The Handmade House

Local people (if there are any here in Southern California) call it The Witch House for its dark shingled swayback roof—the grandmother of the clan was photographed sitting astride the swayback, two hundred feet above the ground—its strange angles, peaked windows and a shadowiness that persists even here in the endless sun. The family that built it and three generations of descendants called it the Beach House and enjoyed it for many vacations.

It’s easy to see why everyone, but especially the children, loved the house. Its eccentricities invite playing: the small children’s door inside the peaked door from the living room, the tiny attic chamber where on Halloween children played spooky music on a pump organ to frighten visitors, the bridge over the gulley, leading to the front door (itself up a perilous set of narrow curved stairs) where on summer evenings the grownups gathered for drinks at twilight while the children scampered and hid in the overgrown paths in the tiny garden. And the beach is only two blocks away.

The grandfather and great aunt of the tribe imagined the house in the early 1920’s, long before this coast became crowded. As Lake Perry who wrote the history of the house, with many photographs, described the inspiration: the great aunt, Bertha Sylvia Barker, recalled in 1976, “I started out to build me a house. Jenny [her sister] had a house, and Helen [another sister] had a house. I was the only poor old woman who didn’t have a house… a home. And I thought, well, I didn’t have a man, that’s true, but there isn’t any reason I couldn’t have a house. So I built it for me.”

Her father, Grandad to the descendants, E. Vernon Baker, designed the house—like a handful of crumpled paper, partly smoothed out—with Bertha’s help as well as a tribe of their women, relatives and colleagues who came down on the weekend to dig and carry and haul. One photo shows an enormous beam being hoisted up to the roof by Bertha, with a rope pulley, assisted by a child sitting in a cart. There was no architect, no blueprints, no contractor, no permits, although Barker went on to a long career building more conventional houses.

I imagine the success of the Beach House was largely due to the energy of these women: Grandma on the rooftop, her three daughters, and their many daughters and nieces who enjoyed the house for three generations. My favorite photo shows Aunt Bertha and eight of her colleagues sitting on a bench in the sun, resting briefly from their labors. A later photo shows six little girls between ages eight and ten, smirking in beach sunlight, unselfconscious in their boyish bathing suits.

Yes, Granddad built it and it was his inspired use of found recycled materials that lend to his magic: the tusk and tendon stairs to the third floor—children loved to climb on the wooden tusks, or pegs, that protruded from the stairs—the woodwork throughout the house, chiseled and then burned with a blow torch to darken it, the fixtures made of bits of old tin and iron, the carefully chosen and fitted red tiles in the floors.

They couldn’t stop the building of an ugly three-story apartment building, two or feet away on the adjacent lot, although they tried. It occupies what had been their garden, squatters turning a bit of unused land to good use. Now the Pacific Coast Highway roars two blocks away, eight lanes of traffic, packed at all hours, but the Beach House, high above the commotion, manages to preserve its strange charm.

I’m visiting here for a few days as the guest of my son and daughter-in-law who, in an inspired, risk-taking moment bought the house and its memories fifteen years ago. At night here I imagine I can still hear those big and little girls, rampaging through the house, free at least for a moment of the ties that bind.

In Travel California