Someone Else, Somewhere Else - A House Tour of LA

“Why shouldn’t people build their houses in the shapes of pagodas, their grocery stores in the shapes of Turkish baths, and their restaurants like boats and hats, if they wanted to? Let them build, and tear down and build again; let them experiment.”

• The Nowhere City, Alison Lurie (1963)

It is a luminous morning in Silver Lake. I’m dressed and caffeinated and waiting for 9.30, when the architecture tour will begin. Our guide and driver is Laura Massino Smith, an art historian and ex-New Yorker who fell in love with LA’s bricolage of architectural styles and promptly moved here, in the manner that people seem to. This will be the second time I’ve been driven around to ogle houses and learn their stories. On my first go-around, I came close enough to the ‘Jaws’ house (Lloyd Wright, 1926) to see the crumbles. I also got a bit excited talking to the other tour-takers, Wally and Evelyn, native Angelenos. (I know Los Angeles is a city where people live and work and dream and die, but I still can’t help seeing it as ShangriLA: shimmering, evanescent - like a dream destination at which you never quite arrive.) Wally told me about his father who had worked in Hollywood as a sound designer and I told him and Evelyn about my thwarted visit with the Gavin Lambert Collection at  UCLA research library. Lambert wrote about LA as if the city was a person, and sometimes that person felt like me: “How to grasp something unfinished yet always remodeling itself, changing without a basis for change? So much visible impatience to be born, to grow, such wild tracts of space to be filled...” I had hoped to find diaries, ‘lost’ writings, rare photographs but all the box contained was a few of Lambert’s published books and a taped interview with a distant relative of Natalie Wood. It turned out the main Gavin Lambert Archive is in Boston. So much sky between the dream and the reality. 

“Ah, well,” said Wally, (who hadn’t heard of Lambert, but now somehow looks like him in my recollections) “We all have our pilgrimages.” 

Some people come to LA to press palms with Marilyn Monroe in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I like all that, too, but mostly, I come for the houses. They are not like the ones we have at home. There are pastel-painted bungalows, Moorish palaces, Spanish haciendas, sixties spaceships, witches cottages, faux chateaus and Victorian-Italianate mansions. There are also ordinary houses, ugly houses but I don’t register these. Part of the charm of being a tourist is being able to walk around with your eyes half-closed. “It’s hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance,” Nathanael West wrote, “But it is easy to sigh.” And what are holidays if not sighing fodder?

The focus of the Silver Lake tour is Mid-Century Modern. There are four punters negotiating seats in the mini-van. Laura used to run the tours from a 1962 Cadillac, but the slow-stop-starts necessary for architectural curb-crawling didn’t jibe with the Caddy’s temperament. What the mini-van lacks in style it makes up for in air-con.

Our meeting place, a Gelson’s supermarket car park, is also our first landmark - the site of Walt Disney’s first studios in 1929. Think of it! People idly pushing shopping carts around the place where Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was conceived! Later, we’ll see the ‘Snow White Cottages’ (Ben Sherwood, 1931) which served as inspiration for the film. The eight, wonky, mini Tudor structures were built as accommodation for Disney animators, and are an enduring example of ‘Storybook style.’ In LA, it’s not always clear which came first, the image or the dream. As Lambert wrote: “Illusion and reality are still often the same thing.”

El Pueblo de Neustra Senora la Reina de los Angeles was founded by in 1781 and ceded to the United States in 1848. It moved swiftly from desert to wild west to metropolis. By 1921, the city was 80 per cent ‘movie people’ - creatives desirous of creative housing. In those trolley car days, Silver Lake, would have been practical and affordable. I feel like I know the neighborhood’s contours from Laurel and Hardy films and from an app about walking LA’s Secret Stairs that I downloaded but probably won’t use because it’s thirty degrees outside and not even ten a.m.

I grew up in a 1960s weatherboard-and-brick bungalow. I remember the bright yellow kitchen bench, the cupboard-like shower, wallpaper to out-Florence Florence Broadhurst, a stone fireplace and a back patio with a white wooden rail where we used to lay bacon rinds for the magpies. In that house the outside was always coming in: earwigs, slaters, spiders, millepedes, thrip. Even as a child I loved other people’s houses. It seemed to me, you could be someone else, somewhere else. Higher up the hill were grandiloquent properties, with lush lawns fringed with agapanthus. Many a twilight I walked the dog past the estate of a once famous politician and considered his riches. My parents eventually sold the family home. Some months ago, I discovered it on Real Estate.com. It had been dressed up modern - ironically resembling the house of my dreams. For a while, I felt depressed because my houselust has become so ordinary. They sell imitation Eames chairs at Aldi now.

There is a name for people who fall in love with buildings: objectum-sexuals, or objectophiles. In 2007, Erika Eiffel married the Eiffel tower in a commitment ceremony, and founded OS Internationale, for people attracted to inanimate objects. I am not there yet, although a Case-Study house in Pacific Palisades makes me giddy.  

On Waverley Drive, Laura points out Anthony House (Bernard Maybeck, 1927) a towering structure that dips into Medieval, Gothic, Tudor and Spanish elements. In the prohibition years, the house had a secret trapdoor for storing bootleg liquor. Once a haven for reprobates, it is now a monastery. I find this interesting, but I can’t help being more interested in the fact that, just next door is the house where Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were murdered by members of the Manson Family in 1969. I stare beyond the formidable gate, as if by the force of my focus I might see - through bricks and mortar and time - the words Death to Pigs written in blood on the living room wall. The house looks eerie, too big and too empty. There is a black cat sitting in the middle of the driveway, perfectly still, staring back. 

We wend our way to the Neutra Colony - a cluster of Richard Neutra designs (and one by his son, Dion who took over the business). Here, we exit the mini-van and engage in swoony perambulations. Laura points out Neutra-isms: flat roofs, continuous windows, spacious decks - it’s all glass and wood and grasses. When he first came to town Richard Neutra stayed with Rudolph Schindler. They shared clean lines and Viennese precision. Both were students of Frank Lloyd Wright; both spellbound by Southern California’s physical charms. Neutra VDL House (1932) is a sunstruck jewel-box overlooking the reservoir. If you lived there nothing bad could happen to you. Your face would be unlined, your laugh musical. Greil Marcus said, “a Neutra house could suggest that men and women were in the world but not completely of it, and lead them to rejoice in that fact.”

In my late teens, I had a habit of going to real estate agents, leaving a key deposit and inspecting flats I could in no way afford. One, in a red-brick apartment block on Alexandra Avenue, had diamond pane windows and a view of the Yarra. I sat on the window sill and imagined what my life could be like if I lived there. Another, in Power St, Hawthorn, had a bedroom with a 1970s Autumnal forest mural covering one wall. My first house-share was a worker’s terrace in Fitzroy. The rent was $150 per week, split between two. It was the darkest house I’ve ever lived in but I was happy there. My flatmate painted the lounge musk stick pink and christened it the womb room. We watched a lot videos and ate a lot pasta. No one I knew owned houses then or even thought about it. On a plaque by the door was the name Lanark, from the Gaelic, meaning Clear Space - I took it as a promise, or a blessing. The house is still there but the name plaque is long gone.

Laura drives and the dream houses accumulate: Schindler’s white boxes poised on the hill, John Lautner’s exuberant Silvertop, (the house Andrew McCarthy comes home to in Less than Zero), and a Gregory Ain that looks like a layer-cake. We see architect’s offices, industrial spaces, schools, and temples and churches. I take a hundred photos. My neck is sore from craning, and I am a mess of sighs. Trying on houses is like trying on selves. Maybe I was a gypsy in a former life. Maybe I should stop being a writer and get into real estate. Or do both. I could write the descriptions - I would never confuse the words ‘flare’ and ‘flair’.

When Laura first started Architecture Tours LA, she didn’t know if anyone would be interested, she only knew that she was, but business is growing; on any day she might be showing people the Arts and Crafts Houses of Pasadena, Downtown Deco or intensives on the significant Franks (Lloyd Wright and Gehry). 

“Environment is education.” Laura says. When I look at the houses I see permission to be big, permission to be strange. I think about the dreaming that must have been born in the nothing, in the flat expanse of desert, and I think about Alison Lurie’s line about LA being a ‘Nowhere City,’ a place with no past, fixed in “an eternal dizzying present.” 

We finish where we started, and it takes some time for me to re-orient. Where to next? Where, now that I’ve seen so much, now that I’m all puffed up with possibility? I stumble-walk to the bus-stop, where a volatile man scat-sings and pink-haired girl in a Mexican dress rolls her eyes. On the telephone pole somebody’s slapped a sticker with the words: It is tempting to dwell on what we did wrong. I wouldn’t mind if the bus never came. It is a luminous morning in Silver Lake.