There is a timeworn expression that goes, “If only houses could talk.” Windemere, the historic 1894 cottage that was demolished last month at 1328 Virginia Way, obviously is no more. But it still can “talk” and tell the rich history of how it was designed and built. Through historians and researchers it can also relate the many stories of the people who lived under its gently sloping rooflines over nearly 120 years. First, it would remember John and Agnes Kendall, a n’er-do-well British couple who wanted a place in the La Jolla sunshine in the late 19th century and commissioned its building inspired, in part, by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. Second, it would remember the young architect Irving Gill, a transplant to Southern California from New York, who sketched the overhangs, fenestrations and redwood board and batten walls, keeping in mind how the house would relate to a mild coastal climate. Third, it would recall a celebrity resident, the novelist Beatrice Harraden, who wrote some of her most popular prose as a houseguest of the first owners. But possibly what Windemere would talk most about is a young girl named Marnie Hutchinson whose childhood memories of growing up in the house remain among the most poignant recollections of what it’s like to live within the envelop of a small town in a storybook cottage — or so it seemed to her in La Jolla reveries she wrote as the start of a book in 1976. The book as Marnie planned hasn’t been published, but the recollections are part of the La Jolla Historical Society’s archival collection. In light of Windemere’s recent demolition, they provide an enduring remembrance of a historic house and what it was like to a child as a home. “Windemere was redwood,” Marnie wrote. “It had a green front lawn with nightshade hedges on both sides and right down the middle … Stepping stones for hopping on all the way to the porch-pergola … right to the door of Windemere, your house in La Jolla that could make you forget bad things that had happened away from La Jolla but were foggy now in your mind … ” Marnie was the daughter of Marjorie and Joseph Hutchinson. Her father was one of the Early Bird aircraft pilots and her mother was active in many social and cultural institutions in the community and was one of the founding members of the La Jolla Historical Society. The Hutchinsons lived in Windemere from 1929 to 1935, shortly after it had been moved from its original location on Prospect Street to Virginia Way. Marnie was a young girl growing up highly sensitive to village life and the air and the sea around her. Her room was the single low-ceiling space that formed the second story — “One big room. It was mine. With two windows looking out on the street (from where you could watch the old vegetable man on his horse-drawn cart come down Virginia Way — and the ice cream man and the milk man and the chocolate man and the bread man in their trucks — and all the people you knew in their cars and the neighbor children you got to know).” Marnie recalled her mother pounding abalone for dinner in Windemere’s kitchen and playing music from World War I on the upright piano in the living room. She remembered the smell of her father’s polished-leather flying boots on the doorstep and the fireplace that “kept people warm and didn’t make a fuss about it.” She recognized the beauty of Windemere as “very old. It was in La Jolla when Anna Held was there and those few artists and other wise people who first came to La Jolla, who painted and wrote and meditated and felt the sweet, salty wet air in their souls and on their skins.” Windemere: 1894-2011. Thank you Marnie for remembering how Windemere was home. — Carol Olten is the historian of the La Jolla HIstorical Society