Beauty makeover for gutters
With the right artistic eye, they can shed their reputation as the frump of home exterior.
To harvest more rain for the garden, first you have to catch it. This requires gutters. Some home styles lend themselves so happily to gutters, the rolled metal amounts to jewelry around the eaves. However, put the same gutters on a modern home whose lines are defined by the roof, and you have a problem. Gutters look dumpy; downspouts amount to vandalism.
The upshot? To those of us who live in mid-century homes and want to practice water conservation, the question of whether to put up gutters can feel like a choice between looking good or being good.
The realization that a modern house could indeed be artfully guttered came accidentally, during an October visit to a 1952 home in the San Rafael Hills of Pasadena. The place was mobbed during an estate sale, and I did not get the lamp that I had come for, but walking out I noticed a rain chain hanging from a portico. Above, a flat fascia had been fitted with custom gutters that were so discreet you had to stare hard to determine that they were even there.
This house at 1049 La Loma Road later came on the market, and an item on the Curbed LA blog noted that it was a Smith and Williams house that had been remodeled by Buff & Hensman. I have no idea which firm should be credited with the gutter design that I shamelessly set out to steal.
It took a succession of calls to find an installer willing to fabricate modern gutters instead of pushing the many rolled and crimped styles suited to more bijou homes. Deliverance came in the form of a metal artist named Ruben Ruiz.
To make sure that Ruiz understood my request, he ran up a sample. The narrowness of the gutter was vital. It had to be six inches high to cover the fascia running around the eaves of my home, but no more than three inches wide. The sample looked good.
I called artist Leigh Adams for a second opinion, and she squinted, stared and after an agonizing pause said, “The aspect ratio is perfect.”
The monkey-see, monkey-do plan had been to paint the gutters to help them disappear against my house, but shortly after the gutters had been constructed and the last weld made, Adams returned. In the glow of a streetlight, she declared, “Don’t paint them!” If the gray tiled roof was the hat of the house, Adams said, the new steel gutters amounted to a neatly rolled brim.
Once the gutters were up, there remained the challenge of positioning the drainage points. Most conventional gutters are three to four inches deep. Mine were six, meaning that during a downpour they could fill up with enormous amounts of water and exert dangerous strain on the house. Working from a map that I had made showing how much water drained from each slope of the roof, and exercising an abundance of caution, we positioned drainage points at both ends of the eaves. These would be fitted not with clunky downspouts but with rain chains that could be removed during dry months — or not.
My budget didn’t run to fancy rain chains, which are beautiful but can cost $12 a foot. Standard chain from the local hardware store would have to do, particularly since there was now more money to be spent at ground level.
Directing runoff
From the outset of the project, I had been haunted by a question put to me by landscape architect Jessica Hall: “Do you want to celebrate the water?”
After watching 33 inches of rain run off the property last year, but then being forced to draw municipal potable water to irrigate the garden, it became a priority not only to gutter the house but also to capture future rain. Some sort of storage will be involved, but the initial challenge was to get rain into the garden and not the street. Done right, the ground would then be well charged when our irrepressible California growing season takes off in February and March.
Using the roof drainage map, it became clear that one of the biggest sections produced so much water that it defied fanciful treatment. Only a conventional downspout and pipe would drain the north slope and convey the water behind a fence, where it would be discharged to irrigate fruit trees.
Beyond that, moving water would be done by sculpture. Every gutter would need a new brand of practical art to act as catchers and spreaders. I asked Ruiz: Had he ever considered fabricating flower-shaped water-catchers? Yes he had, it turned out.
Ruiz disappeared for several weeks into his studio. He returned with an array of partially fabricated devices. There was a stepped metal aqueduct that could be pieced together to carry water across a driveway and drop it into a flower bed.
There was a whirligig that caught and spun water, which was potentially useful for spreading the water stream from a single gutter. There was a metal version of a gutter extender in which three successive flower sculptures caught, then spilled water.
Finally, there were massive flower sculptures with heads maybe 3 feet across. Much like real flowers, these would catch and cup water. Unlike real flowers, their metal leaves would then drop the water into a succession of smaller sculptures until the water could be safely carried away from brickwork and into a thirsty planting bed.
Three days before Christmas, Ruiz arrived with the big metal flowers for the most prominent corner of the house. These were to be installed in concrete, much like a mailbox. As holes were dug and Ruiz’s nephew, Alfredo Ruiz, scrambled to the roof to send hose water through the gutters, down a chain and into the flower as a test, gusting Santa Ana winds picked up. This was providential for estimating how the water-catchers would perform in a storm. The water still went pretty much where it should have gone. The three of us did a happy dance.
Sounds of metal
The timbre of the falling water was unutterably beautiful, which brings me to an important point about metal and water. The first thing that artist Adams did when presented with a sample of the metal for my gutters was put it under the kitchen faucet.
“It’s perfect!” she declared as she heard water hit the metal.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the density of metal selected for a gutter system might have relevance beyond durability. I chose a decent grade for structural reasons. But an equally important consideration was, of course, aural. The fluted melody produced by water in a gutter could becalm or be racket. In our test, it becalmed.
Ruiz’s team and I will face other challenges. Should the sculpture be mounted in the ground, or from the side of the house, like an elegant retort to a satellite dish? How will each be anchored so it doesn’t blow off in high winds? Will they be stolen?
As we turn each corner in the gutter map, we will be experimenting with new ideas involving shape, dispersal, safety, cost and permanence. Many prototypes will be made and tested before we have something that could one day become a conventional tool of water conservation.
It’s an excellent problem. This gutter challenge reminds me that home is where everyone is allowed their greatest personal expression, where we can be our own William Mulhollands or Frank Lloyd Wrights. As I sign off with my last garden column for the Los Angeles Times, if I’ve learned anything writing for the Home section it is that learning, experimenting and playing are the very essence of gardening. Readers can follow Green’s future experiments and her writing through her website, www.chanceofrain.com.