Malibu West offered affordable slices of midcentury paradise

Tract housing in Malibu? Who knew?

This week writer Jeffrey Head explores a little-known cluster of 200 tract homes called Malibu West. He writes:

The tract, built in 1962 near Pacific Coast Highway, is made up of traditional and modern homes, many restored to their original design. To some, these midcentury houses may look like knockoffs of the famed tract homes built by Joseph Eichler, but Malibu West was built by Nisan Matlin and Eugene Dvoretzky, award-winning architects (now retired) who built Malibu West before Eichler had established his signature houses in Granada Hills.

The original sale price? They started at $32,500. Ah, for a time machine.

You can read the rest of Head's story on this slice of Southern California coolness here.

-- Deborah Netburn

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Photo: The backyard view of architect Doug Burdge's home in Malibu West. Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

The Deal: At Viva Terrra, 25% off eco-friendly decor

Crafted from hand-cut capiz shells edged in metal, VivaTerra's Lotus Flower Chandelier stands out for its great design sense and green values.

In this instance, "green" has economic significance too, as the eco-friendly online retailer is offering 25% off selected home decor items through April 21.

The chandelier, shown above, comes in 13-inch and 21-inch diameters, and is also available in a gray hue called smoke. Normally $329 and $649, the hanging pendant is now priced at $279 and $549. (The larger chandelier has a $40 shipping surcharge).

Other colorful items made from sustainable materials include the hand-embroidered Peruvian wall hanging pictured at right (reduced to $139 from $189); nesting tables made from wood salvaged from old houses (reduced to $258 from $298), and a great selection of rugs made from recycled plastic bottles and packing materials (normally $49-$125; now $45-$115).   

For a look at all VivaTerra items on sale, click here. For more information, call (800) 233-6011.

-- Lisa Boone 

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Photo credit: VivaTerra

Architizer: Created for architects, but built for the design addict

Wouldn't it be great to have a database of contemporary architecture?  A site where you could view photos of Roger Sherman’s 3-in-1 House, learn more about the firm Office 42, or locate Standard Architecture’s (not so) Hidden House?

Architizer to the rescue. The new site aspires to "redefine how architects show their work to the world." It's Facebook-for-architects, meets Linked-In, with a good dose of Google Maps. And while architects might be the target audience, design enthusiasts will surely enjoy lurking. If you're shopping for an architect, you can scope out firms -- or simply get lost looking at all the work.

Co-founder Marc Kushner, a New York-based architect, wants the site to become the new forum for word-of-mouth information on design. In the old days, a client might have connected with an architect through "your mom's hairdresser's son," he said. Architizer offers a space where architects, critics, clients and fans can come together.  Already, he said, it is "changing the way how architects put themselves out there to the community."

Kushner worked with architect Matthias Hollwich, the creative agency Kreative Konzeption and director of communications Benjamin Prosky to launch the site.

Architizer has 40 profiles of Los Angeles-area firms so far. Prada's store in Beverly Hills (designed by Office of Metropolitan Architecture) is one of the most-viewed projects.

-- Roselle Curwen

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Photo: Architizer.com home page. Credit: Architizer

Datebook: Events, exhibits, classes for the week ahead

We've listed select home and garden events below. Suggest your own via reader comments. Submissions must be fewer than 75 words and must be for one-time events with legitimate value to other readers. No store promotions and no frivolous links, please. L.A. at Home staff will determine which submissions will be made public, but we won't edit the comments.

Tuesday: Margaret Griffin of Griffin Enright Architects lectures as part of the "Locals Only" lecture series devoted to experimental architecture. 6:30 p.m. Woodbury School of Architecture, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank. Free.

Wednesday: Eric Avila, author of “Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles,” lectures on “The Center Cannot Hold.” The talk is part of the Southern California Institute of Architecture spring lecture series. 7 p.m. W.M. Keck Lecture Hall, SCI-Arc, 960 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles. (213) 613-2200.

Wednesday: The Kodo Arts Japanese Antique Show will feature Japanese art, furniture, bronzes, ceramics and textiles. 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday through April 4. Southern California Artists Assn., #F-3, 3251 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. (949) 374-9617.

Thursday: As part of Thursday Garden Talks With Lili Singer, artist Leigh Adams will lead a class on how to create a pique assiette sphere, a ball encrusted with tile, broken pottery and found objects. Most materials provided. Bring your own ceramic or porcelain plates, buttons, flat-sided marbles or other items. Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanical Gardens, 301 N. Baldwin Ave, Arcadia. 9:30 a.m. to noon. $20. (626) 821-4623.

Thursday: Bob Martin, author of "Showing Good Roses," will discuss the anatomy and parts of roses -- stomata, stipules, prickles, mass, bracts and stamens -- at a meeting of the Pacific Rose Society. 8 p.m. Ayers Hall, Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Gardens, 301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia. Free. (626) 821-3222.

Saturday: Learn how to create an organic, edible garden in this three-part series led by Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of “The Urban Homestead.” 9 a.m. to noon Saturday and April 10. The class will cover planning, planting, maintaining and harvesting. $130 to $145. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Registration: (626) 405-2128.

Saturday: James Hogue, insect collector and co-author of "Field Guide to Beetles of California," gives an illustrated lecture on the benefits of native insects and plants in maintaining a healthy native plant garden. 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. The Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants, 10459 Tuxford St., Sun Valley. $20 to $30. (818) 768-1802.

Saturday: Connie Vadheim will discuss Victorian gardens as part of the gardening series "Out of the Wilds and Into Your Garden." The class will focus on native plants and scented flowers and will be followed by a walk in the Madrona Native Plant Gardens. 10 a.m. to noon; repeats April 6 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Madrona Marsh Nature Center, 3201 Plaza Del Amo, Torrance. Free. (310) 782-3989.

Sunday: The South Bay Orchid Society hosts an orchid lecture from 1 to 4 p.m. South Coast Botanic Garden, 26300 Crenshaw Blvd., Palos Verdes Peninsula. Free with admission of $3 to $8. (310) 544-1948.

Closing: The 66th Scripps College Ceramic Annual 2010 will feature works by Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, Claire Hedden, Guozhen Zhou and others. Free. Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, 11th Street and Columbia Avenue, Claremont. Ends April 4. (909) 607-4690.

-- Lisa Boone

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Photo: Woolly Blue Curls (which attracts pollinating insects). Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Home Tour: 'Organic modern' in the hills of Glendale

It's hard to imagine, but not too long ago this stunning, light-filled home with views out to the San Gabriel Mountains -- to slip into real-estate-agent speak -- suffered from pink plaid wallpaper in the kitchen and gold shag carpeting in the living room. But attorney Christophe Burusco saw beyond that and bought it up for just under $500,000 in 2001.

The above photo is just a taste of what he did to the house during years of careful restoration, creating an effect that his designer calls "organic modern," which incorporates grass cloth wallpaper, cork floor tiles and plenty of indoor-outdoor living space.

Read Debra Prinzing's full story on the home's transformation, or go right to the photo gallery and drool.

-- Deborah Netburn

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Photo credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

The Dry Garden: Previewing Theodore Payne's annual native garden tour

Yes, yes, yes. We all know that native gardens save water, curb greenhouse gas pollution, save homeowners thousands a year on mow and blow fees and entitle their owners to eco-sainthood. But what do they look like? Are they beautiful? If so, are they hard to plant and maintain? Where can you put down the baby? Will those who might want one still be allowed a patch of lawn?

To help Los Angeles homeowners see the almost endless possibilities open after they start incorporating local flora into their gardens, the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants calls upon its members every spring to open their homes to the public. The upshot is a tour in which the smartest, most experienced native gardeners in Southern California get down with whoever shows up asking for help.

If you want lives of the rich and famous, this is not your tour (go on the Garden Conservancy one). The Payne tour is by gardeners, for gardeners. Its host run a gamut -- from a Latina born in East Los Angeles to an Englishwoman from London, from single young hipsters to retired grandparents, from sculptors to aerospace engineers. There are bankers, dentists, photographers, office workers and the newly unemployed.

All find joy, accomplishment and, above all, meaning in their gardens.

So, for the next three weeks, this column will dedicate itself to visiting a selection of the 50 homes participating on the foundation tour on April 10 and 11, starting with two coastal properties this week and then moving inland to the valley, and finally to the foothills.

Mature sycamores attracted Tracey Robinson and Craig Peterson to the Westchester home that they bought in 1999. So the couple (he’s a dentist, she works in television) bought Bob Perry’s book “Landscape Plants for Western Regions” to see what might work under the trees. This was no easy feat. It was not just shade and root competition that limited their choices, but also very likely a natural chemical defense against competition emitting from the sycamores themselves. 

“Rather than watching TV, we were looking at that book all night long,” recalls Peterson. After poring over plant combinations suggested by Perry, they began making trips to the Theodore Payne Foundation, then to the Tree of Life, Matilija and Las Pilitas nurseries, where they met manzanitas, coffeeberries, fluttering grasses and gooseberries in person.

The physical result is a tousled and loosely planted woodland garden with sun-lovers around the edges and poppies spilling over the perimeter through a rustic wooden fence. The personal result for Robinson and Peterson is a shared passion. Gardening.

“When the weekend comes, I don’t want to go with everyone else to the beach,” Peterson says. “I want to stay home and work in the yard.”

Bill and Fran Arrowsmith moved into their Torrance home in 1980 and in 2006 decided to put in a native garden. The only thing they regret, Bill says with a laugh, a retired aerospace engineer, is “what took us so long?” 

They knew that they wanted to keep a dense belt of marathon sod around the patio for their grandchildren, but they had also decided that they wanted something wilder to complete the vista. They called in a designer who created a meandering path around a gentle berm, then planted the beds and berm with natives. The Arrowsmith’s new view became a destination, their own instantly navigable slice of the wild where elderberry, buckwheat and flannel bush (Fremontodendron californicum) grow. As animation, the butterflies moved in, including red admirals, morning cloaks, swallowtails and monarchs.

On a technical note, one thing that makes the Arrowsmith home a must-stop for beach gardeners is the soil. While over in Westchester, less than 15 miles north and no further inland, Robinson and Peterson enjoy clay loam, the Arrowsmiths in Torrance have sand.

After 26 years battling the fast drainage while trying to grow a conventional garden, in turning to the likes of Cleveland sage, the Arrowsmith befriended it. “The very thing that made it so hard to keep the grass looking good became a boon with natives,” Bill says.

To learn how the Arrowsmiths fared when they decided to take on their front garden without a designer, you’ll have to go on the tour. Keep in mind that they must have done well for their garden to qualify.

-- Emily Green

Green's column on sustainable gardening appears here weekly.

Photo credits: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

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Back Story: The men behind a sweet design

This week we revived an occasional feature called Back Story, in which Bettijane Levine tells the story behind everyday objects at home. On Thursday she posted an item on the mystery behind the Lazy Susan and its unknown origins. When she launched this series back in 2008, Levine tracked down one of the creators of another iconic item: a beautifully simple sugar shaker that you'll still find in diners and homes across the country. The original article is seemingly impossible to find online anymore, so we're reposting it here. Look for more installments in the next couple of weeks. Here's Levine's 2008 article:

Consider this humble sugar shaker, a staple of kitchens and coffee shops across the land. About 35 million have been sold -- maybe double that if you include all the knockoffs -- and not one of them labeled a work of art.

Yet that's exactly what they are, says design historian Bill Stern, a connoisseur of ubiquitous and unsung objects. "This decanter is iconic," he says, "the very essence of modernism, a perfect meld of function and form."

Stern, the guiding force behind the development of the Museum of California Design, extols the comfortable swell of the shaker's glass belly, which is shaped to be cradled in the palm. And the clean gleam of its smooth, slightly canted metal top, which cues a user's eye to tilt in the right direction. And the placement of the pouring flap, ingeniously engineered "so that when you tip the shaker," Stern says, "the whole weight of the contents is concentrated at the precise point where it has to come out."

Previous models were inferior, he says. They didn't pour easily, and they collected dirt. But this design?

"There's not a whit of unnecessary decoration," he says. "It's made inexpensively but responsibly, so it won't prematurely break or wear out. Viewed at a distance, it is an extremely elegant object." And those are just some of the reasons it's still around.

Fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld designs a home safe with his name on it: Narcissus

If for nothing else, you have to admire fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld for his audacious sense of I-don't-care-what-people-think-of-me integrity. In a recent interview, the creative mind who revived Chanel and Fendi and launched his own successful collections said, "There are very few important things, and they are not possessions." Now that he's gotten that off his chest, Lagerfeld has put his name to what is being called the most expensive home safe in the world.

Lagerfeld teamed with Markus Döttling, the managing partner and master locksmith of the 91-year-old German safe manufacturing firm Döttling. Their design process took nearly two years. The result is a 1,760-pound treasure chest that stands nearly 6 feet tall and is more than 3 feet wide. It has "owner-recognition technology" that allows access to two handcrafted interior cabinets, which pop out from the sides of the sleek, monolithic piece. The exterior skin is chrome-plated aluminum that has a mirror-like finish, so when you have fetched your finery, you can admire yourself. Fittingly, it is called the Narcissus. 

Made to order and limited to an edition of 30, the Narcissus will be exclusively distributed in the U.S. by LA Closet Design in the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. The price: about $340,000 -- and that's before your designer adds his mark-up. Narcissus does redefine what a safe might look like, but Lagerfeld, who photographed himself with his creation, clearly has as much price sensitivity as he has a sense of irony.

"I am not interested in what people want," he said in a statement. "I've designed a safe that I would like to own and which will stand in my home."

-- David A. Keeps

Photo credit: Karl Lagerfeld / Döttling

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Preparing for the seder with the planet in mind

The Jew and the Carrot, the blog documenting the "new Jewish food movement" with a focus on health and sustainability, has some thoughts about bringing ecological awareness to Passover. Some are simple: Rather than cut flowers on the seder table, use potted plants for decoration.

Other suggestions require more effort.

In many homes, preparing for the holiday, which this year begins at sundown Monday, means a serious cleaning to make certain no leavened products -- even crumbs -- remain in the house. The blog suggests doing that cleaning with products that don't contain harmful chemicals.

Charoset, one of the foods eaten for its symbolism, often is made with apples and nuts. The Jew and the Carrot suggests using local apples and fair-trade nuts.

Take a look at the post for more ideas.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Back Story: Who was Susan, and was she truly lazy?

If you love a domestic mystery, consider the case of the Lazy Susan. This humble household helper has slogged through centuries essentially unchanged.

Despite its enduring popularity, definitive documentation on the design’s origins remain oddly elusive. Logic dictates that some time long ago, a sloth named Susan inspired the entire galaxy of twirling servers. Who was she? And who invented the turntable trays that link her forever with an insulting adjective?

It’s a very cold case. Amateur Internet sleuths credit two Thomases (Jefferson and Edison) for the invention, allegedly named after sluggish daughters. Historians say there’s no proof to back either assertion.

Americans tend to think Lazy Susans are kitschy relics of the 1950s and 1960s, but the lineage turns out to be longer and more distinguished. Historians can trace the concept to 18th century England, when it was probably known as a dumbwaiter. It may have become popular at a time when household servants were in declining supply. In the absence of maids or footmen to refill wine goblets and deliver condiments, diners were forced to reach across the table or interrupt conversation with "pass the pimientos please." The Lazy Susan helped to solve that problem, and plenty of 18th century examples prove it. In January, a mahogany Lazy Susan — 16 inches in diameter and dated circa 1780 — sold at Christie’s auction house in London for about $3,900. (That's it, above.)

"It's a great mystery," says Sarah Coffin, head of the product design and decorative arts department at the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. "I have no idea who first came up with Lazy Susans, although I've wondered. I'm pretty sure the name is a 20th century invention. But the earliest forms I know of are from 1720s and 1730s England. Many were pedestal tables with rotating tops used for wine and tea tasting. I’ve also seen versions with silver trays fitted into the tabletop."