Crime of the Week

House of the Eight Gables, Upland

I'm sure someone is very proud of this rather too-big-for-its-britches house in Upland (where, on a recent outing, I counted more Mercedes-Benzes per capita than in Beverly Hills).

It's hardly the worst crime to be reported in these pages and, in all fairness, it's not quite finished yet . . . but enough mercy.

The rock wall outside is in keeping with this area's Flintstones-like preference for building with small boulders that have gravitated down from Mt. Baldy, whose pate is visible just over the roofline on the top right. The median strips of Upland's major north-south thoroughfares are attractively built from the same material and beautifully planted; someone at City Hall knows what he or she is doing.

This disproportionate house, however, lacks a focused entryway, hidden between two projections with clumsy rooflines, and sports windows that are too puny and too insignificant (not to mention too prefab) for their positioning on the façade. And what's in all that attic space?

I occasionally hear radio advertisements encouraging people to hire trained architects who are members of the AIA. What a better house this could have been had the builder taken that suggestion.

I'm not an architect, but I took the liberty of editing the design in a quick Photoshop, using real windows and some common sense. It's still far from perfect, but I think it's an improvement.

At least a tad better?