New Home, Old Materials

Looks old, sure, but it's faking it

By Janet Eastman

Thursday January 29, 2004

INSIDE and out, the house is faded and abraded. Floor pavers are bleached by the sun. Uneven oak beams and pine wall panels are dinged up. Lichen mars the roof tiles.

And that's just the way the owners wanted it -- a microwaved version of the venerable estates of, say, Montecito. A brand-new structure that gives the credible illusion of being a centuries-old dwelling in Tuscany.

Architect David E. Martin of Los Angeles understood perfectly what clients John and Robin McMonigle were after. Lived-in but casually sophisticated. An efficient antiquity.

Although a modernist by training -- he was associated with I.M. Pei in New York for 17 years, serving for three years as site architect for Pei's Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing -- Martin has designed many stately homes, among them a 22,000-square-foot mansion. He also renovated a 1932 villa in Bel-Air, designed by Wallace Neff in the Mediterranean style for which Neff was best known.

Martin already had worked for the McMonigles on two ocean-view homes in Newport Beach and would do it again "anywhere," he says, "because I know they won't do anything that isn't right."

A trusting commentary, considering his clients bought in Shady Canyon, an Irvine community so new it didn't even have roads when he first saw it three years ago. He and John McMonigle, a custom-home builder on the Newport coast, drove up cow trails to pick out the half-acre site.

Making his mission difficult were the strict regulations of the design review board. Unlike the city's packed tracts, this development preserves its rural feeling. The 400 houses, spread across 1,070 acres, have to blend with the rock croppings, oaks and native shrubs.

Martin's solution was to design a place pretending to be a boxy cottage that grew over generations to become a sprawling limestone estate. He achieved this weathered-as-the-landscape look by using materials salvaged from old buildings.

Last month, the McMonigles and their three children moved into their new-old house in the gated community where retired slugger Mark McGwire, Dodger Shawn Green, former Mighty Duck Craig Johnson and talk-show host Jim Rome will be neighbors.

Although built at the same time, the home's three "stages" have different heights and features. The "original" two-story cottage has a kitchen, family room and basement. The single-story middle holds the formal great room and the interior corridor that connects the wings. Bedrooms are clustered in a single-story, pitched-roof structure.

"The beauty of this house," says Michael Dilley of MDZA Landscape Architecture in Costa Mesa and Los Angeles, who installed a dry well with deep rope-pull grooves in the property's backyard, "is it's not perfect."

Adding layers of time-earned character is the use of materials that show years of wear and tear: rustic walnut planks, pitted terra-cotta pavers, antique French hardware, fireplaces with blackened bricks and scarred grates.

Reclaimed wood, bricks and carved stone cost 20% to 100% more than new because they are rare and usually imported from countries that have structures older than the Mayflower. But the price is worth it to homeowners who want something close to an authentic period home and to help Mother Nature by recycling what is already made.

More companies are selling these materials, according to the National Wood Flooring Assn. Suppliers are kept busy by custom-home designers such as Martin who appreciate that no two pieces made by hand, before sawmills and power tools, are exactly the same. They also bank on the distinction of patinas that have softened with time.

Builders, too, are requesting old wood. It's dry, hard and durable, the grain is finer and denser and it won't shrink or warp much because it has long been bombarded by the elements. They also like that planks from trees that were allowed to mature in forests are bigger than most cut today from young plantation-grown trees.

Companies that specialize in reclaimed wood find it by scouting out warehouses, grain elevators, barns, schools, even sawmills built in the early 1900s that are being torn down. If the building's owner isn't in a rush, a deal is made. Sometimes, though, the wood is bulldozed. Redwood, "which is like gold," says one wood reclaimer, was ripped out of buildings in Camp Pendleton and taken to a dump before it could be rescued.

Old wood is sold as is or re-sawed into flooring, paneling, ceilings, decking and furniture. Some of it, such as flooring made from reclaimed-oak Guinness brewery vats, comes with certification of authenticity. Others don't. A rectangular dining table was made for the Shady Canyon house from wood whose origins are unknown.

"Most of us in this business are interested in the wood in a building," says Dennis Roberts, co-founder of Vintage Timberworks in Temecula, who supplied some of the planks for the home. "Sometimes the history escapes us."

That's a reason many stories attached to aged material are met with a questioning "Oh, really?" When Robin McMonigle talks about a stone sink in a powder room, she crooks her fingers into quote marks when she says, "It's an 'antique' from France."

In her home, she mixes treasures with the untrodden. Antique burgundy Persian rugs lie on the office and hallway floors. But she couldn't find light-colored ones in good condition for the great room's sitting and dining areas, so she ordered two new creamed-colored rugs and had them treated to look as if their floral motifs had been rubbed away by parades of feet. Underneath the rugs are worn, terra-cotta pavers salvaged from crumbling Italian farmhouses that are laid in a basket-weave pattern.

The landscape also feels as if it has been in place for generations. Visitors are announced by the crunch of loose pea gravel, which was used on walkways and driveways long before concrete or asphalt. Soon, grapevines will wrap around an Old-World pergola in the backyard.

The trick to massaging a home to look as if it has endured many seasons, say experts, is to use materials that will continue to age gracefully. As time goes by here, more golden minerals in the hand-chiseled Texas limestone exterior walls will be exposed and the sun will make the tan and cream colors even mellower.

"I never started out with the [just] premise of trying to make this new house look like an old house," says Martin. "What I did was make this building a home, a home with inherent warmth. It will become even more beautiful over time."

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A roof imported from Italy

The Shady Canyon home's crowning feature is its roof, which has 10,000 vintage tiles in pale yellow, peach, ocher and red.

The barrel tiles were made by Italians centuries ago, who put curves into slabs of terra-cotta clay by shaping them against their legs. "There was no standard size back then," says Renato Detassis of Farnese Gallery in Los Angeles, which sells aged tiles starting at $2 a piece.

Lighter tiles, pulled from the sunniest sides of buildings, are interspersed with tiles darkened by dampness and mildew. The mix of contrasting hues on the roof draws as much attention as what's not there: exhaust stacks. Architect David E. Martin hid them in the chimneys.