Part I    Installment 2

UP THE CREEK

Before we even signed the papers, I'd already put a lot of
thought into how I'd remodel the tiny cottage on Cragmont 
Avenue. Here's my Storybook-ish scheme for a new double
garage (there wasn't any); it was to be partly buried in the
hillside that sloped up to the house (note steps at right).

With the purchase documents for the tiny, 600 square foot Storybook cottage on Cragmont Avenue underway, and with ideas for expansion already at a furious boil in my mind, I immediately started sketching different ways of turning the place into a proper architect’s magnum opus. Still, something at the back of my mind kept nagging at me, and eventually it came to the fore: the culverted creek. Why had my soon-to-be neighbor Selma Klett even mentioned it, when it was on her property and not mine? Slowly, it dawned on me: the City of Berkeley had an unusual ordinance forbidding any new construction within thirty feet of a creek’s centerline. The imposition of that policy had been quite an economic blow to the many Berkeleyites who happened to live near creeks and, through no fault of their own, found their homes suddenly devalued because they could no longer be expanded.

When I looked into the creek ordinance a bit further, I found that it also covered what Berkeley termed “historic creeks”—in other words, creeks that had once existed but had been culverted at some point in the past. It didn’t matter if a creek had been running in an underground pipe for a hundred years—it was still considered a historic creek, and the creek ordinance still applied to it. Now the question became: is the culvert on Selma’s property—a few feet from the house I was buying—considered a historic creek?

The City of Berkeley's official Creeks Map. The yellow 
rectangle is the property we were in contract to buy; the red
 line is the "historic creek"—actually, an 8" diameter pipe
buried under Selma Klett's driveway. No new construction
was allowed within thirty feet on either side of the red line.
I was really up the creek.

Suddenly feeling some butterflies, I visited Berkeley’s Public Works department and asked them to show me the official creeks map for my neighborhood. And sure enough, there it was: an eight-inch diameter culvert running right down the middle of Selma Klett’s damned driveway. The official Creeks Map was even more alarming—the sixty-foot-wide  zone in which you were forbidden from building barreled right through the middle of the property. The Public Works official printed out a copy and I took it home with me. It didn’t take me long to grasp that, if I couldn’t build anything within thirty feet of that red line, there was basically nothing I could build at all.

Talk about butterflies: I was now in a legal contract to pay $625,000 for a property that was essentially locked in amber and could never be expanded. It was the nightmare scenario for an architect, and especially for this architect. I very clearly remember calling Monica Wong that evening, trying to sound calm despite being panicked in the extreme, and asking her if there was a way—any way—to get out of the purchase agreement. She enumerated three reasons a contract could legally be terminated. Two of them didn’t apply—they were probably along the lines of, “Buyer has dropped dead,” or something of that severity. The third loophole, however, could be invoked if the buyer failed to obtain financing. That was our escape hatch, and we were taking it.

“Then that’s what we have to do,” I remember telling Monica in tone of voice I wasn’t used to employing with friends. And bless her, she got us out of the contract just like that, to my indescribable relief.

Shortly after this massive and self-inflicted blunder on my part, we went to visit Selma Klett as a courtesy, just to tell her we’d backed out of the purchase—ironically, because her offhand comment had saved us in the nick of time. We exchanged the expected so-sorry-we-won’t-be-neighbors sentiments, but what sticks in my mind is that, just before we left, Selma made a point of telling us: “I said I wanted you to have that rocking goose, and I meant it.” She wrote out her nephew’s Berkeley address, where the goose apparently resided, and directed me to go there and pick it up—which I did. Selma was a lovely person, and the goose was a lovely rocking goose. To this day, it holds a proud position in the living room of The Crookedest House—a reminder of what could’ve turned into a six hundred thousand dollar mistake.

Next time: We continue house hunting—chastened, but not much wiser...

Part I    Installment 1

TOO MUCH MONEY

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

Our problem was money. Not too little—too much. But don’t roll your eyes in disgust just yet; as you’ll soon find out, we weren’t really rich to begin with, and we sure didn’t stay rich for long. The year was 2005, my wife and I were both working, and we were living in a small live-work apartment I’d built with sweat equity. We had a modest mortgage payment of $460 per month, as well as a tenant whose rent fully covered the mortgage and then some. My wife, Aidong Ni, is from mainland China, and I come from German immigrant parents, so both of us were imbued with the compulsion to save, save, save. Five years into our marriage, with both of us working, we were amazed to find that our bank account had swollen to more than a hundred thousand dollars.

In those halcyon pre-Great Recession days, having a lot of money in the bank was considered stupid. Instead of saving money, you were supposed to invest it, so it would grow into even more money. Then you’d invest that money and grow it into yet more money, and then—you get the idea. I never really understood the point of using all that money just to grow yet more money, but then architects aren’t known for their business acumen. As the old joke goes: An architect wins a million dollars in the lottery. A reporter asks him, “Now that you’re a millionaire, what are you going to do?” The architect replies, “Oh, I’ll just keep practicing architecture until it’s all gone.”

Still, my wife and I agreed that we should do something with our huge nest egg—that it was no use having it just sitting there in a savings account drawings a few percent interest. We’d also just had a baby, so our live-work space, which was less than eight hundred square feet, was starting to feel a little tight. The obvious thing to do, it seemed, was invest that money in an actual house. And since I’m an architect and a do-it-yourselfer who’s always up for a building project, the ideal house would be one needing some sweat equity—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.

We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive places in the United States, but I started checking the local real estate listings for houses we thought we could afford. Most were in Oakland and Berkeley, on the opposite side of the bay from astronomically expensive San Francisco. I grew up in a circa-1929 cottage in Concord, California, a small town even further inland, so I had a soft spot for homes of that era. Having also spent my late teens and early twenties in an Oakland house built in 1966, I realized that I had an outright aversion to homes of that era, with their tawdry Sheetrock walls and flimsy aluminum windows. Every time we toured an open house from that period, I simply couldn’t imagine us living there. Those places just creeped me out.

By contrast, whenever we stepped into a home built in the 1920s, I felt like I’d returned to my childhood: the doors with their recessed panels, the glass doorknobs resembling giant jewels, the top-nailed hardwood floors with their skinny planks, even the kludgy old double-hung windows—it all felt endearingly like the house I grew up in.

Lucky for me, my wife, having grown up in the People’s Republic of China—probably the closest thing there is to another planet—had none of the experiential baggage I carried. Moreover, since I was an architect and presumably knew best, she was more than willing to let me choose which house would be right for us. 

The realtor's sales card for the tiny cottage
we were in contract to buy for $695,000.
It was basically one room with a kitchen tacked
onto the back, and a small loft reached by the
spiral staircase visibile in the picture at right.

In November 2005, after a few months of scanning the real estate listings, we found a house in the Berkeley hills that seemed within our price range. It was on Cragmont Avenue, a mile or so north of the University of California, in a neighborhood of wildly varying Period Revival homes styles strung along picturesque winding streets. Once again, I’ll point out that the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the whole United States, so the asking price may still shock you all these years later: $625,000. Even more shocking, though, is what was being offered for that amount: a tiny cottage that had reputedly housed the gardener working for the folks in the “big house” next door.

Even calling the place a “house” was a stretch; it was, in fact, just one big, vaulted room with a few ancillary bits tacked onto the back—about six hundred square feet in total. There was no central heating; the whole place was purportedly kept warm by a small electric wall heater built into one corner of the living room. There was an interesting spiral staircase leading up to a sort of little mezzanine, and the exterior was charmingly Storybook-ish, but that was about all the place had going for it.

Still, as the talented and creative architect I fancied myself to be, I was sure I could turn this little hovel into something worth having. After talking it over with my wife, I contacted a real estate broker friend named Monica Wong and asked her to make an offer on the place. Now, “offer” usually presupposes you’re offering less money than the asking price. But at that time, in the blistering-hot Bay Area real estate market, practically no one dared to do that. On the contrary, it was quite normal for buyers to get into bidding wars and pay ten, fifteen, or twenty percent above the asking price. In one of my rare instances of common sense, I refused to play this game, since it was something of an oddball property, and since the asking price seemed pretty ambitious to begin with. In any event, the seller’s representative accepted our offer, which met their price of $625,000. We were on our way.

The disclosure documents had noted some kind of unusual arrangement relating to a small yard at the very back of the lot, which the owner of the adjoining property had apparently taken over as part of her own garden. Obviously, if we were buying the house, she would have to vacate this land, so we were compelled to meet our future neighbor and discuss it. She was a friendly older lady named Selma Klett, whose late husband had been—what else—an architect. Her house, which he’d designed, was a very interesting example of the 1960s-era California architectural style known as Brown Shingle Revival.

Selma was a perfectly nice person, and as we sat in her living room making small talk, there didn’t seem to be any issue with her relinquishing the little piece of land she’d been borrowing. She was also smitten with our infant son Robert, who was a bit over four months old at the time, and told us she had an interesting old wicker rocking goose she’d like to give him. Before we got up to go, Selma casually asked if I knew about the culverted creek running down her driveway, which struck me as an odd question, but which I didn’t really think much about until later. Then I thought about it a lot.

Next time: Our $625,000 purchase ends up—literally—"up the creek".

After writing hundreds of essays on architecture, first as a syndicated newspaper columnist and then as a blogger, today I'm kicking off a more personal project. For the past few years, I've been absent from the blogosphere busily working on my fourth book, The Crookedest House: An Architect's Twenty-Year Renovation Folly, which chronicles the still-ongoing renovation of a 1930 Storybook Style house my wife and I purchased in Berkeley, California.

While my previous three books pontificated on architecture in the third person, The Crookedest House speaks from the heart, much as my little essays have tried to do. Accordingly, over the coming months, I'l be presenting the book in essay-like serial installments, beginning with the prologue below. I hope you find it, and the subsequent chapters, worthy of your time. —Arrol Gellner

PROLOGUE:    THE ARCHITECT’S CURSE

Arrol Gellner: Accursed Architect?

The curse of all architects is that when we do our jobs right—I mean, really right—the solution looks so natural, so obvious, so inevitable, that people wonder why it took us so long to pull it off. Yet how many people would say of the Mona Lisa, “What’s the big deal—he just painted some lady with no eyebrows.” Thankfully, most of us appreciate the fact that Da Vinci made many, many attempts to capture just the right subtlety of expression (a fact that’s been confirmed by X-ray examinations of the canvas). He worked on it, and worked on it, and worked on it some more, in order to end up with something sublimely simple. That’s what architects—good ones, anyway—also try to do, and dammit, it just takes time. 

Ironically, the very fact that a really good design looks inevitable and obvious rather than strained and fussy also means that no one but the architect can ever really appreciate the long road traveled to make it come out that way. Things are even worse for architects who believe, as I do, that when you mess around with a building of a certain era—especially a well-designed one—it’s an integral part of your brief to make any changes or additions respect the original work. In other words, if I’m remodeling a wonderful old Mid Century Modern house, I’m not going to emend it with some personal magnum opus that’s a glaring departure from the original. Why? Because I’ve seen the results of too many such aesthetic excursions after the trends their architects followed went the way of all fashion. 

The ostensible focus of this book is the place I’ve christened The Crookedest House, which clings to hilly Cragmont Avenue in Berkeley, California. My wife and I bought it in the spring of 2006, just in time to be pulled into the undertow of the Great Recession. In the euphemistic parlance of the real estate industry, the house was “distressed”, having been severely damaged by ground movement over the course of its seventy-six years. Hence, it was priced a bit—but only a bit—below the norm for that leafy hillside neighborhood. Few people would have considered it a great buy, but it was at a price we thought we could afford. More importantly, as an architect, it offered me something I always relished: a project I could sink my teeth into without having to please anyone but my own family. 

W. H. Hooper, 
Curse-worthy Builder?

 I’ve always had a soft spot for 1920s-era houses, having grown up in one, and it’s no accident that two of the books I’ve written dealt almost exclusively with architecture of this period. Moreover, during the course of my career I’ve found that homes of the Roaring Twenties were generally built with exemplary craftsmanship. Structural damage not withstanding, I expected the same from our new house on Cragmont Avenue, built in 1930 by a prolific Berkeley builder named W. H. Hooper. 

Alas, when it came time to open up walls to prepare for construction, I got a rude awakening. There was hardly a stick of lumber in the place that didn’t seem to have come from a discard pile. A closer inspection revealed many instances of hurried workmanship, along with some areas that had never been finished at all. In short, the place seemed carelessly tossed together—a distinct outlier for its time, even compared to the builder’s prior work. For me, piecing together the how and why of this anomaly soon evolved into a project of its own, a parallel narrative that sometimes seemed hijacked by W. H. Hooper himself, and explained in his own words (via courtroom transcripts) almost a century after the fact.

As I write this prologue, some twenty years after we bought The Crookedest House, I’m still working to complete the final details of plans I first developed back in 2006. As we slowly close in on a relatively finished state of construction, the house is so convincingly a product of the late 1920s that few people would suspect that most of it is essentially new. This has led me to wonder whether I might once again have laid the classic architect’s trap for myself—that my very determination to make the new work all of a piece with the original might mean that no one would even realize the design was mine, and not that of the original builder. This is an awful enough prospect for any architect, since the only meaningful traces of our existence are the buildings we leave behind. But worse yet was the prospect that people might take my house to be the work of W. H. Hooper.

I confess that these thoughts began to nag at me, and this book is in large part just an effort to assign rightful credit, for better or worse, for the unusual house that now stands on Cragmont Avenue in Berkeley. Being acutely conscious of my own frail legacy in this latter stage of life, I shudder at the idea of some future passerby observing: “Oh, that W. H. Hooper built such wonderful houses in the Twenties!”

The hell he did.

Next time: The game is afoot.