Crime of the Week

Behold what three-quarters of a million dollars will get you off Laurel Canyon.

2222 Ridgemont Drive.

I should say "off upper Laurel Canyon," lest we forget in which tony neighborhood we are trespassing in search of the exquisitely hideous.

Exuding all the warmth and charm of a Tulsa trailer park, this battleship-gray beauty is listed at $749,000.

Happy weekend.

Crime of the Week

Some disasters can't be blamed on the Bauhaus.

9824 Yoakum Drive, Beverly Hills.

This ungainly shack in nosebleed Beverly Hills was built in 1923, during Modernism's heyday, but it's about as far from Dessau as it gets.

Perhaps John Barrymore had his handyman cobble the place together as a hunting boozing lodge, as it sits in what was, at the time, a very remote area. It certainly seems better suited to weekends of heavy binging with your pals than to day-to-day living.

An "open" plan.

The interior is no less a mess than the exterior. A spiral staircase leads down to a featureless (and, from what I can tell, windowless) basement room—I'm thinking orgy parlor. A sliding vertical ladder allows access to the loft; sleepwalkers need not apply.

The rear hindquarters.

The rear is a hodgepodge of stucco, shingles and clapboard, with all the backyard charm of a well-maintained favela.

Should you care to indulge your prurient interest further, the listing is here.

Crime of the Week

Bobolini, of Fahrenheit Studios, who occasionally serves as my west-of-the-405 scout, recently found this gem lurking on Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

Abode of the 45° people?

As Bobolini reports: "I am most impressed with the position of the antennae." Indeed, the right-hand aerial seems to be pointed unrelentingly in the direction of the great nebula in Orion, perhaps receiving transmissions from the home planet.

Crime of the Week

Crime and context.

853 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena

Some crimes would be less heinous in a different context. This disastrous and ill-maintained eyesore is smack dab in the middle of a Pasadena neighborhood of Craftsman and other early 20th-century houses, just north of the 210 Freeway.

The context

Admittedly, the neighboring structures are not necessarily in pristine condition, but at least they are appropriate to the streetscape.

In the same block

Given the context, there's no excuse for the blatant and egregious nature of the crime at hand.

Crime of the Week

No, the crime is not this charming 1922 bungalow at 135 S. Avenue 54, Highland Park (although one doubts it's really a "4 bedroom," as the listing declares).

The rather recent plantings in the front yard and on the parkway are a laudable effort by the seller to make this place as as appealing as any West Hollywood interior designer's bachelor pad. The effect is completely winning.

West Hollywood charm in Highland Park.

Alas, a quick search on Google Earth reveals the real crime: the squalid multi-family building immediately nextdoor:

Click the image for a larger view of the squalor.

Given the vaguely defined driveway between the two structures, I'm not sure where the actual property line lies, or whether there would be room enough to build a two-story fence (or plant a row of cypresses?) sufficient to mask the ugliness radiating from this hideous tenement.

The bungalow is marked "Sale Pending" on CaliforniaMoves.com. Kudos to the plucky buyer(s).

Crime of the Week

Let me tell you about the nouveaux riches. They are different from you and me.

811 N. Linden Drive, Beverly Hills

I've driven by this 1988 "Tuscan-style" house in Beverly Hills many times and, admittedly, admired its commanding situation, on the raised triangular intersection of Linden and Whittier Drives.

Commanding position: the knoll at Linden and Whittier Drives.

But now that it's on the market (for $6.495 million—the listing is here), I've had a chance to see how its affluent owners (or tenants?) have been living. It's not pretty.

For starters, the entry hall is a crude, disproportionate affair that, with its tawdry furnishings, immediately sets an amateur, DIY tone and makes me suspect that the owners designed the place themselves with no input from a trained architect, much less any real knowledge of architectural precedent.

The carpeted staircase is fit for a suburban townhouse condo, and the cheap white glazed tile continues throughout major sections of the ground floor.

Drama-less DIY.

The downstairs space is confusingly laid out and contains rooms of dubious utility, not to mention appalling ugliness.

Bookless library? Knick-knack storage area? Stand-by-the-fireplace room?

Sooner or later, we run into this mysterious timber-ceilinged lair, the purpose of which can only be to further vex and annoy anyone with a love of architecture or interior design:

Office? Art studio? Torture chamber?

Continuing upstairs, the master bedroom is a vacant, ill-proportioned shell of a room with oppressively high ceilings made worse by the lack of crown molding—perhaps the most uncozy sleeping quarters I've ever seen. (I will spare you the several children's chambers.)

Wha happunnn?

And the façade, for all its imposing symmetry, is hardly more than an anemic affectation of a Tuscan villa.

Villa Pretensiosa.

Crime of the Week

$308,900 will get you this Montecito Heights remodel, originally built in 1922 and since hideously disfigured, perhaps more than once. The listing is (or was) here.

2721 Commodore, Montecito Heights

There are so many things wrong with this disaster that not even extended Photoshopping would help. The awkward, styleless, and completely unrelated two-story addition was evidently built without recourse to an architect, substituting instead a cash-and-carry plan from The Home Depot.

But lack of access to trained architects has been the norm throughout most of history; builders—local workers, just like the guys who probably built this—have constructed most human habitations, such as these:


Why is this example of contemporary vernacular architecture so visually and spiritually impoverished when compared with the vernacular architecture of our collective European and American past?

Crime of the Week

I missed tracking down a Crime of the Week last week, but in my defense, this one more than makes up for it.

No drawbridge? No portcullis?

The L.A. equivalent of Wemmick's castle in Great Expectations—which had, Dickens says, "the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham)"—this crenellated hodge-podge would be ridiculous even at Disneyland, but it's preposterously out of place amid the understated houses of Carthay Circle, which, although varied in style, are united by a common regard for taste.

These queer Gothic windows are vinyl pre-fabs, something King Edward II would probably have appreciated on those cold, damp English nights.

For a larger view of this remarkably tacky sham, click here.

Below, a real 14th century castle.

Haughton Castle, Northumberland

Crime of the Week

There oughta be a law.

But this is America, where, by God or Allah, you can build anything you damn well please to puff up your ego, neighbors and neighborhood be damned.

Wapello Street, Altadena.

If this naïve disaster were on a street composed of nothing but similar architectural schlock (Encino comes to mind), one wouldn't mind quite so much. But, alas, it's on a quiet, quaint, semi-rustic side street in upper Altadena that hosts an array of modest—and quite often charming—cottages, small mid-century ranchers, and the occasional bungalow.

The cottage directly across the street (from Google Earth).

This behemoth not only dwarfs nearby houses, but is entirely out of character with the surroundings, eclectic though they may be.

The behemoth from above.

Like I say, there oughta be a law.

Crime of the Week

Hey, remember Post-Modernism?

While Gloria Estefan was on the Top 10 and Miami Vice ruled the Peacock Network, Kanner Architects were busy with their aqua-tinged 1988 makeover of this 16-unit Mid-Wilshire apartment building, originally constructed (I wouldn't say designed) in 1957.

686 S. St. Andrews Place, Mid-Wilshire.

Unfortunately, the statute of limitations has expired on this one, and in any case one can hardly feel pity for the "victim" building. My deepest sympathies, however, are extended to anyone who lives across the street from this forced study in the Architecture of Cool.

The perpetrator firm now bills itself as "a Modern design studio in Santa Monica, California" (Modern with a nice big capital M), disingenuously disguising its sordid Post-Modernist past. But the truth will out: Kanner continues its obsession with Swiss cheese in this much more recent gymnasium in Pacific Palisades.

Crime of the Week

Outsider art.

Having been a somewhat successful visual artist for two decades and having also worked as an art critic for a few years, I should probably be more sympathetic to this poor, deluded soul, who thinks he is doing the neighborhood—or perhaps history—a favor by displaying his sculptures and paintings in his front yard.

But no amount of "contextualizing," "deconstruction," or just plain indulgence can excuse this streetside eyesore. I would offer the artist the advice—gained from experience—not to quit his day job, but he doesn't seem to have one: he can be seen puttering around outside this Sherman Oaks shanty-cum-studio almost any day, adding refining touches to his life's work.

Crime(s) of the Week

There seems to be a rash of these curiously street-shunning multi-unit buildings in South Los Angeles, built on elongated lots.

Both of these were constructed in 2005.





Their architectural naïveté is more excusable than is their clausterphobic inhumanity.

Crime of the Week

This faux-baroque joke on Greenleaf in Sherman Oaks is "back on the market," according to the sign out front.

"Keep the hell out, peasant!" —H.S.

This defensively gated 3-bedroom eyesore, built in 2005 on a shady suburban street a couple blocks south of the boulevard, sold for $3,043,000 in January. But evidently its new owner got an advanced case of the heebee-jeebees, complicated by second thoughts, arrière-pensées, and buyer's remorse and is now trying to unload it. Or maybe he or she just got in over his or her head.

If you're interested, here's who to call:

Crime of the Week

Evidently, these residents of the Hollywood Hills are unaware that all trash containers "must be placed at the curb by 6:00 a.m. on the day of collection, and removed no later than 8:00 p.m. on the day of collection," according to L.A. Bureau of Sanitation regulations.

Blocking the sidewalk 24/7.

These trash and recycling container are left on the sidewalk 24/7 by residents too inconsiderate—or just too lazy—to bring them back onto their premises after collection.

If you have this problem in your neighborhood, the Bureau of Sanitation will send an inspector out if you call this number: 1-800-773-CITY (1-800-773-2489) and provide the address.

Crime of the Week

Larchmont-adjacent gemisch.

The taste for pre-fab Corinthian columns is not limited, it seems, to Encino's nouveau riche enclaves. This house is Larchmont-adjacent (to use the parlance of real estate agents) and on a street with many nicely maintained cottages and bungalows.

Here, however, the builder opted for an inarticulate stucco box with a hodge-podge of mail-order "features" slapped on: skinny, entasis-free fluted columns which, fortunately, don't really have to support anything; an off-the-shelf Georgian-style door surround, surrounding a vaguely Mediterranean door; a crude balcony befitting a '50s public housing project; an afterthought of an oeil-de-boeuf; prison-like gratings on the lower windows.

When it tuned out that this malproportioned mess lined up perfectly on the grid with the unattractive (although better designed) office building behind it, I felt I had to include the latter as well.

Crime of the Week

A hot pink disaster.

I am a long-time renter, but I do sympathize with property owners (aka "landlords") who are faced with the vandalization of their rental units by tenants. It may be even worse when the damage is done by naive renters who think they are improving the place.

The bedroom above is in a 1926 Hollywood building that is in the midst of a long, meticulous, and expensive restoration to bring it back to its silent-era charm and appeal.

The tenants in this unit, however, (who have now been evicted for other reasons) took it upon themselves to paint the walls a frightening shade of electric raspberry sorbet that even Angelyne would blanche at. But the real crime is that they also slathered all the woodwork with a nice heavy layer of gold metallic paint that will have to be laboriously removed.

The owner, who is a friend of mine, had just paid workers thousands of dollars to strip, refinish, and repaint the trim and the 28 original sash windows in the building.

The gold heart crudely drawn above the bed—upon which the couple, both "artists," must surely have celebrated their masterwork with domestic champagne and a good round of hot pink sex—is the tawdry icing on this disaster.

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?

Crime of the Week

Ugly indeed.

"The message is: Stay away from Los Angeles."

Crime of the Week

This building is just that: building, not architecture. And building of the cheapest possible conception, design, and construction. A street crime on a par with strong-arm robbery, or perhaps worse. since it is being perpetrated not just once but continually for the forseeable future.

A few 2x8s have been glued to the exterior to mimic "style," while the tenants are protected from home invasion by bars on the flimsy pre-fab aluminium windows.


Until we start expecting—or demanding—more from our buildings, developers and landlords will continue to throw up criminal structures such as this. A city that permits buildings like this is equally guilty, perhaps more so.

Crime of the Week

From a listing I ran across five years ago, but the house undoubtedly still stands, as much an affront to taste as it was then.

This splendidly hideous behemoth in Pasadena shows what happens when the "designer" begins with the placement of the wide-screen television and works outward from there. By the time he or she gets to the front elevation, all is lost. The overblown entry portico is the perfect finishing touch.

"Filled with ambiance"

The following was the description provided by the real estate agent unlucky enough to have been charged with unloading this pile of crap on a (preferably naïve) buyer:
We repeat: Words cannot describe this unique property.