Lovish Film Set Wins 'Oscor' lor Wood Promotion

Columbiq Movie Feotures

$zsO,OOO House of Weyerhoeuser Lumber

RIGHT: The completed house, as it stars in the new movie, was built of materials from several leading industry suppliers of building products and compon€nts. However, the story on this page was furnished by Weyerhaeuser Company, and photos are by courtesy of the National Lumber Manufacturers Assn.

In a surprising switch from make-believe to real, Hollywood movie set designers have built a complete all-wood luxury home and filmed the actual house both during construction and as it will be lived in.

And they tossed aside their renowned art of illusion to rely upon a familiar building material ., wood. finished natural to achieve the desired efrects. They did cast wood in the dual role of both structural and decorative material for the strikingly modern $250,000 house.

This full-scale home, perched half-way up a 130-foot ba^nk in exclusive Bel Air estates, is for the new two-and-a-half-million dollar Columbia picture, "Strangers When We Meet" starring Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak. Ernie Kovacs and Barbara Rush in Cinemascope and color.

Ate interesting contemporary home, literally suspended on the steep hillside, has exterior walls completely free from ornamentation except for the slight rough texture of the Weyerhaeuser 4-Square red cedar vertical siding. fire spacious interior is of open, informal treatment with postand-beam construction and exposed wood structural ceilings throughout. Most rooms have paneled walls.

Eor interior surfaces, two distinctly different woods are combined with pleasing results. All exposed posts and beams are of Douglas fir with large structural members of Rilco laminated beams, smaller framing of solid pieces. The end-matched two-inch roof decking, which serves both as a base for the rooflng and as exposed structural ceiling, also is of fir.

The light color of the fir contrasts beautifully with the rich red-brown wall paneling of red cedar. The paneling surfaces all walls of the living room, dining room, open stairway, high-level "eagle's-nest" study, and two walls of the bedroom suite. Clear. vertical grain wood was specified for fine texture of grain.

Paneling in the kitchen is of matching red cedar plywood with cedar lattice above the walls to screen the upper area yet contribute to tJre open-desig:r treatment.

I'raming lumber for walls a^nd floors is of kiln-dried fir specified for extra strength, rigidity and stability to resist winds in the steep canyon and for overall structural superiority which characterizes the house. On upper levels, the floor construction is of two-inch, end-matched material for added strength and speed of installation. Draperies and furnishings were chosen in bright colors and interesting texture to complement the wood surfaces. for trnal shooting of the movle on schedule. Third, there were frequent interruptions of construction and delay of building crews while cameramen filmed construction scenes.

During the next few weeks the second most famous house in the country (come autumn) will have clifr dwellers and wouldbe-home owners dusting off their old blueprints and reachingfor newones. The house, completed only two months ago, is the ffrst genuine, complete house ever built for a motion picture and will probably be viewed by more people than have seen the White House in years.

Not even Holl;rwood's lavish fflm moguls have ever before built a real house on a real site for one of their productions. As most veteran movle-goers know, Hollywood pro-

Even though thousands of yards of dirt were dug out of the hillside for the homesite, sufrcient excavation was required also for the inevitable HollSrwood swimming pool as well.

Original desigl of the home was conceived and developed by Columbia Pictures Art Directors Ross Bellah and Carl Anderson. The home was engineered by the nationally prominent architectural flrm of Victor Gruen Associates, architects-engineers, of Beverly Hills, Cal., and New York City.

Since the unusual home is a showplaee not only for the motion picture but in actuality as well, only the finest materials were specified throughout including Weyerhaeuser 4-Square lumber and plywood.

Construction presented a unique problem to Builder Kenneth B. Wamsley of nearby Santa Monica. F irst, of course, the speci- ficatlons required finest craftsmanship as well as fine materials. Second, a g0-day time table was set in order to complete the home ducers as a rule simply construct temporary sets to represent those parts of a house tJrat are needed and then shoot the scenes in the studio. Even Mr. Blandings's dream house was just that: a studio prop; take away a few key braces and the whole set would have collapsed.

However, the story line of "Strangers When We Meet" deals with the attempt by an archltect (Kirk Douglas) to design artistic homes rather than develop industrial communities, and the studio desiglers wanted a house with a distinctive appear-

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