on a multiple listing service. “It had so much heart and soul you could feel it immediately,” says Troutman, who bought it less than a week later.

The humble church--Santa Monica’s oldest remaining wood structure and a landmark since 1977--has had four owners and three locations in its 130-year life. It began as the Methodist Episcopal Church at Sixth and Arizona streets. Eight years later, it was transported two blocks west to Fourth Street to be closer to town; in the early 1900s it was moved to Second Street, a gift to a parish in Ocean Park.

Deconsecrated in 1923, it served for years as a community center for widows of Civil War veterans. Painted letters still visible above the front-door transom spell out its days as Patriotic Hall. When the building was threatened with demolition in 1971, local artist Helen Taylor Sheats saved it from the wrecking ball by converting it into her atelier. She designed stained-glass windows for her church home, and for three decades slept on a bed where the altar used to be.

The predicament for Troutman and her husband, architect Aleks Istanbullu, was how to retain the architectural integrity of the church, yet have it reflect their modern sensibilities. Their solution: a free-standing cabinet-like structure set within the 40-foot-square sanctuary. “The walls don’t touch the old church,” explains Troutman. “We essentially built a building within a building.”

The couple’s large collection of books is housed in the exterior of the “cabinet,” and a modern kitchen sits in its center. The mezzanine overhead, reached by a small staircase, contains Troutman’s office and a guest area. Behind the cabinet, two bedrooms with garden views anchor the back corners of the home, while the den occupies the church’s old social hall. “It’s ecologically sound to adopt older buildings and not just tear them down and build new ones,” says Troutman, a director of the Santa Monica Conservancy.

In the waste-not, want-not spirit of the 19th century, the couple used all the beadboard and chair-rail molding, Douglas fir flooring and iron window weights they could salvage. An old pew they rescued sits in the garden under the avocado tree. “It’s a quiet place to sit and look at the old church’s peaked red roofs,” Troutman says, adding that passersby still come to the front door. “They think it’s a church--until they see the pool table.”

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High-Rise

A readapted water tower has its

residents going in circles.

“I felt like I had won the golden ticket to get into the Willy Wonka chocolate factory,” says psychiatrist Robert Bright Jr., explaining his reaction when he purchased a 1,100-square-foot water tower in Pasadena three years ago. The 1891 wood-shingle structure once contained a 50,000-gallon steel water tank that served nearby Grace mansion. (The Victorian mansion, built for William Stanton, a cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, was designed by Frederick L. Roehrig, architect of the historic Green Hotel and its Castle Green annex.) Today, the 45-foot-tall tower has four stories connected by a narrow, winding staircase.

Bright’s partner, Ruben Garcia, manager of a sober-living house in Hollywood, had to get used to the stairs and round rooms but soon succumbed to the tower’s lofty charms. Their third-floor balcony offers ringside seats come Fourth of July, when they watch the Rose Bowl fireworks. “They’re practically in our backyard,” says Garcia. “It’s spectacular.”

The uninsulated tower gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but Garcia and Bright wouldn’t live anywhere else. “It’s really quiet and serene,” Garcia says.

One of the biggest challenges of life in a tower occurs when they get a delivery. “There’s no going through the front door and up the stairs,” Bright says. When the 200-pound-plus Kenmore Elite arrived in July, they had to extend a large beam out the fourth-floor window and lift up the refrigerator with a hand winch.

Other unconventional arrangements include a unique fire escape, installed by a former owner, consisting of a 3/8-inch steel cable that links the tower to a nearby Moreton Bay fig.

“In case of a fire,” explains Garcia, “we can swing down Tarzan style--thank God we’ve never had to use it.”

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Hot Spot

A firehouse is a blaze of color

now that it’s an artist’s atelier

Every day Jim Morphesis drove past Engine Co. 17. Every day he had the same thought: “I wish I had a space in that firehouse.” Five years of wishful thinking had passed and he was about to be forced out of his loft-ready-to-turn-condo when he spied a “For Rent” sign flapping against the brick facade. “I’m an artist; you have just got to rent me this space,” he told the owner.

Today, Morphesis calls the upstairs firefighters’ dormitory home. The firehouse on South Santa Fe Avenue was built in 1927 as a replacement for its 1905 namesake on East Seventh Street, demolished to make way for a bridge over the Los Angeles River. By the time Morphesis moved into the stately building, the second floor had been converted into two loft-like apartments, and the first floor into commercial space. The decorative tin ceiling was gone, as were the brass poles the firefighters used to slide down to the fire engines, with patches in the worn wood floor near the kitchen and front door marking where the poles once stood.

Morphesis began putting his imprint on the structure by removing the long wall that bisected his apartment and adding four walls to create a studio/gallery. He kept the original north-facing windows--ideal for a painter, he says--but covered the southern windows to gain more wall space.

The one extravagance in the otherwise minimal dwelling is the spacious firemen’s bathroom, which sports two showers and a claw-and-ball-foot tub. “It’s bigger than some New York apartments,” says the artist, who loves the original white octagonal tile floor.

He admits to a near-obsessive desire to inhabit older buildings with character such as L.A.’s Desmond’s department store, his former atelier. “I know it sounds corny,” Morphesis says, “but there are life-and-death issues that have been dealt with within these old brick walls. . . . It’s palpable. I like putting my mark on an old space and becoming part of its history.”

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Power Point

A former electrical substation is

buzzing with events and family life

At a former power station with a deep history, modern life is humming along as the 1906 building acts as a location for film screenings, art shows, weddings and photo shoots. The Huron Substation in Cypress Park, the second-oldest surviving substation in Los Angeles and No. 404 on the city’s list of cultural-historic monuments, once housed equipment to power the L.A. Railway’s Yellow Cars.

Owner Meike Kopp, an event producer and property developer, is currently working to bring it up to code as her full-time residence. “When I bought the substation it didn’t have hot water, heating or insulation,” she says. “I was washing my dishes outside with the hose.”

Today, there is hot water but no insulation, and she says it may never be installed: “I don’t want to ruin the integrity of the building by covering up the beautiful antique brick.” She’s considering environmentally friendly radiant wall panels for heat. “They’re flat, more like European radiators, and can be located below eye level,” says the German-born Kopp. “That makes more sense.”

Right now, she plans to keep the former electrical transformer room (32 by 46 feet) as a space for large events. An adjacent area and part of the mezzanine are reserved for her private living quarters. On the mezzanine, a corner room with Shoji-esque sliding doors is used as a playroom for Kopp’s 9-year-old son and his friends, as well as a place for brides to dress and actors to have their hair and makeup done when she rents the space.

Kopp--a single parent on a shoestring budget--has hit on ingenious ways to deck out the former substation. A steel cable routed around the beams and threaded with Ikea curtains defines the master bedroom. A large branch decorated with crystals, birds and Christmas lights acts as a romantic chandelier. In the renovated kitchen, an 11-foot-long Sequoia slab functions as a center island.

On hot summer nights, a large fan helps cool the masonry building, billowing the bedroom curtains. “It’s really lovely and romantic to sleep here,” Kopp says. “This old building reminds me so much of Europe--it has so much history and character--that’s not so easy to find in L.A. I just love it.”

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Market Share

Gone are the shelves of groceries,

but not the love of place

Makeup artist Sonia Lee fell in love with the neighborhood first--Echo Park Lake and its giant pink lotus flowers--before setting foot in the old store that has been her home for three years.

Her Realtor introduced her to the three-level property that steps down a hillside in Angelino Heights, an area of Victorian homes and the city’s first historic district. Old-time neighbors recall shopping at the simple flat-roofed market until the ‘70s; hearsay has it that it was a former trolley stop as well. According to the late artist Leo Politi’s book, “Angeleno Heights,” a trolley driver named Jack was so accommodating that he would

let riders off in front of the store; he also used to stop when he needed to run up the market’s outside staircase to use the “man’s room.” A fire has since destroyed the stairs as well as the upstairs “facilities.”

In 2002 local property developer Princess Bovlanna purchased the boarded-up, graffiti-scarred store, a local gang haven, to save it from further harm, and when Lee moved in there was little left of the original market. “It was pretty much a rectangular box with rows of empty shelves at the rear, an old deli scale for weighing meat and a cash register set up near the center of the room,” Bovlanna recalls.

She gutted the space to create an open-plan room and removed the rotted ceiling, leaving the second-floor joists exposed. The old wood floors and ceiling add a warm patina to the living quarters, decorated in a minimalist Asian style. A short wall partition toward the rear dates from the original 1906 store; the area behind it serves as Lee’s small pantry and kitchen. The formal dining room is one floor below.

“I love living in the old store--it feels splendid,” Lee says. “My neighbors often tell me they used to shop here.” A native of Seoul, she notes that Korea “has 5,000 years of history, but here we like everything modern.” Not Lee. “Old places should be revered. I’m very happy it didn’t get torn down.”

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Reel Living

A Chinatown movie theater now

stars as a mixed-use complex

“Master of the Flying Guillotine” was the last film Willard Ford saw at the Kim Sing Theatre. That was 25 years ago. Today, Ford is the proud owner and occupant of the vaudeville theater-turned-movie house, which hugs the edge of Chinatown at the corner of Alpine and North Figueroa.

The theater, built in 1926, had been boarded up for more than a decade when Ford, an amateur bike racer out on a training ride, saw the “For Sale” sign seven years ago. A month later, he was in escrow on the place, along with an adjacent row of neighborhood shops.

Ford, a furniture dealer, called in husband-and-wife architectural team Austin Kelly and Monika Haefelfinger of XTEN Architecture in Los Angeles to walk through the space. “It looked like something out of movie set,” recalls Haefelfinger.

“The ceiling had collapsed, and there was a beam of light streaming through illuminating the old theater seats, dead rats, pigeons. It was surreal.”

The owner’s mandate: turn the theater into a loft home, update the leasable space along North Figueroa--and maintain the integrity of the neighborhood landmark. The architects artfully reconfigured the building, keeping the exterior profile intact. They gutted the theater to make two lofts, then created a 120-foot-long courtyard to bring light into the interior spaces.

Inside the theater, Ford’s home is a voluminous space showcasing bow trusses and a dramatic red wall with an alternating pattern of doors and glass. Next to the open kitchen, a recessed seating area marks the spot of the former vaudeville stage and theater screen. Today, it’s Ford’s media room.

“It’s more interesting adding layers to an existing structure than building from your own tabula rasa,” says Kelly. “There are few places you can build from scratch in Southern California, so it’s important to revive what we have.”

Although the theater no longer shows movies, the neon marquee has been painstakingly restored and glows against the night sky. Four renovated stores--a pizzeria, hair salon, market and the owner’s furniture showroom, FordBrady--now face Figueroa. “Many of my Chinese neighbors have fond memories of going to the movies here and also shopping,” Ford says. “The renovation has brought the whole corner back to life.”

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Track House

A rusted Pullman car is revived

by a train buff and his wife

Fifteen years ago, Jack Sessums, a devoted train fan, saw a rusted Pullman at the Colton train yard, shoved aside like a beached behemoth. “He decided to take it home,” his widow Beverly recalls, “and fix it up.”

Easier said than done. The 82-foot-long car was loaded onto a flatbed truck for the drive to Redlands, where a crane lifted the 84-ton car onto its final resting place at the back of the Sessums’ 37-acre property.

The car, which in its heyday had carried passengers from L.A. to the Grand Canyon, needed a complete face-lift. The Sessums refurbished the window frames and outfitted them with new glass. The exterior was scraped and repainted a deep green. Inside, the couple installed a small sitting room with a convertible sofa to accommodate overnight visitors.

“People really have a love of trains,” Beverly says. “It’s been fun to bring it back to life. . . . Better than seeing it end up in a salvage yard stripped apart for its metal.”

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Resource Guide

Pages 22-25: Anne Troutman, DesignSmart, Santa Monica, (310) 452-0410, www.designsmartla.com, and Aleks Istanbullu Architects, Santa Monica, (310) 450-8246.

Pages 30-32: Jim Morphesis is represented by the Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles, (323) 932-0170, morphesis@earthlink.net.

Pages 36-39: Randall & Edwards design builder, Eagle Rock, (323) 256-6862. For information on staging events at the power station, go to www.huronsubstation.com.

Pages 44-46: Austin Kelly and Monika Haefelfinger, XTEN Architecture, Los Angeles, (213) 625-7002. Interior designer Guy Clouse, Los Angeles, (323) 462-0040. Ford-Brady furniture showroom and gallery, Los Angeles, (310) 800-3999.

The Chinese theater is included in the CA Boom fall 2006 design and architecture series tour, which takes place Saturday, Nov. 11. For information, call CA Boom Design Shows, (310) 394-8600 or go to www.caboomshow.com.