Strimmling House, Ray Kappe

I saved this Ray Kappe home, literally.  I was with it through 3 owners/clients, I guess you could say the house was the client.  The house is referred to as The Strimmling house as the Strimmling family were the original owners for whom the house was built.  The home was completed in 1964, cantilevered off the side of a hill in Encino, a massive tree house, and was the predecessor and model for Kappe's own home in the Santa Monica Canyon.  

After the massive restoration of this project, Ray and his wife Shelly came out to see the work that we had done.  I relished in the experience and soaked up every moment of being onsite with Ray, walking the house and asking him about all the moments that I had reveled and wondered about while restoring his work.  Trying to stay true to his intentions.

Ray told me that of all the homes he had seen restored, he felt that I had restored the home with the most integrity to the original that he had seen and if someone were to call him for restoration work on one of his projects, he would recommend me.

There is no greater compliment.

I was brought in by the first client to help get the house ready for sale.  It had fallen into severe disrepair after having been badly remodeled at some point in the 1990’s.  The client’s brother had died in the house and he was just looking to get the best price he could, but was planning to list it as a tear-down.

I was mortified.

I convinced him that this home was worth saving.  That it was a midcentury treasure by one of the great midcentury California architects.  I told him to let me spend enough to at least make the house look salvageable to a buyer so that the next person would see that it was worth saving.  He agreed.

There was quite a bit of structural work that needed to be done.  The house had jumped off one of its foundations during the 1994 Northridge earthquake nearly 20 years prior and the guest bedroom, cantilevered off the side of the house was so twisted that you got sea sick just walking across the room.

I called Kappe’s office to see if Ray would be available to consult.  He wasn’t, but I was given the name of the structural engineer who had worked on the house when it was being built.  A few weeks later, Richard ‘Bud’ Brown came out to walk the property with me.

I was 7 months pregnant with my second son and Bud was in his mid 80’s and there we were scaling  the loose dirt up side of the hill under the house together to investigate the structural integrity.

After a few months of construction and some staging, the house went on the market and sold for significantly more than the client had anticipated when we first met.  He was elated, I was relieved,

The new buyer hired me to continue on with the restoration and we went on to complete over a $1million restoration together.  The entire home was stripped down and brought back to it’s original intentions, including the entire roof and T&G ceiling being removed and replaced.  I will never forget standing in the sunken living room, looking up at the canopy of trees above.  If only we could have left the roof off.

The house had been painted a horrific combo of dingy white and a brown that shouldn’t exist.  During the construction process, I had noticed some of the stucco peeling and as they sanded down the exterior woodwork, the original colors of the home were somewhat revealed.  I spent an afternoon mixing all kinds paints in dixie cups until I found the perfect formulation to match what I thought was the original color.  A warm mid tone olive brown on the woodwork and a light putty on the stucco.  We went through a similar process sanding down the original redwood paneling throughout the interior and then toning to achieve the warm red and khaki tone that had faded over the years.

The work that we did not only won over Ray Kappe, but was featured on the Dwell on Design home tour.  The greatest compliment was hearing people walk through the house exclaiming how perfectly preserved it had been.

It hadn’t been preserved.  It was a disaster when I got it, a true tear down, but I knew what it was.  I took a house that was a shambles, had been badly remodeled and allowed to fall into disrepair and made it look as if it had been perfectly preserved in its original state for over 50 years.

When the client who restored the house decided to move a couple years later, the new owner became my third client with the house.  She purchased the home with many of the furnishings that I had selected or built custom for the previous client, but hired SRID to help her personalize and create a nursery for her baby on the way.

To view the entire project, check out our project gallery OAK VIEW.