20th CENTURY STORYBOOK HOMES

A HOLLYWOOD TAKE ON MEDIEVAL AND EUROPEAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE.

Fairytale, Hansel & Gretel, Storybook: These are names commonly given to a whimsical style that enjoyed only a brief moment but never ceases to bring a warm smile to those who encounter it. It appeared in the Los Angeles area in the early 1920s, reached its height of popularity just before the Depression, and then it was gone, save for a few isolated examples. The style is theatrical and often humorous. The houses are unusually well crafted, of brick and stucco, shingles and even thatch—all artistically rendered to suggest great age.

did you know that the famous sign, when constructed, read HOLLYWOODLAND? That’s right—it was the promotional sign for a subdivision begun in 1923. Advertisements touted the quaintness of the steep hillside setting and the quirkiness of its homes: the developers required that homes be built in “French Normandy, Tudor English, Mediterranean and Spanish styles,” a nod to the growing popularity of Historical Revival styles at the time. The architecture police weren’t patrolling, however, and some of the homes constructed were, well, eccentric. A crack publicity staff succeeded in attracting the likes of Bela Lugosi, Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Swanson, Felix Adler (author of Three Stooges two-reelers), and cellist

Efrem Zimbalist Sr. In the development were built some early, and well publicized, Period Revival houses that crossed a line into what can only be called Storybook Style.

It’s no surprise that the center of the theatrical Storybook Style should be Hollywood, land of make-believe. The stars—the star system dates back to silent films—wanted flamboyant, oneof-a-kind homes. Los Angeles was full of set designers and craftsmen used to evoking foreign locales and a sense of the past for the movies. “As Hollywood flourished in the early ’20s, Period Revival homes began to dot the area in growing numbers,” writes Arrol Gellner in the book Storybook Style. “Most were relatively sober examples of Spanish Revival, Normandy, or half-timbered modes; yet tucked among them could now be found isolated outbreaks of Storybook Style madness. The upshot was at once ironic and fitting: Los Angeles, a city renowned for its youth and impermanence, would devise for America the consummate version of instant antiquity.”

Spadena House, for example, was designed by the art director Harry Oliver in 1921 and built for the Willets studio in Culver City to house offices and dress- ing rooms. It doubled as a movie set and appeared in silent films. (In 1934 it was relocated to Beverly Hills, and has since been a private residence.)

The style is easy to spot: battered walls, upswept roofs, deeply recessed front doors in archways with a random edging of bricks or stone and perhaps brick voussoirs, turrets and entry towers, exaggerated or cartoonish chimneys, metal casement windows, jerkin-head dormers, rough-troweled stucco. The roofs are often a giveaway: usually laid with wood shingles or slate, they may even have a sway or sag in the ridge, suggesting great age.

“These are houses that embody the utmost joy in creation, yet which never demand to be taken too seriously,” writes Arrol Gellner. “It remained for the elements of exaggeration, artifice, and humor to be fused into the Period Revival mixture, in a process that could perhaps only have transpired in one place in America—a city in which a clutch of quaint but well-behaved home styles would be transmogrified into movie-caliber fantasy.”

The style did not, of course, spring from nowhere overnight. It was, perhaps, a manifestation of the Picturesque movement that began in 18th-century England—architecture based on vernacular, medieval forms, meant to elicit emotion more than intellectual appreciation. By the 1920s the popularity of Spanish Revival architecture, especially in California, had broadened into a fascination with European revival styles in general. Storybook Style is the most exuberant. It spread across the country, courtesy of movie celebrity and magazines. Though not common, Storybook houses can be found from Milwaukee to Maryland, in Washington, D.C., and Asheville, N.C., and even in staid New England.

FAR RIGHT Builder Hugh Comstock called his own house in Carmel “Hansel.”

RIGHT Spadena House in Beverly Hills, “a cleverly wrought caricature of dilapidated antiquity,” is the ultimate Storybook example.

ABOVE The mushroom-like Half House by Michigan architect Earl Young, built in 1947, is a late example built almost entirely of granite boulders and local fieldstone.

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Normandy Village, an apartment complex in Berkeley built 1926–28 by William R. Yelland, evokes rural villages in Northern France, patterned on war memories. A bulging dovecote echoes turrets. Inside a house by W.W. Dixon.