Restoring Irving Gill's "Williams House"

Visiting the Rich Cousin

If Irving Gill houses are one big family, our house would be the wayward son, the one who disappeared only to show up years later, with a long gray beard, beleaguered, and in need of a bath.

We visited the relatives last week during an Elder Hostel event at the Marston House. First, I should say that I managed to get through the event without anyone asking for proof that I am at least sixty years old. I don’t look a day over forty, at least not when I’ve had some sleep, so last week I probably didn’t look a day over fifty.

It turns out that sometimes rich cousins don’t have the constitutions of their wayward relatives. As I listened to the work done on the Marston House, I just shook my head wondering what in the heck I am worried about with our house. We don’t have two trillion bricks to repoint. In fact, we don’t even have one thousand. We do have some structural issues, but they are not on the same scale. (May those not be famous last words.)

We have dry rot on the outlooker beams, still not taken care of. We also have a beam splice in the great room and there is some disagreement among those who have looked at it as to whether it’s “ingenious and well done” or “a temporary fix that was never complete.” It also has a bit of rot. So that beam may cause some excitement but I don’t expect it to land us upside down on a home loan. Its greatest potential is ending up as one of the many California Hot Springs stories such as the time the large boulder rolled onto the road and everyone brought picnic lunches to see it blasted into bits.

The single greatest expense on this house, I expect, will be the window restoration and that, as grandpa would have said, is “a high class problem.” The windows work. At least most of the windows work most of the time. We even have new-fangled dual-pane vinyl windows to fight the winter cold. My dad put those in the closed porches back in the 90s to replace the aluminum windows installed in the 70s. Now one seems to be convinced by my argument that the vinyl is historically significant and most people think we should do something about them. Again, this is a high class problem -- they are not actually rotting the house, just causing eye strain.

My big plan now is to create a big plan. What I would like to do is create a master design plan for the house and grounds and just get started. Even if my generation just keeps the house from falling down and passes on some of the fun projects to the next generation, at least there would be a plan.

Advocating for the National Register of Historic Places

It is a hard lesson to learn that you can’t win every argument (though I’m about 1 for 2), you can’t talk yourself out of every driving ticket (I’m 1 for 3), and you can’t even get your 3-year-old to climb into the car when it’s time to go (I’m about 1 for 15).  I talked to a person at the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) recently and found myself 0 for 1. 

I contacted the office to find out about the possibilities of registering the house on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Phone Booth

When we received the original plans for this house about a month ago, we noticed that the phone booth in our house is not in the drawings, nor was the closet in the bedroom adjacent.  But we believe both to be original.  On the plans themselves someone drew in by hand one "entertainment closet" to be included in the space that now is a phone booth and a bedroom closet.  It appears as if further changes were made since those notations.

The phone booth is in the great room.  It is in need of a bit of decor but has a cool chair as a start.

It's certainly a Gill window

I was checking out a website dedicated to Irving Gill's Peter Price house in San Diego and was tickled to see that the house's windows share some similarities to one of the remaining windows in our house.  In our original window inventory I mentioned that the original design for the house calls for 18 transom windows.  From the interior, the window looks like this:

Original Gill Doors

This house has some unusual doors which match precisely the original plans designed by Irving Gill.  Most of the doors in the house were a rustic style, though we believe there were also eight sets of French doors in the main house.  Ten of the rustic style doors remain.  Two of those doors in the main house are properly hung.  The little house had 4 rustic doors, all of which remain (though one was moved to a new location). 

Pictures of three of the remaining doors are below. 

Haunted by kitchen plans

I mentioned in a previous post that our original house design included a kitchen layout.  As we move forward to renovating the kitchen, I find myself haunted by these plans.  We will be doing a kitchen remodel sometime in the spring of 2006 and already had the floor plan design and most of the materials selected before we received these plans.  Generally, we plan to use existing cabinetry for one wall of cabinets, build a new run of base cabinets on our north wall, and build an island using a baker’s table as a model but sizing it up a bit.  A few key items stand in the way of restoring the kitchen to the original plans:

Original Window Inventory

July 20, 2005

As we mention in the house history, sometime in the 1940s or so this house was left empty and it was stripped to the studs, including windows.  We’ve taken a window inventory with the help of the original architectural plans.  We believe that the house had 59 casement windows, 18 transom windows, and one large fixed glass window in the main house.  None of them remain.  The little house had 9 casement windows and 4 transoms.  It appears to have one original window and one original transom.

Original Gill Drawings have arrived

The drawings arrived from the UCSB archive which archives Irving Gill's remaining drawings.  I had mentioned to Dean at the post office that we were expecting them, so he called me to let me know they were in.  When I arrived he handed me this mailing tube:

I looked at the small, crumpled tube, felt a bit disappointed, and then noticed the return address.  It was not from the UCSB Art Museum. 

He started laughing.  The day I mentioned to him that we were expecting a package from UCSB and that it would be in a tube, I realized after the fact “boy, you really set yourself up for a practical joke.” 

The Open Porches Sisterhood

June 19, 2005 

My sister Kimberly and I had a Father’s Day brunch with my dad today in Bakersfield.  I took Thomas Hines’ book Irving Gill: The Architecture of Reform along with me to show them historic pictures of the house and other similar Gill homes.  Kimberly had never seen an historic picture of the house even though one in the book had actually been provided by my father.  She said with a bit of a wrinkled nose “Those sliding glass doors and windows, you’re going to get rid of them, right?”  I thought she was referring to a slider that replaced a window in the dining room but upon some questioning I realized she was really asking if we were going to open up the porches.  I got a big grin on my face and said “we’ll start the ‘Open Porches Sisterhood,' Kimberly."  She offered to put on some sort of dramatic performance for my husband Sander to let him know how incredible the porches would be in their original condition.  I said “Kimberly, he didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.”

As I see it, if you have a 6,000 square foot house and no porches, you have too much house.    What’s 1,000 square feet among 6,000 anyway?

At this point, Sander has agreed that if I outlive him, he would have no problem with me opening the porches at that time. 

Architectural Drawings

June 15, 2005

Today I have confirmed that the architectural plans for our house are on file at the Architecture and Design Collection in the University Art Museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  Collection curator Kurt Helfrich informed me:

I have checked our inventory of Irving Gill drawings and there are 10
architectural plans for the Williams House.