What To Do When Your Architect is an Enigma

By Michael Good | Columnista SDUN

Be careful when you restore an old house—you might find yourself communing with the dead. Sometimes that conversation takes on a creepy, is-it-Halloween-already flavor with things going bump in the night and cosmic messages from beyond telling you to paint the dining room green. Jade green. Other times, the communication may be a little more subtle, as you ponder the lives of all those who have gone before you—the builders, architects, carpenters and owners who made your house what it is today. What were they thinking? Did that fireplace tile really have to be so orange? What does it all mean?

Before Keith York called me for help with the stain colors on his historic, 1953 mid-century modern house, he had already done some communing with the architect, Craig Ellwood. “Apparently, he was kind of a jerk,” Keith says as we walk through the low-slung, redwood-sided, post-and-beam house. Ellwood wrote his children out of his will, and his employees claimed he took credit for their work.

Keith had already done a lot of research on his house. He’d interviewed Gerry Bobertz, one of the original owners, and he’d talked to the owners of similar Ellwood houses in Los Angeles. He’d read the literature on Ellwood. And he’d won a preservation award for the sensitive way he’d restored his house. But he hadn’t yet cracked the mystery of the stain. Keith led me out to the garage, to show me what he thought might be the original finish.

I climbed a ladder and looked at the tongue and groove ceiling and the four by 10 beam that ran across it. What I saw looked like a whitewash of gray paint and some kind of thick, oily black finish, both applied in a somewhat cavalier fashion, perhaps with a rag. I asked Keith what it looked like to him. “Well, I’m color blind,” he said. I could see this was going to be harder than I thought.

After a trip to the public library, I began my investigation. The first thing I discovered about Craig Ellwood was that he wasn’t really an architect. And he wasn’t really Craig Ellwood, either. As his biographer Neil Jackson explains, “Craig Ellwood…was a construct.” James Tyler, an architect who worked in his office from 1965 to 1977 is even more blunt: “Craig Ellwood, the great architectural designer…in point of fact, and in truth, didn’t exist.”

Craig Ellwood was the invention of a one-man marketing department named Johnnie Burke. After graduating from high school (he was senior class president), Burke joined the army with the rest of America’s young men, and when the war ended started a construction company with his brother and a couple friends. They decided to call themselves

Craig Ellwood Incorporated, because a liquor store in the neighborhood was called Lords and Elwood (they added the extra “l” because it looked “swankier”). As for “Craig,” it just sounded cool. The company didn’t last, but the name stuck. In 1951, Burke changed his name to Craig Ellwood.

Ellwood never went to school to become an architect. He learned on the job—as a cost estimator for a construction company that built many of the modern classics in mid-century Los Angeles, including the John Entenza house, which was designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. Entenza was the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, which sponsored the seminal Case Study houses. When Ellwood opened his own office, Entenza offered him the opportunity to design a Case Study house. He eventually did three, and those houses were published more than 20 times in the magazine.

Ellwood was the first rock and roll architect, the first to promote himself like a Hollywood star. He had been an assistant publicist at the Hollywood Bowl and a print model, appearing in ads even after he had some success as an architect. He hired models and photographers and styled the photo shoots of his completed houses, and he marketed those photos and descriptive copy to magazines and newspapers around the world. He understood Hollywood—his wife, Gloria, was a studio actress. After their three children were born, Gloria went back to work in television, playing the mother in the Dennis the Menace series.

After the Bobertz house was built, Ellwood designed some similar post-and-beam residences, then moved on to steel framing and, eventually, large commercial projects. By the 1970s he was driving a Ferrari, sponsoring a racecar in the Long Beach Grand Prix and designing some of LA’s most iconic buildings. But reading about Ellwood, it’s hard to shake the impression that everyone close to him thought he was a fraud. His family, his wives, the draftsmen and architects he employed…they all seem a little too ready to claim responsibility for his success. Looking for the real Craig Ellwood can be like watching a slow drawing back of the curtain, revealing not the Wizard of Oz but some phony magician. Which can be a bit disillusioning.

Fortunately, we still have his work. Spend some time amidst the fir and Redwood and glass, and a different picture of Craig Ellwood emerges. There is something undeniably great here, whether designed by a “construct” or a person.

But what about those pesky stain colors? Somehow Keith and I came to a decision. I could say it had something to do with what Ellwood called the “shadow line,” a dark band around the wall panels that make them appear to float. I could say it had to do with Ellwood’s drive to simplify and make things less expensive. I could say I was influenced by the garage, and the references to umber that I found in his biography, the deep brown color I found peering out from under the peeling paint beside the kitchen door, and the very similar umber color that remained on the bathroom doorframe even after two coats of stripper. But basically I had a feeling, and I followed it, and because Keith was acting a little nervous that I might forget that feeling, I wrote down the percentages I came up with—of raw umber, burnt umber, lamp black, gray paint, gel stain and acrylic polyurethane. In the end, it just felt right, although I have to admit I might have felt a cold shadow pass over me as I first climbed the ladder and wiped the oily concoction on one of the fir beams.

Ellwood went through a rough spot in the mid-seventies, what we today might call a mid-life crisis. He split up with his wife Gloria. He lost a big commission. He closed up his architecture office, after some of his lead architects announced they were venturing out on their own. He married a beauty queen, moved to Italy, took up painting and started restoring an ancient villa. The modernist architect had become an old house restorer, like the rest of us.

Ellwood died in 1992, at the age of 70. Once he’d died, wife number three claimed she had in fact done a lot of the work on his paintings. And as for his final project, the restoration of a neighbor’s house in Italy—he never lived to see it complete. His fourth and youngest wife finished it herself. And so Craig Ellwood’s final building plans, true to form, to bear her name, not his.