Residence of Louise Foster
4235 Las Cruces Drive
Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California, 1950.
Designed by John Lautner.
Credit: USC Digital Archives.
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John Lautner in Sherman Oaks (1950)
Tag: Architecture
La Linda.
La Linda is an artisanal cafe and bakery built within a 1927 garden house in Montevideo, Uruguay. The architect is Pedro Livni.
Dezeen featured it on their blog and I’m bringing it, digitally, to Here in Van Nuys.
Why can’t we have a place like this near downtown-like Van Nuys?
On Gilmore Street, west of Van Nuys Boulevard, north of Victory, there is a row of empty shops across from, of course, a large, underutilized parking lot.
An old grocery store at 14547 sits forlorn and abandoned with homeless packed under the eaves of the building, and no signs of any forthcoming improvements.
Perhaps someone poor and unknown, who grew up in nearby Sherman Oaks and Encino, someone like Nancy Silverton, the celebrity founder of La Brea Bakery who sold her enterprise for $55 million in 2001, might come up to Van Nuys, 20 minutes north of Beverly Hills, and wave her imagination, her vision, and her money at a forgotten corner of Los Angeles. She could come her by Uber, maybe split a ride with her housekeepers from Pacoima and Panorama City and check it out.
She could partner with animal rights photographer, musician and Silver Lake resident Moby, and with his $32 million dollars, they might fund a bakery here, employing poor men and women, as well as starving artists, starving architects and starving for vision politicians.
Photography of La Linda is by Pablo Casals Aguirre.
Walkable Places You Drive By.
On the east side of Van Nuys Boulevard, south of Oxnard, there is a conglomeration of small shops.
Signs advertise a Kirby Vacuum shop, Attorney Sandra Nutt, a Farmers Insurance office, PC Tech Computer Repair, Young Actors Space, and a Los Angeles Wedding Chapel. Angeleno Mortuary and Benjamin Moore Catalina Paint fill up the northern most two blocks.
Here you buy cleaning machines, you get legal counsel, you are taught acting, you are legally married, you are fixing your computer, you are buying paint, you are purchasing life insurance, and you are dead and interred.
All this small business activity takes place in little shops constructed in the 1940s when commercial Van Nuys barely stretched south of Oxnard.
To the east of this is a pleasant, shady neighborhood of single- family houses mixed together with multi-family properties, mostly well-kept. Tiara, Califa, Tyrone and Sylmar are interesting to walk down because they contain an ecosystem of housing that works well together, near public transportation, modest and neat.
And if you are wondering what to call this area, please address it properly as “Sherman Oaks” even thought it abuts downtown Van Nuys.
You get your smog check in Van Nuys. You rent or own in Sherman Oaks.
At Calhoun and Tiara, a three-story apartment is under construction. Humorously, I observe that the style recalls those jutting out, trapezoids on steroids style popular 15 years ago in Santa Monica. The Valley is always behind….. architecturally.
There are vividly painted buildings on Calhoun, including a bright red box unit, and a 1920s house in school bus yellow at 14300 Califa. People will do daring things only when they see their neighbors do them.
The eccentric hues cheer up the area, bringing energy to a place where the beiges and grays cover everything else.
At Califa and Sylmar there is a property with dark green dwarf palms growing in profusion along the walkway and the front yard. They are a bold alternative to grass and liven up the house, along with a muted green fence built of wood and wire. This arrangement of plants discourages parking, and provides a sharp, prickly security perimeter, a subliminal deterrent, but naturalistic.
On the west side of Sylmar, are newer (2014), two-story dense houses packed together, a chorus line of garagettes. The builder pastiched shutters, vinyl windows, tile roofs, and various desert colors to evoke a Californian aura, Montecito Mansion by Home Depot. The houses sold for about $800,000 each.
With a down payment of $157,000, a mortgage for a family of four would be about $3,100 a month.
This area, newly christened as Sherman Oaks, still within paint fume reach of the auto body shops along Oxnard, is a desirable place in a city starved for “affordable” housing.
At 14403 Tiara, townhouses with three bedrooms and three baths will soon be available for $659,000 each. With rows of garage doors, it is unlikely that any of the folks living here will hang out on the front porch drinking lemonade.
The tour ends BEHIND the shops on Van Nuys Boulevard where an old house stands marooned in a sea of asphalt and parking.
Forensically, curiously, I wonder what this was so many years ago? Was this building a little cottage in a sea of orange groves, set back from the road before they filled in the frontage with the commercial buildings? Someone was surviving, living, eking it out 80 or 90 years ago. Then the land, I guess, was subdivided and “improved”.
A clever, innovative city would allow this back area to be turned into a garden apartment area. The shops could be built with apartments above, and the windows could face in back around a central courtyard planted with lemon, orange and walnut trees. They might build a few more small houses here, and devise a protected, nurturing development on this site.
The cynic in me doubts it will happen. But the optimist in me knows it is possible.
Small House in Japan (Why Not Van Nuys?)
The architectural blog Dezeen has a cornucopia of outstanding designs from around the world.
They have many projects from Japan, including small homes, which the Japanese have constructed all around the densely populated country.
The Gap House, by MUU Store Design Studio, (shown above) only covers a total area of 200 square feet, yet it embodies an inventive, imaginative and practical way to live, with its light-filled interior and clean, modern layout.
It is sandwiched between two other buildings, yet it does not feel claustrophobic. The house is located in a residential area near Sagami Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture,Japan.
Alleys are where these small homes are constructed. In Japan, most alleys are fastidiously neat. Nobody desecrates their environment in Japan.
Here in Van Nuys our alleys tell our stories of how we value ourselves, our city and our nation:
Around Van Nuys there are numerous places where this type of housing could be erected, and the benefits of building this type are many.
They are more affordable, they could provide walkable, new, community oriented housing near Van Nuys Boulevard, and they would help in the revitalization of our community.
Right now, Van Nuys is zoned to deny imaginative solutions to our housing crisis. We need to free up zoning to allow, encourage and incentivize developers, architects, investors and small-home builders to build more with less restrictions.
The alternative is the bleak, expensive, dirty, dilapidated slum of current day downtown and vicinity Van Nuys. It is appalling but it must not be our future. We must step up and change it for the better.
N. Windsor Ave. in Hancock Park.
Last week, I walked down N. Windsor Ave., a street just south of Paramount Studios, a few blocks east of Larchmont, in Hancock Park.
Windsor Ave. is full of artful, old, well-maintained housing, in a variety of styles and forms. There are 1920s and 30s Spanish, Bungalow, Art Deco, Colonial and blessedly few Canoga Park-like stucco uglies with iron fences and cinderblock walls. But the main layout is a small building, one or two stories high, with parking in the back.
The mixture of single and multi-family provides an eclecticism and rhythm to the tree-lined, quiet street.
This was an area that probably provided housing for people of modest incomes who worked in the studios. They lived within walking distance of work, and they spent a modest part of their income on rent. Some had cars, some did not, but they could shop, work and live without driving.
An area like N. Windsor Ave. simply could not spring up organically today. Zoning laws would separate multi-family from single-family and there would be onerous parking requirements. A building with six attached units would probably require 12 parking spaces.
I looked with envy on this street and wondered why it could not be emulated in my reviving neighborhood in Van Nuys?
Then I imagined the bitching on Next Door if a developer proposed six attached units next to a single-family neighborhood. “Where the hell are they going to park?” “Who’s going to live there?” “This place is turning into a ghetto!” “Those developers are so greedy!” “I don’t want no weirdo looking down on my backyard from his bedroom!”
Los Angeles used to be so much simpler back in the 1920s.
One Story Town
One Story Town is Sepulveda Bl., from Oxnard St. north to Victory Bl.
It is 2,569 feet long, almost a half a mile. It encompasses the Orange Line Metro Busway, LA Fitness, Costco, Wendy’s, Chef’s Table, The Barn, CVS, Dunn Edwards, Bellagio Car Wash, Wells Fargo Bank, Enterprise, Jiffy Lube and other small businesses selling used cars, folding doors, RV rentals, Chinese food, hair cutting, and ceramic tile.
The Southern Pacific freight trains once ran through the present day Orange Line, and they fashioned the district into a lumber- oriented, light industrial area. Such behemoths as Builder’s Emporium were located here, and the stretch of Oxnard that borders the old rail line has retained an industrial use.
The zoning designations for almost all the parcels along Sepulveda are commercial. They prohibit residential within walking distance of the Orange Line, and they prohibit it even though buses run up and down Sepulveda!
Available online for public research, is the Los Angeles’ ZIMAS, a website run by the Department of City Planning. Here one can select a parcel, for example, 6206 Sepulveda Blvd., where The Barn furniture store is located, and see that it occupies two parcels totaling 44,250 SF. It is not, according to ZIMAS, in a transit-oriented area, nor is it designated as a pedestrian oriented one, nor is it part of a community redevelopment one.
Someday the owners of The Barn, which has sold, since 1945, brown stained furniture in heavy wood to seemingly nobody, may choose to sell their business. And here there is enormous potential to develop a first-class residential and commercial building just steps from the Orange Line.
Residents of Halbrent St. just east of The Barn and other businesses, are on the ass-end of parking lots, illegally parked homeless RVs, and are subject to the use of their street as a speedway for cars entering and exiting Costco. Maybe, just for once, Halbrent St. might see a better development on its west side.
Every single one of the businesses, up and down Sepulveda, between Oxnard and Victory, is located, by observation, in a transit- oriented area. Yet ZIMAS states they are not.
Perhaps that will change as Los Angeles reviews its zoning, and permits taller, denser, more walkable development within a 5-minute walk from public transit.
At dusk, with the early October sun hitting the one-story buildings, there is a homely, lowbrow, neat banality to the structures along this stretch.
This is not the worst of Van Nuys. It is generally tidy. But nobody living nearby, some residing in million-dollar homes, would come here to mingle, to socialize, to sit and drink coffee, eat cake, shop or walk with their kids after dark.
Studio City has Tujunga Village.
And we, in Van Nuys, have, this:
The One Story Town: what is it and what could it be? Might this district, one day, contain vibrant restaurants, outdoor cafes, beer gardens, garden apartments, parks, trees, flowers, fountains? Why not?
In planning for 2027, 2037, 2047 and beyond why would we keep the preferences of car-oriented, suburban dreaming, 1975 Van Nuys, in place? Why are thousands of parking spaces at the Orange Line Busway used to store cars for Keyes Van Nuys? Is this the best we can do?
Could not a group of architects, developers, urban planners, government leaders and vocal citizens devise a Sepulveda Plan to transform this wasted opportunity into something better, or even ennobling?
Where is our vision? And why are we so starved for it when we live inside Los Angeles, the greatest factory of imagination, illusion and improvisation the world has ever seen?
Here in Van Nuys 
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