CA-Modern Magazine Fall 2017

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THE MID-CENTURY MODERN WAY

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P8 | Heavenly sanctuaries take us back to when God went mod P20 | Architecture in fabric: art of textile designer Ealish Wilson P24 | New trends in tile flooring blend indoor & outdoor spaces

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Contents

7 Modern Renewal

8

Keeping your floors warm and toasty —even after the radiant heat expires

8 Feature Storyboard When God went mod: what drove the rise of mid-century modern churches?

14 CA-Modern Flashback Tiny Eichler cul-de-sac turns a casual art share into the Fairglen Art Festival

20 Art About the House Bay Area textile artist Ealish Wilson and her striking ‘architecture in fabric’

24 More Modern Renewal

24

20

Rising trends in flooring that carry on the indoors blending with the outdoors

28 That’s Entertainment

32

Latest in books, video and music that embellish mid-century modern living

32 Blast from the Past

34

Unsung masters of the mid-century: designers of furniture that time forgot

34 Dear Cherry Advice, etiquette and tips for healthy homemaking and mid-mod manners

28

Contributors Publisher & Managing Editor | Marty Arbunich | marty@eichlernetwork.com Marketing Coordinator | Chris Marcoccio | chris@eichlernetwork.com Publisher’s Consultant | Dave Kalman of Terrella Media Features Editor | Dave Weinstein Home-Improvement Editor | Tanja Kern

On the Cover Our cover shot this issue is by the late, great Eichler Homes photographer Ernie

Staff Writers | Dan Smith | Jack Levitan | Jeff Kaliss Photography | Sabrina Huang Print Designer | Doreen Jorgensen | doreenjorgensen.com

Braun, who would be surprised that this particular photo wound up front and center.

Social Media Editor | Robin Bertelsen of Daxia Digital

After all, the image area you see is only about one third of the entire horizontal

Web Maintenance | Priscila Hoffman

scene that Braun originally framed for this shot. For our purposes, we zoomed in for a vertical crop, eliminating the bedroom on the right side, and focused on the woman of the house and her look of longing. We wonder: is she awestruck by her view of the stars, eyeing a hovering UFO, longing for Nosferatu’s return—or just grooving

CA-Modern magazine is published quarterly in regional editions during January, April, July, and October by the Eichler Network, P.O. Box 22635, San Francisco, CA 94122. Mailed to thousands of select California mid-century modern households (and aficionados), including all Northern California Eichler and Streng modern homes. Subscriptions and back issues available at the CA-Modern magazine section of Eichler Network Online: eichlernetwork.com. Publisher: 415-668-0954. Marketing: 415-307-3801.

study it. By the way, Ernie shot this one in 1956, in the then-brand new San Mateo

The Eichler Network is not responsible for the quality, scope, pricing, or any other aspect of the services and/or goods obtained from the participating service companies. Although it is believed that these companies are reputable based on current information and their good standing with the Better Business Bureau, we strongly encourage you also to carefully evaluate and screen all service and goods providers. The participating service companies pay a fee to advertise and become part of the Eichler Network referral network. Performance reviews, home improvement concerns, and publication inquiries are welcome. Discover CA-Modern and the Eichler Network online at eichlernetwork.com. Also on Facebook and Twitter.

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in her negligee on a comfy night home alone with her Eichler? Ha! We don’t have a clue but continue to find this Braun image both intriguing and eerie—and love to

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■MODERN RENEWAL

On the Homefront Radiant love ‘Warmboard’ could be the ticket back to toasty floors and energy efficient heat if your radiant heat dies out Radiant heating was one of the most

‘futuristic’ features of Eichler homes when they were introduced—but, according to reports for years around the Bay, in general that feature is not aging well today.

A half-century or more later, many of the Eichlers’ original systems, especially those that were made of steel, have been lost to corrosion, have developed leaks, or operate ineffectively for other reasons.

When owners find themselves in need of replacing their failed radiant systems, there’s a handful of common replacement options out there: Pextubing-based in-slab radiant, aboveslab radiant panels, mini-splits, baseboards, and low-profile rooftop forced-air systems. As you might expect, all have their advantages and drawbacks.

As brand manager for a radiant heating company, Ross McCord is a big fan of radiant technology, but even he concedes its limitations.

“Some radiant heating methods supply uneven heating surface temperatures—the tubing provides temperature, the space between the tubing the coolest. This ‘striping’ affects comfort and can risk damaging flooring,” McCord said recently.

“Additionally, some systems are unable to provide adequate heating for some finish flooring options.”

Enter Warmboard, McCord’s employer. Invented 25 years ago in Capitola by architect and entrepreneur Terry Alsberg, Warmboard is tongue-and-groove paneling made of wood and aluminum, with preset grooves a foot apart for half-inch radiant tubing. It is a product uniquely adaptable to failed radiant systems.

The company is also one of the newest additions to the Eichler Network’s roster of Preferred Service Companies.

“For those in Eichler homes, Warmboard is an ideal option,” promises McCord. “Homeowners are able to upgrade their high-mass radiant system with a modern solution with minimal impact on the design of the home.”

Now based in Aptos, Warmboard has provided more than 25 million square feet of radiant panels for structures worldwide and is the leader of the field here in North America. It is also a viable energyefficient alternative for some of the first mass-produced homes to use radiant—built by Joe Eichler.

Knowing well the enjoyment radiant heating brings, some Eichler owners over the years have been known to replace their defunct systems with new ones—re-grooving the concrete slab and laying down new Pex tubing in the grooves. The end result may be wonderful, but the installation process is quite challenging, requiring the family to move out of the home, up to three months, while the messy process is completed.

“Radiant heating has numerous benefits, comfort and health [being] the primary ones,” says McCord.

“Radiant floors spread heat out evenly across an entire area. This is superior to forced air, which loudly blasts overheated air into a room—air which then collects at the ceiling until it dissipates and the system kicks on again.

“Baseboard heat works well, but inhibits where you can place furniture and, the farther away you are, the less comfortable you become. Radiant is about 25-30 percent more energy efficient than forced air, so homeowners can generally see a significant savings on their annual energy usage.”

Warmboard brings the opportunity to start over with new tubes inset into the paneling. Their original ‘S’ model is generally used in new construction, while a newer ‘R’ model is for remodels. The panels are screwed into the concrete slab or any subflooring in the structure.

“High-mass concrete cannot easily be nailed to, of course,” said McCord, citing one of Warmboard’s selling points over its competition.

“This limits flooring options to gluedown hardwood, and other radiant panels are often too thin to hold the nail adequately.

“Because of this,” he continued, “these panels require an additional layer [or two] of plywood to cover the panel. This increases floor heights, hides the tubing during installation (making a tubing hit more likely), and places additional obstacles between the heat in the tube and the interior of the home.”

Of course, floor heights are raised

Owens of John Owens Services in San Rafael. “If a panel system is installed with a finish floor above, you would have to step up as you enter the sliding doors.”

Still, savings from the superior conductivity of Warmboard panels just may be worth the inconvenience.

“Hydronic radiant heat functions by pumping water through a tubing beneath the floor,” McCord explains.

Other radiant methods are primarily focused on covering up that tubing [with concrete] or creating

HEAT IN A GROOVE. Warmboard is one of the few ways to keep floor-generated radiant heat alive in your Eichler home once your original system fades. Left bottom: Close-up of Warmboard tubing.

by Warmboard as well, necessitating some adaptation.

“Warmboard-R, which is the product most appropriate for renovating an Eichler, is 13/16” thick,” states McCord. “Regular doors can have the bottom shaved down. Baseboards may need to be moved. This depends on existing flooring however. If a home [already] has a layer of plywood over the concrete, floor heights and sliding doors would be minimally impacted.”

One Eichler Network technician said these needs should not be minimized when considering radiant products.

“One major problem in an Eichler is the sliding doors are very low to the concrete,” says John

a level surface [wood panels with tubing channels].

“Warmboard panels, however, are coated with thick aluminum, an excellent conductor which helps to rapidly ‘pull’ the heat from the water and transfer across the surface of the floor. So, our panels respond much more quickly to heating needs.

“Alternatively, because Warmboard is so much more conductive, you can use much lower temperatures.

Most systems require water temps in the 120 to 140 degree range, while Warmboard generally runs between 90 and 110 degrees.”

–Dan Smith • All six of the Eichler Network’s Bay Area radiant heat maintenance companies, found on the Service Directory of eichlernetwork.com, have been added to Warmboard’s installer network. For more on Warmboard, visit warmboard.com.

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■F E ATU R E STO RYB O A R D

WHEN GOD WEN T MOD Once despised, modern churches have thrived— designed by architects who helped to shape mid-century suburbia Story: Dave Weinstein

When, during the height of the midcentury’s beatnik era, architect Walter Netsch was assigned to design a chapel for some of the squarest young men in America—U.S. Air Force cadets—he sought inspiration from the greatest churches in the medieval pantheon.

One was the elegant Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, dating to the 1200s, and another was the Basilica of Saint Francis Assisi, in Assisi, Italy, of similar date.

Why then did Netsch’s plan for the Cadet Chapel cause an uproar in the U.S. Congress, with lawmakers calling it “a monstrosity” and “a row of polished teepees”?

No, modern architecture hadn’t found full acceptance in 1957.

Netsch, who was with the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was far from the only modernminded architect to face fury when designing a church that was neither pointed-arch Gothic, clapboard New England, red brick Georgian, or, in California, Spanish Colonial.

In America’s heartland—Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and their neighbors—young architects of the midcentury wishing to create “churches for today” were producing suburban structures in modern styles, pleasing some people but angering others.

The churches these men were producing were derided as “grocery store” or “gas station” churches, according to Gretchen Buggeln, author of the fine book The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America.

Still, since the conclusion of World War II, architects globally were arguing that new churches must have a new style to reflect current needs and functions, new ways of worshipping, and new ways of understanding God. The French architect Joseph Pichard expressed this idea in his 1960 book 8 CAMODERN

IMPOSING SITE. Top: In a rare nighttime shot, the iconic Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, designed in 1957 by Eichler architects Anshen and Allen (near right). Far right: A look inside the chapel.

Modern Church Architecture. If “we are unable to create our own religious art,” he wrote, “the implication [is] that we cannot find our own way to God.” Designers, he wrote, need to get away from “nostalgic concerns.” “We must now ask ourselves,” Pichard wrote, “what we, who are used to scientific precision and practicality, and whose main belief is in the oneness and importance of the human race, can add

to this sumptuous heritage and manifold expression of faith.”

And he noted that designing a church is no easy task: “The architect must localize the Infinite in a specific place and build walls around the Unlimited.”

But despite an ingrown distaste for radical design among many churchgoing people, modernism did succeed.

Just as suburbia was booming with new tract homes from the 1940s into the 1960s, it was filling with new churches, many in what was called ‘contemporary’ design. In 1946, according to Buggeln, spending on church building in the Unites States was $126 million.

In 1958 it hit $863 million.

Many of the same architects who were designing suburban homes

were also designing churches. It’s not surprising that some of the more imaginative mid-century architects who worked in California, including those who designed tract homes for Joe Eichler, created some of their best work in churches: Anshen and Allen, Jones & Emmons, Pietro Belluschi, and Aaron Green.

The variety that can be enjoyed in modern churches is apparent throughout California. Forms range from parabolic and catenary-curve roofs, to churches that appear to be all steeple, to Brutalist-style structures that look like concrete bunkers from the exterior while providing moody, mystical spaces with splashes of light within.

Other churches looked like free-

UPROAR. Left column: Cadet Chapel (top)— once called “a monstrosity” and “a row of polished teepees”; Anshen and Allen’s Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Stockton (middle); Jones & Emmons’ St. Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Studio City (bottom). Above: ‘The Onion’—Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, North Hills. Near left: Jones & Emmons’ Congregational Church of Northridge.

Bottom: A. Quincy Jones (left) and Frederick Emmons. standing sculptures. Bob Anshen and Steve Allen designed one of these in 1957, and it has become iconic—the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona. A striking Catholic church on an imposing site, along the side of a red rock mesa, the chapel has become a top tourist spot in a town known for spiritual tourism.

And in Stockton, for the Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Anshen and Allen produced a church in 1964 that remains loved by its congregation today, using a form that is typical of Continued pg 11 CAMODERN 9

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■F E ATU R E STO RYB O A R D WHEN GOD WENT MOD (cont. from pg 9)

many mid-century modern churches —the reaching-for-the-sky spire.

For the same church, they also used an uncommon, perhaps unique

form—an undulating rib-like frame that can be seen inside the chapel and the community room. The ribs are visible on the outside as well, in the almost Eichler-like atrium that separates the two interior spaces. The church has been compared to a fish and to an upturned boat.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons created another unusual form, for their Congregational Church of Northridge in Southern California—a tent-like pyramidal roof. It’s a striking image, if a bit off-putting. Is it a gimmick?

No. Like many modern churches, like many modern houses, this one requires a visit inside. It is warm and enveloping, with fine detailing and a soaring ceiling. Walls of glass beneath the roof admit light and provide views of nature. A true indoor-outdoor church.

Belluschi was responsible for one of California’s most startling churches,

San Francisco’s Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, with its soaring interior of concrete hyperbolic parabolas supporting a concrete shell dome streaked with stained glass.

giant space-age onion.” The designer was Frank Ehrenthal.

If the need to “find our own way to God” was paramount both for architects and churchgoers in choosing modern styles, the story of St. Mary’s Cathedral displays another, more specific reason.

trends towards ‘ecumenism’ (better relations between different religions), church unity, and a reformed liturgy were common in the postwar era among many faiths.

Besides dropping Latin for vernacular tongues, Vatican II also aimed at more personal, less hierarchic worship.

While writing about architect-engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who collaborated with Belluschi on St. Mary’s, Pace called the San Francisco cathedral “a project that could play a critical role in importing the Vatican Council reforms to the United States.”

The architecture of the church, like that of Gothic cathedrals, was designed to encourage “the emotional participation of the faithful in the liturgical celebration as they listened to the ‘Word of the Lord,’” he wrote.

STARTLING LOOK. San Francisco’s Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption (top left), with its soaring interior, is a collaboration by architects Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi (top right). Above left: Mario Ciampi’s Newman Center chapel, Berkeley. Above right: William Corlett’s chapel for Sunset View Cemetery, El Cerrito.

The cathedral has its detractors, who suggest its exterior resembles the agitator of a washing machine.

Another church that suggested comparisons to something more commonly found around the house is the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society, located in North Hills. The window-less dome from 1964 has been informally dubbed ‘the onion,’ because, as the Los Angeles Conservancy puts it, “with its round plan, bulbous shape, and neartotal lack of windows, it looks like a

How people worshipped, how they related to the church hierarchy, and how they functioned in their church as more socially conscious activities were taking place required new designs.

Some of these changes came out of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, whose goal, Italian author and engineer Sergio Pace has written, was to “reform Catholic liturgy from the ground up.”

Vatican II, as the council was called, was aimed at Catholics, but similar

Aaron Green, who designed one unbuilt subdivision and some custom homes for Eichler, was a Frank Lloyd Wright protégé who designed several funerary chapels, Saint Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church in Pleasanton, and a remarkable columbarium in Oakland.

His design for the Chapel of the Chimes, in Oakland, combines an earlier neo-Gothic building by Julia Morgan with Green’s larger addition and rambling courtyards based on the Wrightian Continued pg 13 C A M O D E R N 11

■F E ATU R E STO RYB O A R D

WORSHIP ON THE WILD SIDE Over the years and across the globe, modern-styled churches have taken on a variety of forms, ranging in mood from contemplative to boisterous, and from modest to pull out the stops.

Consider the variety shown in these six striking and unforgettable examples of world-class houses of worship.

A Cathedral of Maringá

inspired by Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which houses the crown of thorns— hence the name.

Nature, Jones told reporter Jan Cottingham, “is where I’ve felt my most spiritual feelings.”

One fan of the chapel was Prince Charles, who praised it as a form of “poetry arising out of buildings in

Architect: José Augusto Bellucci Maringá, Brazil, 1972 In mid-century United States the A-frame church, well or poorly designed, became so common as to be trite. In Maringá, for his Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Glory, Bellucci created a foundation of A-frames and topped them with a conical skyscraper that, at 400-plus feet, is the tallest church in South America.

Essentially windowless, the chapel has light shining down from a skylight onto a shimmering metallic curtain on the altar by artist Harry Bertoia.

This 21st century church shows that modernism remains a force in church design, and whimsy never goes out of style—even in worship.

C

B

C

A

D The A-frames hold stained glass producing a glorious colorful interior. More stained glass rises up along the side of the tower. Even more colorful is the exterior when illuminated at night in a variety of shades and patterns.

B Thorncrown Chapel Architect: Fay Jones Eureka Springs, Arkansas, 1980 This compact yet spiritually soaring chapel in the woods was designed to look like the woods itself. Jones was 12 C A M O D E R N

harmony with their natural surroundings.”

Charles added, “Thorncrown Chapel was built in the woods from timber carried to the site by hand. Not one of the trees around it was touched.”

C MIT Chapel Architect: Eero Saarinen Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955 This lovely, circular-plan chapel, with 128 seats and serpentine interior walls featuring outrageously deformed brick, represents the meditative style of modern sacred architecture.

Light also bounces upwards through low arched openings near the floor, as it is reflected from a moat that surrounds the chapel.

Saarinen succeeded in the modernist quest to strip away nostalgic references to the past and pasted-on decoration, while provoking a sense of quietude and awe.

D Harajuku Church Architects: Henri Gueydan and Fumiko Kaneko (Ciel Rouge Création) – Tokyo, Japan, 2006

The exterior shows a peaked roof like so many of the so-called midcentury modern A-frame churches.

But here, the peak is asymmetric, giving an off-kilter air. The church steeple surrounds negative space in the shape of a cross.

And from the straight-edged exterior we see into the curvaceous interior, its arches “specifically designed for fine acoustics,” the architects say, which “also remind of a hand overwhelming the crowd.”

(continued from pg 11)

E

E Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia

E F

Architect: Oscar Niemeyer Brasilia, Brazil, 1970 Many architects sought to give their modern churches a unique form. Niemeyer succeeded here, with 16 curved structural-concrete piers shooting towards the sky and supporting walls and ceiling of stained glass.

The interior is a dream of color, abstract stained glass overhead and sculpted angels suspended above parishioners. This is the church as show biz, suggesting in spirit one of Bernini’s Baroque interiors in Rome.

Yet, unlike Bernini, who lavished on details and played up the melodrama, here the shape and symmetry is simple and comprehensible, altogether modern.

F La Sagrada Familia Architect: Antoni Gaudí Barcelona, Spain, 1882-1926 “There is no better beginning for the history of modern religious architecture than Gaudi’s work,” architect Joseph Pichard wrote, calling this church—which Gaudí never completed—“a poem in stone in which medieval mysticism and contemporary lyricism are strangely combined.”

Yet Pichard recognized the Art Nouveau church would not prove a model for others because of its “highly individualized romanticism.”

Historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote of the church: “The four sugar-loaf spires, Tunisian more than anything else, with their amazing pattern of voids and solids and their even more amazing crustaceous pinnacles, are the lasting monument to Gaudí‘s intrepid daring.”

hexagon with stained glass and mosaic décor. Most remarkable, though, is how many of the chapel-like spaces are roofless, with the flow between exterior and interior space seamless.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area some of the finest sanctuaries were designed by an architect who was avowedly religious, Warren Callister.

His Mills College Chapel, with its undulating walls of warm wood and a freestanding pipe organ for a sculptural centerpiece, is a perfect representation of rustic yet imaginative Bay Tradition modern.

Callister’s last project, a church near Santa Cruz that he was working on until his death in 2008, employed a form popular with modernists worldwide—a freeform curve, in this case a catenary curve that suggested waves on the nearby beach and to “a tent for gathering of people.”

Gothic churches have been reimagined many times as glass-walled modern sanctuaries. In El Cerrito the chapel of Sunset View Cemetery by architect William Corlett is fronted by a steep, quasi Gothic A-frame in-filled with abstract stained glass.

An entirely different mood is evoked at the Catholic chapel Newman Center in Berkeley, a 1960s design by Mario Ciampi, in a style termed ‘Brutalist.’ It has thick concrete walls, foreboding to some, and an interior darkness broken up by unexpected pathways for exterior light.

Yet another reason modernism succeeded as an architecture for churches has to do with the architects. Many of the country’s most imaginative architects saw a chance to really shine.

Churches have always been daring and dramatic, cutting edge, and structurally innovative. And they have always told stories in stone and brick and glass.

Consider Gothic Cathedrals with wing-like flying buttresses holding up walls that are as much stained glass as stone, or the Baroque churches of Italy that combined art and architectural motifs to stir emotions.

English architect Edward D. Mills made this point in his 1955 book The Modern Church. The church in medieval days was designed for people who didn’t read. “A stained glass window was really a large picture book,” he wrote.

Structural elements told stories and evoked emotions too, with bell towers, piers, and ceiling beams soaring towards

RUSTIC MODERN. Warren Callister’s Mills College Chapel, Oakland: undulating walls of warm wood. heaven, and dark naves evoking what the German church architect Reinhard Gieselmann called a “mystical twilight.”

Many modern architects, Mills wrote, were part of a millennium-long trend of increasing the areas of glass in church walls, “completing the conquest of voids over solids.”

Modern churches also won over church building committees because they generally cost less than building something that tried to resemble Notre Dame.

Designers also convinced congregations to go mod by not going overboard with the style, evoking instead the feeling of a traditional church. In this approach, they were adhering to the advice of Edward Mills, who wrote, “In turning away from the sentimental clutter accrued through the centuries, one cannot wholly dispense with tradition.”

No church illustrates this principle better than Skidmore’s Cadet Chapel, which opened for business at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado in 1962. It was a glistening exercise in geometry—a series of sky-high tetrahedrons that suggested nothing so much as a light-filled Gothic cathedral. The cadets loved it. ■ Photography: John Eng, Dave Weinstein, Darren Bradley Photography, Alamy, Cantusstar Studios, Thales Anibal Jardim, Debra Jane Seltzer, Ken Duffy, Tom Small, Dave Toussaint, Bob Gorman, Mike Hume (www.mikehume. com), Dave Soldano, Boshiang Lin, Frank Alvarado, Paula Funnell, Nailton Barbosa, Naotake Murayama; and courtesy A. Quincy Jones Papers (Special Collections - Young Research Library, UCLA), Stantec - Anshen + Allen, Pacific Northwest College of Art C A M O D E R N 13

■CAMODERNFLASHBACK

Something in the air How the Eichlers of San Jose transformed an impromptu art-filled happening into the ambitious Fairglen Art Festival

Art at the start Born in the San Jose Eichler tract of Fairglen in 1962, the Fairglen Art Festival carried on for the next 33 years. Carol Sveilich and her family were there at the start, when a seed was planted in their Eichler cul-de-sac in the form of a low-key neighborly art share dubbed ‘Art in Our Alley.’ In short time, the event mushroomed into a high-spirited annual festival, eventually drawing thousands of visitors from around the Bay Area. As Carol fondly looks back at her childhood in Fairglen and the festival’s humble beginnings, she is accompanied here by more than two dozen precious photographs that have survived the past five decades, many of them shot by her dad Joe.

Story: Carol Sveilich Lead photography: Joe Sveilich

Santa Clara Valley was wallto-wall cherry and apricot orchards in the mid-1950s—and San Jose’s Willow Glen was its sweet spot, a fragrant oasis of blooming blossoms and pungent agriculture.

Soon the bulldozers arrived—and my family moved into one of the brand-new Eichler neighborhoods that sprouted on the tread marks.

My San Jose childhood home was on Fairgrove Court, in Fairglen, a unique tract of more then 300 Eichler homes, built between 1957 and 1962, 14 C A M O D E R N

within the umbrella neighborhood of Willow Glen.

The ten homes in my U-shaped cul-de-sac circled like covered wagons, chock-full of nuts, drama, wild parties, babysitting co-ops, infidelity, and artistic zeal. An intriguing cast of characters—authors, artists, philosophers, musicians, politicians, professors, and architects—became my neighbors.

Everyone seemed to know everyone else in this neighborhood overflowing with camaraderie, creativity, and lots of children, who would routinely abandon their bicycles on driveways each night at dinnertime. Neighbors didn’t schedule their visits—they dropped in and

RAIN OR SHINE. Top: During the Fairglen Art Festival of 1969, surprise summer rain hit, but the festival carried on. Above: Fairglen’s festival may have been inspired by ‘Art About the House,’ a 1954 event staged by Eichler Homes at a Palo Alto Eichler that was featured in Life magazine. Here, event organizer, Stanford professor, and Eichler Homes design consultant Matt Kahn (left) mounts art on a fence in preparation for AATH. shared juicy gossip or a fevered political outburst over coffee or cocktails.

The families around us celebrated

with block parties in the summer, Christmas caroling in the winter, and garden parties and evening shindigs

LIFE IN THE SIXTIES. Left vertical column: Joe and Blossom Sveilich, parents of our story’s author, Carol Sveilich, pose in their Fairglen cul-de-sac in their 1963 Austin Healey Sprite (top); art hangs on a fence for Art in Our Alley, circa 1962-’63 (middle); Blossom Sveilich and Marge Lambson (Les’ wife) stand with a tapestry for Art in Our Alley, 1963 (bottom). Right vertical column: Blossom in the family atrium (top); wild shindigs were a staple of 1960s Fairglen life (middle); Carol, 8, and brother Howard, 10, in their atrium, 1962 (bottom left); Maggie Caploe, one of the earliest founders of Art in Our Alley (bottom right).

all year ‘round.

Modern living in the 1960s was trendy, yet easily attainable and certainly affordable. My family moved into Fairglen in 1960, when a new home could be had for $19,000.

Eichler homes, with their lush central atriums, were a Space-Age suburban oasis. Joe Eichler and his C A M O D E R N 15

■CAMODERNFLASHBACK architects designed and built homes like no others; they zigged where other homes zagged, and each dwelling had a distinct and irreplaceable soul.

It would be difficult for a builder

today to replicate their spirit, as they were spun in a time when space travel and modern living were at our doorstep. Only now, decades beyond the heyday of my youth, do I realize that an Eichler existence was for the fortunate few—the sons and daughters of the ‘60s. At the time, however, we had no idea just how blessed the flower children of the cherry orchards were.

The walls of neighboring Eichler homes featured paintings and prints by artists such as Klee, Miro, Picasso, and Cezanne. Most of these reproductions could be found in a bin at the local Thrifty’s drugstore or at import shops Cost Plus and Akron. Later, Pollock, Warhol, and Lichtenstein prints would replace them.

Soft shapes, clean lines, dirty martinis, and cool Tom Collins—that’s what the San Jose Eichlers were all about. Even the phrase ‘mid-century modern,’ coined by journalist Cara Greenberg two decades later, hinted 16 C A M O D E R N

CROWD PLEASER. Puppet shows were a popular feature, drawing big crowds, as the three photos above (top right, middle) show. Top left: Posters (this one from 1974) promoting the festival became collector’s items. Above left: Welders and other craftspeople were on hand to demonstrate how it’s done. Above right: Brian Leddick plays classical guitar for the passersby. Bottom right: Minding the art store and babysitting at the same time. at the new and old mixed together like rum and Coke.

Two years after we arrived, the ‘Fairglen Art Festival,’ an improvised mini arts-and-crafts fair, quietly germinated in our Eichler enclave. The festival’s reputation would eventually spread across the entire Bay Area and feature the most talented local painters, craftspeople, weavers, and entertainers.

From driveway to artistic acclaim Next-door neighbor Les Lambson was one of the first artists drawn out into the streets of Fairglen in the early 1960s.

When he rolled his potter’s wheel onto his sloped driveway, all the Eichler neighborhood kids would gather around him like a pond full of koi at feeding time. We watched wide-eyed, like children in a Keane painting, as Lambson spun a wet, messy blob of clay into a work of functional art.

Little did we know that we were also witnessing the budding of an artist and his extraordinary career.

Lambson was not just a potter; he was also a painter, politician, philosopher, and college professor.

On summer afternoons, his garage door would slide open. Then we’d see him inside, shuffling around, mumbling in colorful language about his latest artwork, and utilizing the oddest assortment of tools—twigs, branches, tree bark, scraps of wood, and stones.

Soon Lambson would scratch through strata of paint layered on Masonite creating wonderful Asianinspired paintings. We’d lean against the wall of his dusty garage and watch transfixed as he cut and sanded the wood he fashioned into frames. Once in a while he’d ask me to fetch a strange stick or brush, and I’d become his dutiful

eight-year-old apprentice.

In those early days, Lambson gave away many of his paintings to neighbors, including to my parents, for no apparent reason other than to see the pleased expressions on their faces. Several of our neighbors had the same familiar-styled paintings on their walls, all courtesy of the artist. At the time, while fame had not yet found Lambson, the generous heart of an artist was already on display.

Though Lambson had been getting exposure mostly at the local level, his work soon received international recognition. Inspired by the revered Japanese artist Shōji Hamada, Lambson’s paintings fused both Asian and

BIG DRAW. Fairglen’s Art Festival attracted larger and larger crowds over the years, drawing 5,000 at one point.

The actual origin of the Fairglen Art Festival has been macraméd together from oral history passed from neighbor to neighbor, and from one generation to the next. Contrary to what its name may suggest, the event did not start on Fairglen Avenue. In fact, it didn’t even begin as the Fairglen Art Festival.

Its origin can be traced to Maggie

Caploe, who also lived on Fairgrove Court, as well as to our next-door neighbor Les Lambson and a handful of residents hovering in homes just outside our cul-de-sac.

One summer afternoon in 1962, Maggie set up an exhibit of her handmade arts-and-crafts creations inside her Eichler and then invited a few of

LES ART. Above: Painter and sculptor Les Lambson showing off for the kids with his potter’s wheel, 1960s.

Top: Admiring his painting in his Arizona home, 1970s.

European technique into a style that was earthy and fresh.

As Lambson’s reputation spread, the likes of Frank Sinatra, Winston Churchill, Andy Williams, and other celebrities reportedly purchased his paintings, and for prices stretching into the thousands of dollars. You couldn’t walk into an art gallery from the late 1960s to the early 1980s without running into one or more Lambson paintings or lithographs.

By the late-‘60s, Lambson and his family moved away from San Jose, and into a modern glass-walled house in Arizona that was not unlike their Fairglen Eichler. My parents would occasionally take road trips to visit the Lambsons, and, more often than not, they’d return home with an original painting or two wrapped up and tied to the roof of the family Buick.

In 1981, while walking through the renowned Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, I spotted a series of Lambson paintings hanging in the hallways.

In that moment, with my mind reeling, I was back home again—with Art in Our Alley and the Fairglen Art Fair in full swing. There I was, in Les Lambson’s driveway, as he scraped out another enchanting work of art, sawdust in his hair and paint smeared across his cheek.

“Hey Carol,” I could hear Les say, “get me that piece of wood over there for this new frame, will you? Oh, and give me a smile.”

the neighbors in to have a look. They noshed on cookies rolled in confectioners sugar and emptied a pot of Folgers from the tall percolator.

Drawings, tapestries, ceramics, prints, note cards, and paintings were strategically scattered and displayed from the kitchen to the living room and down the hallway. Maggie called them “oddments” and managed to sell a sprinkling of pieces to her guests.

This interest inspired Maggie to bring out more and more of her work.

She displayed some on her garage door and the wooden fence that ran along the street just outside our culde-sac, and others, including sculpture and pottery, on rickety card tables in her driveway. Her efforts radiated a spirit that whispered, “Hey, you can do this too.”

Maggie’s oddments brought the neighbors out, including other artists and creative hopefuls who wanted to join in the fun. Les Lambson dragged

his potter’s wheel onto the driveway and showed the neighborhood children how to form a pot and magically shape a vase. He also demonstrated his Asian-inspired painting technique to all who strolled by.

More and more neighbors pulled their artistic creations into the street or hung them on garage doors and fences. It was as if static electricity had suddenly charged the atmosphere. The neighbors and passersby studied the details of each display as they strolled the streets with their arms folded behind them like ice skaters.

They must have known something special was happening. They felt it in the air. It was a carnival without the Tilt-a-Whirl. It was New Year’s Eve without confetti.

But in reality, it was the dead of summer—and someone had parked an old jalopy in the middle of the cul-de-sac for neighborhood kids to climb on. And a sign draped from its C A M O D E R N 17

■CAMODERNFLASHBACK hood read ‘Art in Our Alley.’

During the summer of 1963, even more artists took part in the fair’s festivities. The exhibits filled Fairgrove Court and spilled down the street onto the adjacent blocks. Fences and garage doors became open-air galleries.

Driveways became exhibit halls. Musicians carried out various instruments to the front yard and began to play.

It was no longer an art festival in an ‘alley’—our cul-de-sac; the artists and activities now stretched over to the Fairglen Avenue thoroughfare towards Fairwood Avenue, the neighborhood’s longest street.

Soon rechristened the Fairglen

artwork find a home at this show, but neighborhood garage bands performed, folksingers strummed guitars, dancers whirled in the driveways, local cooks

sculpture, ceramics, quilts, and jewelry lined the streets. Puppet shows for the younger children, square dancing for restless mothers, and judo demonstra-

driveway, and fabricated an intricate sandcastle masterpiece.

Thatcher would spend 12 hours each year building his four-foot drive-

INTO THE 1970s. Top left: Temporary sound system pipes in live music and announcements throughout the day.

Top right: The information booth could easily be located in the crowd—just look for the sun umbrellas! Above left: Even a donkey was on hand. Above right: This Eichler garage door provides a backdrop to a painting exhibition.

Art Festival, our art-filled happening returned each summer, for one Sunday in June. From word-of-mouth, and with each passing year, the event continued to flourish.

Not only did a unique variety of 18 C A M O D E R N

grilled hot dogs and shish-kebabs on barbeque grills, resident weavers wove their looms, and welders spliced metal fragments into abstract shapes.

Parades of booths and tables featuring stained glass, clay and stone

tions for active teenagers were featured.

One of our neighbors, Jim Thatcher, who, with his family, played an important role organizing the festival each year, even hauled in a truckload of beach sand, dumped it onto his

way kingdoms, their castles featuring 16 doors, 67 windows, and 88 circular staircases. The intricate walls required frequent misting to prevent crumbling in the hot summer sun.

These sand creations were the

in September 2017.

Maintaining the community spirit established by the original art festival, the Fairglen Eichler block party today brings together like-minded Eichler enthusiasts who celebrate their tightknit community. The get-together, attended by 250 locals each year, takes to the streets with music and dancing, cooking and dessert contests, outdoor movies for the kids, food and drink— and lots of getting neighborly.

But Fairglen was never just a neigh-

1970s IN COLOR. Above: Many garage bands entertained during the festivals, including this one, featuring Carol Sveilich’s brother, Howard. Top left: Children were encouraged to display their artwork and play an active festival role. Left: Jim Thatcher creates a sandcastle in the family driveway. Top right: His crowning achievement.

Thatcher family’s annual signature gift to the Fairglen Art Festival. One of them even appeared in a Sunset magazine article on how to build sandcastles. Each year when the festival ended, the castle sand was offered to neighborhood children to help refill backyard sandboxes.

The Fairglen Art Fair became a growing and impressive success—as many as 200 artists and 5,000 art-loving fans attended at its peak—but, after 30 years, it had grown a bit too big for its britches.

“The original goal was for neighbors

to get to know neighbors,” reflected Jim Thatcher in the Willow Glen Resident in 1996, “and for neighbors to show neighbors the artwork they were creating.”

But by the 1990s, the neighborhood craftspeople, artists, and musicians were being edged out by outside vendors and commercial food booths. Large displays and rivers of massive crowds overflowed through the modest neighborhood fairways.

With such large numbers of people crammed into a small space, the

Fairglen Art Festival sadly had become a logistical and liability nightmare.

Despite its popularity, the festival closed down after the 1995 event following city-imposed restrictions and insurance liability concerns.

“When you invite 5,000 people to your street in the 1990s, it’s not being neighborly,” admitted Kim Jones, one of the fair organizers, a few months after the last festival. “It’s creating a liability.”

To fill the void, the Fairglen Eichler neighborhood slowly and carefully regrouped—and its homeowners returned to their roots a few years later, producing the first of a long series of lively yet manageable annual block parties. They celebrated their 17th year

borhood. Fifty-five years after that first Art in Our Alley, the Eichlers of Fairglen remain a state of mind and a creative hub of closeness and celebration. Their unfailing unification and sense of fun and exploration continue to this day. ■ • Guest contributor and author Carol Sveilich, MA, is writing a memoir that includes her coming-of-age story of growing up Eichler in Fairglen during the 1960s. She can be reached at writefaceforward@yahoo.com Additional photography: Ernie Braun, Fairglen’s cast of unknown shutterbugs from yesteryear; and courtesy the archives of Carol Sveilich, Steven Thatcher, Bill Pfahnl, Michael Greene, Fred Caploe, Stella Slyngstad C A M O D E R N 19

■ART ABOUT THE HOUSE

Architecture

fabric in

Then the alchemy begins. The digital image is printed onto fabric. For the de Young-based work, Ealish “isolated one part of [the image] and created a repeat pattern,” she says.

But this isn’t the fabric that goes into her final piece. Instead, she manipulates the fabric to create new designs, then takes a photo of the manipulated fabric, prints the photos on new fabric—and then gets to the smocking.

“What I like to do is take very mundane items, and then make them become more aesthetically pleasing,” she says. “I like the idea that you start with something, and then by whichever manipulation you choose, it just makes it into something new. It gives it a new life.”

In some of her smocked pieces, viewers can make out the original imagery—with some attention. In other works, though, there might be no more

San Francisco textile artist Ealish Wilson painstakingly mixes digital and traditional techniques for a unique look Story: Dave Weinstein

At a large crafts show a few years back, the objects on display by Ealish Wilson stood out for a simplicity that looked modern and even a bit minimal—and for their oddness. It wasn’t immediately clear exactly what they were.

“People can be funny about textiles,” Ealish says, noting that art professionals often regard fabric works as more craft than fine art. But, Ealish (pronounced Ay-lish) says, “I think of myself as being a textile artist.”

She’s also a bit of an alchemist.

While Ealish has produced pillows and fabric for upholstery, and she is designing fabric for a high-end fashion maker, her focus is on three-dimensional fabric art to hang on walls and sit on pedestals, she says.

She defines ‘fabric’ broadly to include such materials as Tyvek insulation, plastic zip ties, and recycled plastic bottles. And she treats her materials in ways that are both rooted-in-tradition handmade, and 21st century digital.

She manipulates image-soaked fabric once, then again, then again, 20 C A M O D E R N

MEET THE ARTIST. Ealish Wilson and her San Francisco home studio (above). Treating her materials in ways that are both rooted-in-tradition handmade, and 21st century digital, she focuses today on three-dimensional ‘fabric’ art that hangs on walls and on pedestals. Top: ‘Yellow Ties,’ a digital print on polyester with dyed plastic zip ties. then again, until the final product has been transmogrified, like lead into gold, in ways that sometimes reveal the original images—if you look closely.

“For me,” she says, “it is about taking something and making it into something else. I love doing that.”

These days Ealish’s signature works are her smocked wall hangings, which range in scale from intimate to wall-sized. Smocking is an ancient embroidering technique of gathering fabric into pleats to provide a degree of elasticity, very useful for collars.

“What happens is, it just concertinas up, you see?” Ealish says, demonstrating the technique in her compact San Francisco home studio. “It’s a form of

pleating where you catch opposite sides and it makes it stretchy.”

It’s not a common fine arts technique, says Michael Yochum, who with partners runs Arc Studios & Gallery in San Francisco. “I’m not aware of anyone doing smocking like she does. It is pretty unique,” he says.

Smocking may be antique, but how Ealish gets her visual imagery for smocking is of today—though it does suggest medieval alchemy.

She starts by taking a digital photo— of a marking on a parking lot in Japan for one project; photos of landscapes taken from a plane for a current project; or photos of exterior details of the M.H. de Young Museum for another.

than the memory of the image.

“They invite closer inspection, to appreciate the layers involved—from photography, then fabric manipulation, then printed over or photographed again, and re-imaged onto an everchanging surface,” artist and former art partner Leona Collins says of Ealish’s work. “You simply have to touch the piece, and that’s what I love as a fellow textile designer.”

Yochum appreciates Ealish’s skill.

“I’m a big fan of craft, and not in a sense of arts and crafts, but that you actually are talented in what you are doing,” he says. “That goes a long way with me.”

Lea Feinstein, an artist and friend who has several pieces by Ealish in her

Ealish says she is influenced by architecture. “It just makes me think about scale, and it makes me think about proportion,” she says. In fact, she traces her smocking to architecture— and to her time in Japan. “[Switzerland-based architects] Herzog & de Meuron are responsible for the fact I do smocking, because they designed the Prada building in Tokyo.”

(The firm also designed the de Young.)

“It has concave and convex glass, and it really gives the impression of being padded,” she says of the Prada, “and I was really inspired by it. I went back to Kyoto and started to recreate it in fabric. That’s where I basically came up with the smocked thing.”

As a technique, smocking is antique in terms of years but also in terms of attitude. It’s painstaking, in the way inscribing an ancient alchemical treatise by hand was painstaking—and perhaps with some of the same meditative effects.

“When you look at this work that is so laborious—thousands of ties, so repetitious,” curator Hanna Regev says, then pauses, “it would drive me nuts.”

Regev showed one of Ealish’s large pieces, ‘Felt Cocoon,’ at the Pacific Felt Factory art space in San Francisco.

EVOLUTION OF ART. Influenced by architecture, Ealish traces her smocking work to it—and to her time in Japan. The Prada building in Tokyo (center row, right) was the piece of architecture that got her smocking started (center row, left). More architecture at work (top row): the exterior of the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco (right) inspired her ‘De Young Dots’ (left), created from digitally printed Tyvek and vellum with Mizuhiki strings.

Above left: Ealish’s design on this pillow (left) evolved from her photograph of blue and white plastic ties (right). Above right: ‘Jabara,’ a digital print on Tyvek stitched into concentric circles supported by Mizuhiki strings.

Palo Alto Eichler, calls Ealish’s work “architectural textiles.”

“The large-scale smocked pieces, because of their combination of softness

and rigidity, are architectural in spirit and speak to the architecture of the building,” she says. “They look great in modern spaces.”

“She takes pictures of fire escapes, and the shadows of fire escapes, and uses them. She responds to architecture,” Feinstein says.

Ealish, who hadn’t worked in felt before, used ‘eco felt’ made from recycled plastic bottles, created an image using hand block printing, and smocked it C A M O D E R N 21

■ART ABOUT THE HOUSE using dyed zip ties.

“She worked on it for over four months,” Regev says. “It’s quite laborious. Fifty inches wide, 150 inches long.

But it began with a piece of felt that was 30 feet long, but then she pleated it and smocked it.”

“And it’s so unusual. A lot of my exhibits deal with how art, technology, and science intersect,” Regev says. “[Ealish] starts with a digital process and ends up doing everything by hand. It’s typical of artists who still enjoy doing things by hand. Many of the artists are not very practical. But for them it is a meditative process.

They enjoy the process. They don’t

Leona Collins—one in Scotland and the other on the Isle of Man, where Ealish is from. She remains a proud Manx woman, as people on the island are called.

One immense work was a series of fabric sails that hung above a restaurant in Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal shopping center, “with the purpose of hiding all the ducts, conduits, etc., while also providing acoustic dampening and an aesthetic appearance,” Collins writes.

Another, which remains one of Ealish’s favorite works and illustrates her love for places, was created in 2003 for a hospital on the Isle of

PAINSTAKING WORK. Top right: Ealish in her studio with ‘Felt Cocoon,’ made of ‘eco felt,’ from recycled plastic bottles and yellow-dyed zip ties. Top left: ‘Wishing Line,’ digital print on Tyvek and vellum. Top center: Another influence on Ealish: Japanese artist Michiko Kawarabayashi. Above: Five examples of Ealish’s smocking projects, including a portion of ‘Manx Day Out’ (second from right), created for a hospital on her Isle of Man homeland. mind the handwork.

“It also takes a person with a lot of discipline to do that. You are committed to it, and you are going to do it.

And when it is done, it is very beautiful. When you look at Ealish’s work, you don’t see an image, you don’t see a beautiful landscape. But it still provokes you. ‘Who could do that sort of thing?’

I could not do it.”

Ealish has done even larger installations in the past, in her pre-smocking days. She did two of these with 22 C A M O D E R N

Man, ‘Manx Day Out.’ “The final piece was inspired by photographs Ealish took of various architecture and scenes around the island,” Collins writes. “It was the first time we explored digital sublimation printing on a large scale. The piece was a printed, stitched, and pleated sailcloth hanging that hung the length of the building’s four-story open stairway. The actual length of cloth used was three times the overall hanging length, due to the amount of pleating

that was done—by hand!”

Ealish says, “I love that all these years later it really gives people solace.

I’m really proud to have created that piece and people love to look at it.

People will know where the places are on the island.”

It was on the Isle of Man that Ealish attended a high school that was “very arts-centric,” with an art room that was open all day. She returned to the island at age ten, after living in Germany, where her dad served in the forces.

In later years, she also lived with her family in Dubai and Oman, soaking up the tradition of colored textiles in those lands, and also landing a royal commission—a piece for the dining room of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s leader. She never met him nor visited the palace.

But it was Japan more than the Gulf that made Ealish the artist she is today.

“Japan completely changed my art— and my life, actually, I have to say—in the way I appreciate life,” she says.

traditional techniques,” Ealish says of Bristow, “but she’ll hand-stitch a light switch. You look at it and think it’s a light switch, but it is all embroidered.”

In Japan, she lived and studied with Japanese artist Michiko Kawarabayashi, thanks to an Anglo-Japanese exchange mentorship program. Ealish was the only English artist who got to live with her mentor, and that made a difference.

“The whole experience, living with her, I was very influenced by her work

ART OF CELEBRATION. Top left: ‘50/50,’ digitally printed Tyvek and vellum circles. Top right: ‘300 Knots,’ Mizuhiki strings knotted in a plexiglass box. Center row: Four more examples of Ealish’s smocking, plus a detail of ‘Urchin’ (center), dyed zip ties on printed wall paper. Above: Two Ealish Wilson art pieces hang inside the Palo Alto Eichler of friend Lea Feinstein. Ealish’s work is “architectural in spirit and speaks to the architecture of the building,” says Feinstein. “They look great in modern spaces.”

By the time Ealish went to Japan, in 2003, she was already an accomplished artist. She had studied with Maxine Bristow, a well-known fiber

artist, at Chester University, and received a master’s degree from the Scottish College of Textiles.

“A lot of her work is based on

ethic, her diligence, working every night.” The experience affected Ealish’s tonal range, and much more, she says.

“How I filter things, as well as how

I choose things, is very influenced by Japan. The daily things of living, like using your nice bowls or your nice plates. Don’t save everything. Every night we ate off these beautiful dishes that her friends had given her.

“Celebrate the art in every day rather than: this bowl being so precious you can’t use it. What’s the point then?”

Ealish’s website describes Michiko’s influence: “She explained to me later how in Japan, art and design was a part of the every day, not a commodity. It was everywhere to be seen, used, lived through. There is no distinction in the value between what we consider fine art and craft.”

Today, Ealish spends most of her time caring for her baby daughter, Sophie. She and her husband, Seth Sowerby, who works for Apple, live in a cute Victorian home in San Francisco’s Glen Park, which feels like a small town in the heart of the city. She sings with

the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra & Chorus.

And, like Michiko, she makes art every day. “I basically have [time for art] when [Sophie] naps in the morning, and in the evenings,” Ealish says, adding, “I do try to do something every day. I think that’s an important part of practice.”

When discussing the meaning of her work, Ealish links it to the way she lives and works. “My work really is about the diligence of the making.

That is very important to me. And the craft, and the quality.

“So I guess I am communicating,” she pauses to think, “…the idea of taking the time to make something.

It’s a perfectly valid way of spending your time.” ■ • For more on the textile art of Ealish Wilson, visit ealishwilson.com Photography: Sabrina Huang, Dave Weinstein, Namealus, FHKE; and courtesy Ealish Wilson C A M O D E R N 23

nMOREMODERNRENEWAL

Rising trends in home flooring Story: Tanja Kern

If there is one truth in life it’s this: what we hope will happen and what really happens are usually not the same thing.

This is especially true when it comes to flooring.

Too often, homeowners drop a considerable amount of money to install a beautiful floor, but they are disappointed when these floors just don’t hold up to the realities of life: muddy shoes, kids and dogs racing through the kitchen, and stiletto heels dancing away at the holiday party. You’re left with floors that scratch, warp, wear out, or dull over time.

Thankfully, new advances in technology and style have had an impact on flooring product improvements over the past several years, providing homeowners with options that not only look good but also provide the performance to withstand the realities of everyday life.

Since new flooring entails a substantial investment and its presence can impact the entire house and everyone living in it, choosing the right materials can be a formidable challenge. While trends that influence style may come and go, trends that influence lifestyle are broader and often last decades. For this reason, it’s a good idea to look at those lifestyle trends when selecting home-improvement materials such as flooring.

The Eichler architecture has always emphasized the indoor-outdoor lifestyle, and this trend continues today, as more and more designers are talking about connecting homeowners with nature. As we spend more time outdoors, we want to bring the idea of green spaces into our daily living situation—whether we’re relaxing with a book on the patio or 24 C A M O D E R N

Grounded in nature INDOOR-OUTDOOR. Top: Living Style porcelain pavers from MSI feature a subtle pattern reminiscent of natural stone with a matte finish. They are available as 24x24-inch pavers for indoor-outdoor use. Right: Natural Feeling porcelain by NovaBell is a woodeffect tile that can also be used indoors or out. binge-watching movies indoors.

The right flooring can help bridge the two areas, providing one layer of this connection. Enveloping our spaces in materials that are natural, or at least present a natural appearance, help us to connect with the outdoors while also providing durable solutions for everyday living. Here are some top picks.

High-style hardwood Real wood flooring is often considered the gold standard of flooring, but it’s facing stiff competition these days, as virtually every other hard-surface flooring emulates the look of hardwood while offering better performance features.

To compete, hardwood manufacturers have responded with new, longer formats that go beyond the traditional

six- to seven-foot lengths. Styles are now available in ten-foot or longer lengths to create spaces with fewer seams and grander visuals.

Wider plank flooring is another trend that has evolved during the past

few years because of its ability to open a room visually and create an illusion of space. Wide-plank flooring, which is usually a minimum of seven inches wide, is a smart choice in environments where there are variations in humidity through-

Not your grandma’s vinyl Often emulating the look of hardwood, multilayer flooring (MLF) is taking the design world by storm because of its benefits and features. Multilayer flooring has gone by many names in the past—including rigid core, composite core, and vinyl planks—but it has grown into a whole new flooring category of hard-surface flooring.

In short, MLF is stronger and more durable than its vinyl ancestors. MLF is made of several layers of materials: a cork, a high-performance core, a backing layer, a printed layer (which provides the look), a transparent wear layer, and a protective coating. The result is a product that keeps its form better than traditional luxury vinyl tile or planks.

There are a number of benefits to MLF. One of the most important is appearance. New digital graphic technologies are creating floors that look more like real hardwood or stone, with fewer repeating planks. It has a soft matte finish, eliminating the ‘plastic’ look of old-school vinyl floors.

MLF also provides superior performance. We have all seen floors that have warped or gapped over time.

Multilayer flooring provides a snug

DURABILITY. New advances in technology and style have had an impact on flooring product improvements. Top row: Vintage Vintique engineered wood from Mohawk (left), various colors of oak parquet (right). Row two: Twilight Oak MLF vinyl from Karndean (left), Pryzm luxury vinyl from Armstrong (right). Bottom row: Explorer luxury vinyl from Shaw (left), Mannington sheet vinyl (right). out the year because they fluctuate less than traditional strip floors.

In terms of styling, hardwoodflooring producers are providing more color and finish options to appeal to a broader group of consumers. Graytoned wide planks, without too much sheen on the finish, continue to be a popular choice. Gray tones work with a variety of décor styles because they don’t overpower other colors.

As an alternative to traditional wood stains, some companies are offering fumed wood flooring, which gets rich color and grain without additional staining.

The fuming process involves placing

the wood in a chamber where airborne ammonia is then released. The wood reacts with the ammonia and undergoes a color change. The final look feels deeper than what you might get with stained wood flooring.

On the other end of the spectrum,

bleached wood is also gaining traction. Inspired by Scandinavian style, this softer, whitewashed look is created through a bleaching process that involves applying a chemical solution onto the surface of the wood to get rid of the wood’s natural color.

structured overlay to a slab and is also moisture-resistant, and in some cases, waterproof. In contrast, hardwoods can be severely damaged if they get wet or are installed in humid environments. Today’s new MLF can withstand exposure to moisture, especially C A M O D E R N 25

nMOREMODERNRENEWAL in spaces like bathrooms, laundry rooms, and kitchens.

MLF offers easier installation than traditional hardwood or vinyl. There is little preparation required, which helps to cut down on installation costs. Many MLF brands are installed with a simple click-and-lock installation, which makes installation fast and less complicated.

Alfresco living No trend emphasizes the connection with the outdoors—or works as well with clean-lined mid-century style— than seamless flooring indoors and out. Of course, traditional concrete flooring installations are always an option to achieve this look, but por-

ety of sizes and trim pieces so that you can customize the layout of your floor.

They also provide different finish options, which are nearly imperceptible to the eye, and a variety of textures for indoor and outdoor use that allow for appropriate slip resistance in patios and pool areas.

Radiant heat considerations Installing any new flooring over radiant-heat systems requires some special attention. According to Jon Namba, a Salt Lake City-based certified floorcovering installer and industry consultant, flooring manufacturers usually limit the maximum temperature to 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

Slow, incremental heating adjustPROOF PORCELAIN. Porcelain tile manufacturers (as above) are producing more products than ever before to realize indoor and outdoor spaces that transition seamlessly. Far left: This wood-look porcelain, Chateau Reserve from Marazzi, is water resistant, transitioning from floor to walls, inside and outside the bath. Near left: Dark grey porcelain, Saddle Brook

by Daltile, lines the exterior of this modern home. and installation instructions is recommended before installing over radiant heating, since failure to follow the manufacturer’s guidelines may void their warranty.

For general guidance, the Radiant Professionals Alliance (radiantprofessionalsalliance.org) annually publishes the Radiant Comfort Guide, which includes helpful information on flooring over radiant systems. ■

celain tile manufacturers are producing more products than ever before to help homeowners blend spaces through large-format collections that transition seamlessly.

Whether you have traditional sliding doors or a moveable sliding glass wall, you can now install tile on both sides of those doors that makes the indoor and outdoor spaces visually connect.

Porcelain tile comes in a spectrum of colors and styles that can emulate the look of concrete, hardwood, or natural stone. In fact, new printing technology makes it possible for companies to recreate almost any look found in nature—be it slate, marble, travertine, or oak.

Size-wise, bigger is better in tile flooring installations, and today sizes for square configurations reach up to three feet, and rectangles up to four feet in length.

Tile manufacturers often offer a vari26 C A M O D E R N

ments will help to keep floors from experiencing shock, while sudden adjustments may cause problems. A safe measure, to ensure the longevity of tile floor, is to only make two-degree adjustments in radiant heat every 24 hours, Namba adds.

Radiant heat transforms hard, cold tile into a warm and comfortable surface. Porcelain tile works well with radiant heating because they are thin, dense, and conduct heat well.

There are a variety of methods for installing tile and stone over radiantheat systems, and many professionals recommend the use of a crack isolation membrane, which provides a flexible layer below the tile that allows the surface to expand and contract, thus reducing the likelihood that tile will crack with fluctuating temperatures.

Tile installers should contact the tile manufacturer for specific instruc-

tions for installing products over radiant heat, and reference publications by the Tile Council of North America (tcnatile.com).

Wood flooring provides some challenges when installed over radiant heat. Installers must consider the wood species, the wood width and thickness, moisture levels, installation practices, and heat output of the radiant system.

Installers should reference guidelines provided by the National Wood Flooring Association (nwfa.org).

Engineered wood floors can be less temperamental than real wood, but not all engineered wood floors are recommended for use over radiant-heat systems. Maximum temperatures differ by product and must be followed.

Many multilayer flooring (MLF) options are safe to install over embedded radiant-heat systems. Again, contacting the manufacturer for recommendations

STORY RESOURCES Armstrong Flooring Armstrong.com

Daltile Daltile.com

Karndean Designflooring Karndean.com

Mannington Mills, Inc. Mannington.com

Marazzi Marazziusa.com

Mohawk Flooring Mohawkflooring.com

MS International (MSI) Msistone.com

NovaBell Novabell.it

Shaw Floors Shawfloors.com

■MODERN RENEWAL

On the Homefront Uncurb your pride Ambitious Concord owner returns to the streets with curb address stencils and a big thumbs up for Eichler If you are proud of your Eichler

home, you’re certainly not alone in this world.

But if you are seeking something special that exudes Eichler pride and sets you apart even from neighbors who are already unconventional, well, then look no further than the curb itself That’s where Eichler Stencils shows off their snazzy stuff.

Hunter Wimmer, who lives in the Rancho del Diablo tract of Concord, is the dedicated Eichler enthusiast behind this brainchild: Eichler curb address stencils for retail sale.

Even though Wimmer says he has managed to profit approximately zero dollars so far from his Eichler curb-appeal product, the design instructor and his group of students have produced and sold more than 100 of the reusable stencils—and at least the students have made a few bucks.

Wimmer, who has created a buzz over the years with his Eichlerfocused, DIY-friendly homeimprovement site, RedneckModern. com, also readily admits he did not originate the idea to create Eichler curb address stencils.

But he specifically recalls the day when the idea sparked for him.

It was on a 2007 trip to Southern California in which he and his wife Casie were PT Cruising around, photographing Eichlers and Cliff May homes in the area.

“I’m driving around, and we notice these [Eichler] curb addresses and said, ‘How can we make this ourselves?’” he recalled. “Turns out it’s not that hard.”

Anyway, the seed was planted, though it took a few years to flower.

First Wimmer hunted around on the Internet for the address stencils,

M-SF

but unsuccessfully: “You end up needing something, and you can’t find it—as they say, necessity is the mother of invention.”

So the ambitious Concord man extended his research beyond the marketplace to the archives, particularly those of the Eichler Network and other resources.

Starting with an image of the original script Joe Eichler used for marketing his homes, the graphic

patterning the script portion after the original Eichler literature, for the address numbers he chose a font he said is a predecessor to Helvetica called Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Once he had the design, Wimmer’s instincts as an educator took over. He told some budding designers at the Academy of Art University (where he teaches, in San Francisco), “You guys are students and could use the cash, so run with it!”

“Application is certainly going to affect longevity...It’s going to flake off if your curb is dirty,” he acknowledged, recommending preparation with a wire brush to smooth out the curb surface, and then using a quality outdoor enamel paint such as Rust-Oleum Hard Hat. “They dry really quickly, and they seem to be the appropriate colors —white, gray, and black,” Wimmer said, somewhat tongue in cheek. He

CURB APPEAL. The recent new crop of Eichler curb address stencils is the handiwork of Concord Eichler owner Hunter Wimmer. “It’s not really a business—it’s more of an initiative,” he says. “I derive more pleasure from seeing other people not struggle.” Left column (top to bottom): Stencils after application (#1), stencil kit (#2), Wimmer (#3), tools and supplies for installation (#4). Above: Wimmer’s Concord Eichler—with snazzy stenciled curb.

artist went to work.

“Super accuracy was not the goal, it was just to get a reasonable facsimile,” Wimmer conceded, admitting having to “tweak things here and there to make everything line up” for the laser cut of his stencils. Besides

Since then, different students have helmed the three previous production runs of the stencils, including Howard Li, Kim André Bøe, Ziv Tsau, and most recently Mary Tolosa.

As the logical next step, Wimmer recently set up an Etsy online store for the stencils, and they now ship for $75 out the door.

“They’re made out of polypropylene, so they’ll last a while,” he promised. “The stencils are good for at least a half-dozen applications…One set can serve every single neighbor.”

Wimmer said the curb address he painted with one of the stencils outside his and Casie’s home is eight years old now, and needs repainting.

Interestingly, the address of one of his neighbors, who has a ‘rollover’ style curb, has aged much better than the artist’s square curb.

said satisfied customers appreciate the addresses for adding “a certain sense of pride, a finishing touch” to their Eichler.

But Wimmer has no regrets that his Eichler Stencils haven’t padded his wallet along the way. “It’s not really a business—it’s more of an initiative,” he explained of enlisting students in the effort. “As an instructor, I derive more pleasure from seeing other people not struggle.”

–Dan Smith • To order your own Eichler Stencils, go online to etsy.com/shop/eichlerstencils.

For more info, visit eichlerstencils.com.

• It should be noted, the original production run of curb address stencils that inspired Hunter Wimmer during his Southern California visit a decade ago was designed and produced by Jaime Jim Flores, then an Eichler owner in the Balboa Highlands tract in Granada Hills.

C A M O D E R N 27

■ T H A T ’S E N T E R T A I N M E N T

Trousdale Estates’ labor-of-love tome New book explores L.A.’s ‘celebrity colony’ designed by top names of mid-century California architecture If you turn immediately to page 134 of this colorful, expansive tome, you may think you’re in an Eichler neighborhood. You see a low-gabled, magnificent home by one of Joe Eichler’s architects, A. Quincy Jones, splashed across two pages.

But Trousdale Estates, developed by Paul Trousdale from the mid-1950s to Trousdale Estates: Midcentury to Modern in Beverly Hills

By Steven M. Price.

348 pages. Hardcover. Regan Arts.

1972, is far from one of Eichler’s modest middle-class neighborhoods. It is rather, as we read on the book jacket, “Los Angeles’ largest colony of luxury residential work by many of the most revered names in midcentury California architecture.”

Yet this Mecca for over-the-top taste is facing the same problem that many Eichler homeowners are facing today— the loss of neighborhood character due to teardowns.

Trousdale Estates, with 500-plus homes on 400-plus acres in Beverly Hills, has been called “a place of extreme vulgarity and conspicuous consumption.”

Price, an author and preservationist who clearly loves the neighborhood, concedes that “some of the most striking homes in Trousdale Estates don’t really look much like houses at all; they could be said to more closely resemble art museums, banks, or country clubs.”

28 C A M O D E R N

One house he calls a “glam ranch.”

Another he describes as having “stadium-sized rooms giving way to slightly less enormous ones, finally settling on simply huge in the private spaces.” For one home, architect Harold Levitt “went all out on Hellenistic glamour, Hollywood style.”

The neighborhood was aimed at celebrities, attracting Sinatra, Elvis, David Janssen (The Fugitive), Audrey Meadows, Sid Caesar—and Richard Nixon. When Jennifer Aniston lived in one of the great homes, her neighbors included Ellen DeGeneres and Ringo Starr.

The range of modern homes in Trousdale Estates far exceeds anything you’ll see in a middle-class modern tract.

Many architects worked here in a range of styles, from Eichler-like (Jones designed four homes) to International Style influenced but glammed-up “Mies van Deluxe.” Rex Lotery designed a woodsy Usonian-style home, and there were gaudy Hollywood Regency blends.

All are lavishly illustrated, with new photos and historical ones.

By the 1970s, Price writes, Trousdale Estates was becoming “tarnished” in appearance and reputation. “The frank theatricality of its architecture was already ripe for lampooning,” he writes, in such movies as The Loved One and Valley of the Dolls.

Price clearly spent years on this

HOMES OF THE STARS. The range of modern homes found at Los Angeles’ 500-plus home Trousdale Estates far exceeds anything you’ll see in a middle-class modern tract. Among its modern beauties is the 1965 home above (‘Modern House 5’) designed by A. Quincy Jones. Far left: Paul Trousdale and wife Jean during a fishing excursion (circa 1965) at Spanish Cay, Bahamas, a private island owned by businessman Clint Murchison, Jr. book, gaining entry to home after home and learning the stories of each change in floor plan and tales about each owner. The book, far from a cold architectural tome, is a labor of love by an insider. It’s also a cri de coeur.

So many of these homes have been badly altered over the years, including a once-warmly colored and textured A. Quincy Jones house that disco producer

Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA By Sam Lubell.

376 pages. Paperback. Phaidon.

Care to visit a hospital in Tacoma that “looks like a mash-up of rocket ships, grain silos, and cake-icing tubes?”

How about the “tallest concrete and steel structure” in the United States, a bell tower at UC Santa

Giorgio Moroder turned into an “Ice Palace Disco.”

But it is the recent spate of teardowns that most troubles Price.

Between 1970 to 2000 about 20 homes were demolished in Trousdale Estates, he writes. Today it is about 20 a year.

He writes: “Almost a dozen homes in the main chapters of this book have fallen during its production.”

Barbara? Or a “home on top of a ship’s mast,” in Portland?

Lubell clearly enjoyed writing this book, and if you have a spirit of adventure, you’ll enjoy carrying it around in your pocket.

“Take a turn onto a winding street anywhere along the West Coast and the air gets stiller, your pulse gets slower, and there’s a chance that the building you’re looking at is not just a piece of revolutionary architecture—it’s a sublime escape,” Lubell writes.

The guide, which “excludes buildings that can’t be seen from public places,” doesn’t try to cram in every wonderful modern building along the Coast. Rather, it gives a full page (or often two) to each entry, and one or two photos.

It includes neighborhoods as well as individual buildings, including some Eichler tracts, as well as Currey Lane in Sausalito, with homes by several leading modernists. And Lubell includes useful information on visiting, when visiting is possible.

Aaron G. Green: Organic Architecture Beyond Frank Lloyd Wright By Randolph C. Henning.

443 pages. Hardcover. ORO Books.

Desperately few Northern California modern architects get the star treatment doled out to Aaron Green in this detailed, lovingly put together book.

But how many of his confreres had the name Frank Lloyd Wright alongside their own? From 1951 to 1959, when the master died, Green ran a San Francisco office with both Wright’s name on the door and his own.

He was the only Wright acolyte who had such a position. Green handled 30 Wright projects during that period, many of which he brought to Wright. The most famous was Marin Civic Center.

On his own, Green (1917-2001) designed 300-plus projects, many detailed in this book. It is largely a project-by-project discussion, with fine photography and renderings, as well as plans and more.

An unbuilt Eichler neighborhood designed by Green that would have been part of San Mateo Highlands, alas, is not shown.

Though Green’s work built on the work of Wright in a creative way, Green never departed from it.

“Everything I know about architecture, I know from Frank Lloyd Wright,” he said. “There is no question about it.

That is my whole direction.”

Can art that has “no basis in the natural world and no symbolic content” be political?

Abigail McEwen thinks so, arguing that the values of the geometric abstraction created by this group of Cuban artists, by embodying “rationalism, universalism, utopia,” stood in intellectual opposition to both the Batista dictatorship of the 1950s and the Castro regime that supplanted it.

David Zwirner, who runs galleries in New York and London, showed this museum-quality exhibit there in 2015 and 2016. McEwen says it was “an auspicious moment, amid dovetailing interests in Cuba and in the mid-century blooming of geometric abstraction across the Americas.”

This accompanying book, though its prose is academic, introduces to a new audience some very fine painters whose works, while they may suggest such Californians of the same period as John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, are varied, sometimes idiosyncratic, and generally very beautiful.

One of the goals of these artists, McEwen writes, was “to express in stylistic terms [the] desire for peace, that peace for which the human spirit is so desperate.”

“Our architecture is too humble. It should be prouder, more aggressive, much richer and larger than we see today,” Saarinen says at the start of this film, which was done for the ‘American Masters’ series and filmed and, one suspects, spearheaded by the

thing electronic at times, and at other times a chorus.

Would this music be better as a DVD that allows us to watch the sculptures in action? They are indeed beautiful things. But that would remove some of the mystery —and wonder—that comes from hearing these alternately ethereal and earthy sounds.

Love this disc? Then consider buying the Complete Sonambient Collection on Important Records, 11 CDs plus voluminous archival material.

Various Jazz Artists: Avantgarde — The New Thing 10-CD set. The Intense Media.

Harry Bertoia: Clear Sounds / Perfetta CD or LP. Sonambient.

Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future Produced and directed by Peter Rosen. DVD. 68 minutes. PBS.

Concrete Cuba: Cuban Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s By Abigail McEwen with Pedro De Oraá, Lucas Zwirner and Susanna Temkin.

192 pages. Hardcover. David Zwirner Books.

architect’s son Eric.

From the soaring arch that defines St. Louis (“a breathtakingly beautiful leap into the sky,” an observer here calls it) to the curvaceous TWA terminal at JFK, Eero created works that helped define modern expressionism from the 1940s to his early death in 1961.

This film catches much of his spirit, with time-lapse shots of clouds scudding by his masterpieces at sunset, animations showing how ingeniously and courageously they are constructed, and the standard array of talking heads.

The film gets personal, with Eric on a quest to rediscover the dad he never fully knew, a dad who left the family when he found a new love.

Too bad the film never puts Eero Saarinen’s work into a wider architectural context. But few such hagiographic films or books do.

The record company may classify this in the ‘non-music’ genre, but don’t believe it. Bertoia (1915-1978), known as a sculptor (he did the sculpture above the altar at MIT chapel, for example) and furniture designer, became a sound artist by turning his metallic creations into ‘sonambient’ musical instruments.

This album’s two compositions, created and recorded at Bertoia’s barn in Pennsylvania, are lush and ominous, evoking a place that seems at times more like a European city under threat of war than a rural barn.

You hear low booms, high-pitched skittering, a carillon in the distance.

The movement is slow, sustained, moody—then suddenly picks up speed. It builds both in sound and emotion. The sound suggests some-

‘The New Thing,’ as free jazz was dubbed at the start of the 1960s, can seem intimidating. Not everyone wants to hear 18-minute blowing sessions with every musician making it up on the spot.

But that’s not what you’ll hear with this set, 16 original albums on ten CDs in a simple box with no liner notes— that’s no original notes, no new ones.

There’s plenty of good listening though.

And it shows just how diverse the artists called ‘free’ really could be.

The first CD starts with John Coltrane, known for his intense spirituality, with two very different albums—one quartet, the other big band.

Eric Dolphy, who created a rhythm all his own on reeds, gives a wonderful performance on the often-saccharine standard ‘Tenderly.’ He supplies the requisite fat, emotional vibrato, but adds some irony, seemingly laughing at the song while loving it.

This is a great budget set. But how can you release a ‘New Things’ compilation without one of its defining leaders, Pharoah Sanders?

Photography: Luke Gibson Photography; and courtesy Clint Murchison, Jr. family C A M O D E R N 29

■MORECA MODERNFLASHBACK

Wheels of Fortune

Eichler architect comes full circle with his radical site plan of concentric rings and curving Palo Alto streets Story: Dave Weinstein Lead photography: David Toerge

From the air, Fairmeadow looks like a work of abstract art, circles within circles encased in a not-quite square. A glance at a roadmap of Palo Alto reveals immediately that this neighborhood, which started construction in 1952, is something different—and that’s the way builder Joe Eichler wanted it.

Fairmeadow clearly marked Eichler, early in his career, as one of the few tract homebuilders who was willing to sacrifice profit—it’s been said he gave up 57 potential home sites to provide room for a circular street plan—to produce more attractive, livable, and safer neighborhoods.

“The real guy who took the chance here was Eichler,” says Walter Thomas Brooks, the architect who designed the street layout in 1950. “This isn’t as efficient as a grid pattern.”

Brooks recalls the assignment as given him by his boss, Bob Anshen, an original co-partner of the architectural firm Anshen & Allen. “Bob said, ‘We have this tract. Inside, we don’t want any grid streets. We want all curving streets.’ The idea was to get as many houses in the space without any straight streets.”

“Architects at the time didn’t want to be thought of as developers’ architects, as builders’ architects, because builders had a reputation for building squares, square houses, and grids,” Brooks says.

“That was the criticism of mass building at the time. We were structuring our society in these rectangular grids, and that was not good.”

Brooks was only 23, but had already laid out suburban tracts for a developer in the Midwest and had done site plans for San Francisco modern architect Gardner Dailey. He was given Fairmeadow on his first day on the job. In fact, it was the day he was hired. He imagines it may have been the reason he was hired.

“I walked in at 10 o’clock in the morning. Bob Anshen looked at my work and said, ‘Could you start at 1?’ He really liked my stuff.” The firm had about 12 architects at the time, Brooks recalls.

It was Anshen who came up with the idea of curving streets, but, Brooks says, “He let me go to town.”

“All he said were, ‘curved streets,’ 30 C A M O D E R N

YESTERDAY & TODAY. This scene takes veteran Bay Area architect Walter Thomas Brooks (above) back more than 60 years, when his progressive site plan design for Eichler’s Fairmeadow tract of Palo Alto made the cover of Fortune, one of the nation’s top business magazines, in 1955. His plan remains a marvel today. and I did three or four layouts, and this was the one that was picked. It was a series of trials to see which has the least pavement and the most houses, and would be the most striking in design.”

Brooks’ plan differed slightly from the neighborhood that finally got built.

Two of the circles’ centers, for example, were reserved for parks in the plan, instead of houses.

Brooks said the design took three or four weeks. Then, he says, “I went on to something else.” The job of aligning houses on the lots fell to Claude Oakland, who oversaw Anshen & Allen’s Eichler work at that time, and later ran his own firm designing houses for Eichler. Brooks left Anshen & Allen about a year later.

A committed modernist much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Brooks had already worked for Skidmore

Owings & Merrill when he sought Anshen & Allen out. “Anshen had a reputation for doing pretty nice stuff,” Brooks says, “and he was oriented to organic architecture.”

Fairmeadow arrays about 284 homes on several streets that are complete circles—some surrounding inner, concentric circles; on several outer streets that are segments of incomplete circles; and on several cul-de-sacs that reach into the circles. Although Eichler created many other neighborhoods of curving streets and cul de sacs, he never again produced a street plan as geometrically stylized as Fairmeadow.

Brooks later ran his own small firm, designing civic and community buildings and many individual homes in an individualistic, modern style that blended Wright, California modernism, and his particular take on organic

architecture, inspired by natural forms, including seashells and crystals. He designed an un-built subdivision that arrayed homes not in circles but on curved streets that resemble the veins in the wing of a dragonfly.

Brooks is not entirely happy with Fairmeadow’s layout. “I still feel it was too mechanical. But put some street trees in here,” he says, “and you take away the mechanical aspect.”

The neighborhood quickly won fans, both among the people who took up residence and in the popular and professional press.

In naming Eichler’s Palo Alto houses ‘Subdivision of the Year’ in December 1950, the magazine Architectural Forum praised Eichler’s “fresh design,” variety of plans and exteriors, and site plans by Anshen & Allen. Among the illustrations was Brooks’ site plan for M-SF

Fairmeadow, even though it wouldn’t be built for another two years.

It was the Architectural Forum article that claimed “Eichler willingly sacrificed 57 lots to provide room for the curvaceous roads.”

“They have been given a free hand

by Eichler,” the magazine said of the

chosen an aerial image of Fairmeadow for the cover of its 25th anniversary edition, February 1955. The photographer was William A. Garnett.

Inside, a photo essay by Ezra Stoller, ‘Since 1930,’ provides the issue with its thematic focus: ‘The American Breakthrough,’ how America has

your perspective is always changing— new houses, new gardens ever floating into view. Curved ‘corner’ lots—where the entry streets enter the circles—provide a wide cushion between street and house.

They are filled in many cases with miniforests or extensive plantings that provide a casual, outdoorsy effect. The neighbor-

ABSTRACT ART. Walter Brooks’ first Anshen & Allen assignment—on his first day on the job, in 1950— was straightforward. “No grid streets—we want all curving streets,” boss Bob Anshen (below) told him.

architects, “to pioneer more versatile layouts with streets that form cul de sacs, loops, and concentric circles. Though not derived from contours (all tracts are on flat land to cut costs), these curvilinear street plans create a spacious, informal effect, slow traffic within the development, reduce dangerous crossings, and improve house orientation.”

The publication that really caught Brooks’ eye, however, was Fortune, then as now the nation’s top popular business magazine. Brooks was startled to see his striking, circular design staring out from a newsstand. Fortune had M-SF

changed since Fortune’s debut. Stoller’s photos included Levittown from the air, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the United Nations Building, and the Pentagon, and a trend-setting modern high rise, George Howe and William Lescaze’s Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building. “Modern architecture, so new, so controversial in 1930, is the accepted style in 1955,” the text claimed.

The editors chose Fairmeadow as their cover image because it provided “a dramatic aerial glimpse of the changed face of the U.S.” They may also have been influenced by the magazine’s private iconography. The first issue of Fortune, which is illustrated inside, featured a cover shot of a ferris wheel, dubbed ‘the Classic Wheel of Fortune.’ It resembles the wheels that make up Fairmeadow.

What the birds-eye photo doesn’t catch, however, is how well the Fairmeadow neighborhood functions at human-eye level, and how livable it really is. From the main roads that border the development, there’s a sense of mystery as you look into ‘the circles,’ as the neighborhood is often called. You glimpse only a few houses before the lazily curving streets curl out of site.

Walking or bicycling along the circles,

hood has no shared parkland, but there is a sense of space, softness, even luxury.

Adding to the soft feeling are the low, rolled curbs. Utility lines aren’t buried, but they are hidden on poles that run behind the houses, so views over the broad roadways are uncluttered.

As the Fortune cover suggests, the site was barren when developed. Today it is forested with spruce, deciduous trees, redwood groves, and a handful of palms.

On Redwood Circle, where architect Mila Zelkha grew up, and where she lives today with her husband and son, bicyclists pedal through every fall to enjoy some of Palo Alto’s most colorful foliage.

Fairmeadow is part of a tradition of suburban development with roots in the mid-19th century. In America, Frederick Law Olmsted, and in England, the garden city designers, created neighborhoods of slowly curving streets, well landscaped with wide medians, and mini-parks that often occupied the corners. Throughout the 1910s and ‘20s, American developers adopted the theme in such neighborhoods as St. Francis Wood in San Francisco.

But these were generally precincts for the well heeled, not for typical postwar tract buyers. But along with

adapting modern architecture for the middle class, Eichler adapted principles of modern planning.

Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, Eichler’s other team of architects that began designing for him in the early 1950s, also contributed house designs to Fairmeadow. Their 1957 book, Builders Homes for Better Living, enunciated the modern principles of suburban design that Eichler strove to follow.

They opened their chapter ‘The Planned Environment’ with the ‘concentric circle site plan’ for Fairmeadow, contrasting it with a grid of Levittownstyle Cape Cod houses.

“The most efficient layout will almost always result in a grid plan which provides rows of identically shaped lots in a pattern familiar to everyone,” Jones and Emmons wrote.

“This method can hardly be expected to produce any result except unrelieved monotony.”

Advanced suburban planning, of course, was about more than curved streets. “The complete community,” they wrote, “provides facilities for education, worship, shopping, recreation, and play.”

Some later Eichler communities would include community centers, pools, parks, and sites for schools. One, not far from Fairmeadow, even included an adjacent Eichler-built shopping center.

More than 60 years after its birth, Fairmeadow still appeals to young parents who like a safe, quiet neighborhood. Fairmeadow has natural boundaries, says Zelkha, who remembers bicycling Redwood Circle as a girl, when she knew all her neighbors.

Mothers often push strollers down the streets, she says, and older kids follow on their tricycles. Other kids skateboard and play basketball on the streets.

“Visually we have a lot of privacy,” Zelkha says.

Stephanie Mulqueen, who moved into the neighborhood more than a decade ago with her husband Brian and daughter Juliette, enjoys the street plan for aesthetic reasons. “I think it’s nice that they tried something different,” she says. “They were creative.”

And even the circles’ downside— they make for a confusing traffic pattern—is something residents appreciate.

“Almost everyone gets lost around here,” Zelkha says. “People who don’t live in the neighborhood don’t come through here.” ■ Additional photography: Ernie Braun C A M O D E R N 31

nBLAST FROM TH E PAST

UNSUNG MASTERS OF THE MID-CENTURY FURNITURE DESIGN

Living life the mid-century modern way certainly has its rewards and challenges. One of the choicest rewards is hunting for cool furniture to complement your lifestyle.

As a budding (or even longtime) modernist, you can encounter marvelous pieces whose style is an exciting departure from the bland uniformity of homes furnished at Ashley HomeStore or Ikea.

The human body having evolved very little in the past century, there are designs dating back to the birth of modernism that are still genius today.

MURIEL COLEMAN

ARTHUR UMANOFF

By Dan Smith

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND Perriand was a French master of collaborative design, and as an early-century woman, it is sometimes hard to discern her role.

Le Corbusier is credited with creating several landmark chairs in the 1920s, but his ideas were brought to fruition by Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. Some are still available from the Italian firm Cassina. Le Corbusier famously dismissed Perriand with a flip, “We don’t embroider cushions here,” but she had the last laugh.

Their periodic collaborations stretched over four decades.

WHERE TO START:

Chaise Longue collaboration above

Known to the rare collector who has heard of him by last name only, Umanoff is undoubtedly the most unsung of our ten designers. Very little information about him is available, though his designs were sold from 1952 into at least the mid-’70s. He worked primarily on chairs, clocks, and wet bars for a cavalcade of distributors such as Elton, Shaver Howard, Howard Miller, George Nelson, and others. His work is sometimes misattributed, partly due to occasional similarity to the ubiquitous Paul McCobb.

One of the least likely paths to furniture fame was taken

by Muriel Coleman. Already a well-exhibited, Columbia University-trained water colorist, she convinced her parents to spin off a branch from their farm equipment company to make home furnishings. Strapped for materials by WWII shortages, she originated extraordinary uses for scrap metal tubing, rebar, and expanded metal. The results were a popular line of minimalist furniture for San Leandro-based California Contemporary Inc. She also became a leader and major patron of the late-century Bay Area arts community.

WHERE TO START:

WHERE TO START:

Metal-framed furniture, as below

Metal-framed furniture, as below

PAUL MCCOBB As much as any one person, McCobb was responsible for the look of furniture in 1950s America. Before dying too young at 51, the Massachusetts native’s prolific work for varied manufacturers ranged from the widely popular Planner Group for Winchendon Furniture Co. in birch and maple to a more adventurous, higherend line for Directional Furniture using materials such as brass and walnut. McCobb’s furniture is still widely available, and he also designed assorted home electronics, timepieces, and kitchenware.

WHERE TO START:

Planner Group Series, as above

GRETA MAGNUSSONGROSSMAN Grossman had plenty of company as a European with essential contributions to design in midcentury Los Angeles, but the preeminent Swedish modernist was the lone girl in a boy’s club. She was the city’s only female architect with her own practice, and she outdistanced many male colleagues with huge contributions to furniture and interior design.

(She also was a childless professional married to a jazzman who spent her last three decades painting landscapes in retirement on the San Diego coast. So how cool is that?)

WHERE TO START:

Gräshoppa floor lamp above

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As we did with unsung jazz saxophone masters in the spring ‘17 CA-Modern, we have selected ten modern furniture designers whose work will add a sparkle of innovation and style to your home—even if you never heard their names before.

“It’s a very accessible list. People may have heard of them, but don’t know a ton,” says Bay Area mid-century modern furniture expert and retailer Vince Bravo, who assisted with our selection.

“Or, maybe people have seen their work but not know the designer.”

PAUL EVANS

It’s a treacherous pursuit too. Most of us know furniture by manufacturers or retailers, not designers. Adding to that, design misattribution is rampant among period originals.

Of course, you can’t go wrong with a chair designed by Charles and Ray Eames or a table by Eero Saarinen. After a bit of research and shopping, though, your newfound courage and curiosity will lead you to pieces by less-recognized masters— like the ones below.

PAUL T. FRANKL

A misplaced master of modern metal, Evans invented ways to incorporate sculpted steel, verdigris copper, argente sculpted bronze, and other materials into chests, cabinets, and other memorable pieces. To do so, he utilized welding, jewelry making, metallurgy, and other skills previously unused by most designers. Evans frequently signed and even dated his studio pieces. Production pieces for North Carolina-based Directional Furniture were hand built and finished one at a time, presaging the limited-edition art furniture trend of today.

ALEXANDER GIRARD

Frankl was a consummate advocate and practitioner of modern design between the world wars.

The Austrian-born designer, author, and teacher moved to the U.S. in 1914 and went on to run trendsetting galleries in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. He brought to the fore several groundbreaking styles such as his metal ‘skyscraper’ designs and other noteworthy Art Deco pieces. Frankl’s design style evolved continuously over the years, eventually focusing on production pieces for Brown Saltman and Johnson Furniture.

His books on modernism are also collector’s items.

WHERE TO START:

Sculptural metal cabinetry & chests, as below

Fabric designer to the stars (of furniture design), Girard was known to friends as ‘Sandro.’

Lifestyle had a greater impact on his work than our other designers, influenced as it was by his collection of art, toys, and textiles from around the world.

Training as an architect as well as his travels fed into a portfolio of ‘mexidots,’ ‘mexistripes,’ and other geometric patterns. Girard achieved his greatest renown creating fabrics for furniture designed by George Nelson and the Eameses for Herman Miller Inc. from 1952 to 1975.

WHERE TO START:

WHERE TO START:

Skyscraper collection, as below

Lounge chair below

LUTHER CONOVER

MILO BAUGHMAN

Probably the briefest design career on our list belonged to Luther ‘Bill’ Conover. Like Bay Area colleague Muriel Coleman, Conover fashioned pieces one expert calls “quintessentially mid-century modern” from scrap, including parts from decommissioned troop ships. Conover had no formal art or design training. One aspect of his furniture’s appeal—its insideoutside versatility—unfortunately contributes to its rarity today due to wear and tear. Conover’s Cost Plus-predecessor shop on a ferryboat in 1960s Sausalito was more lucrative than the furniture, so he gave up design after only ten years.

The Kansas-born Baughman achieved greater recognition than some with eponymous lines for various companies. He began as an interior and custom furniture designer at the legendary Frank Brothers store in L.A., following that with stints at Glenn of California, Drexel, and Murray Furniture before roosting a halfcentury at Thayer Coggin Inc. in North Carolina. There he created iconic chairs and the occasional sofa or chaise lounge. Baughman was a popular teacher and lecturer on modernism, culminating in his formation of the Department of Environmental Design at Brigham Young University.

WHERE TO START:

WHERE TO START:

Iron-framed furniture, as above

Living room furniture, including Sling Lounge Chair above

Thanks to VinceBravo.com for assistance in selecting our roster of masters Photography: courtesy Rico Tee Archives

C A M O D E R N 33

DEAR

CHERRY . . . America’s Queen of Modernism, Manners and Mirth!

Dear Cherry, My pictures of Thanksgiving always look flat and ugly. How can I capture the true essence of what we all will be experiencing this year?

–Feeling Like a Turkey in Thousand Oaks Dear T.O. Turkey, Okay. So you’re expecting this year’s holiday meal to be amazing, and you want to share pictures of it with friends and family on social media.

Some folks are lucky enough to have professional cameras that compensate for and correct poor pictures with advanced technology. But for the rest of us clicking away with our phones, these following tips might help.

If you are including people in your shots, try not to have them pose. Try to capture random fun moments just as someone cracks a joke; or as the mashed potatoes arrive at the table, and three sets of hands scramble to be the first to dish up.

If you are photographing food, try to take those pictures against a nice neutral background: wood, clean tablecloth, marble counter, etc.; and keep the plates neutral as well, so that your food really stands out.

Try to use natural lighting, if possible.

Artificial light, spotlighting, and camera flashes can be harsh and detract from your shots. If you really want to show off those yams, and there’s no sunlight streaming through a window into the dining room, consider taking your dish outside in the sun to truly capture the yams’ golden hue.

Also remember, the zoom on your camera is probably a digital zoom, so it may be better to relocate the camera closer or further away from your subject to get the exact composition you desire.

Also, the digital zoom may make your final shot grainy.

Thanks to digital photography, we never run out of film. So be sure to take lots of pictures. Then, when it’s time to share your snaps, please only select the best of the best to share. No one wants to see a dozen shots showing endless angles of grandma’s stuffing.

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Dear Cherry, What is the right way to set up a buffet? –Buffy in Burlingame Dear Buffy, For inspiration, I look to the tried-and-

over on their plate.

Put the ‘big ticket’ items at the end of the line. If there is an extra-special item, an expensive-to-make dish, or just something really good that you don’t have a lot of, put it at the far end of the

commercial TV. I have several of the ‘pay per view’ type services, but they don’t always offer the things I wish they’d watch. You got any bright ideas?

–Celia R. Dear Celia, Create your own viewing library of exactly what you’d like your children to watch by patronizing your local public library.

When children need to get away from home, they know that the library not only supplies great resources for school projects, it also offers a nice quiet neutral zone. It’s a place where no one is yelling

TRIED AND TRUE. Above left: Cherry Capri would give her ‘seal of appeal’ to this flashback buffet party. Above right: Cherry the movie hound hangs out at her local library. true authorities of buffet: the Las Vegas casinos!

Create a definite beginning and end to your buffet display. Start your line-up first with plates, and end with napkins and utensils. I have seen some parties put the plates and utensils in the same location—but guess what? It leaves some folks juggling too many things at one time. So, it’s best to put the forks, knives, and napkins at the far end of the line.

Put out smaller plates so that guests won’t fill up too much during the first go-around. It allows everyone to get started on a little something, and then they can always fill up on more during a second or third visit.

Smaller plates also cut down on waste. When people go small, they also tend to take less. As a result, when they discover an item they didn’t enjoy, they don’t have to feel badly when there’s only a small amount of uneaten food left

table. That way, by the time people get to it in the food line, they likely will have filled their plates with lots of other stuff, allowing everyone an opportunity to try your special dish.

At table’s end, try laying out your utensils wrapped in a napkin roll to make it easy for your guests to grab them with their free hand as they head off to eat.

Consider creating a layered effect by draping a tablecloth over various boxes to bring interesting height and depth to your buffet display.

And, please, include some kind of décor in your display. Fresh flowers, garlands, greenery, raw fruits and vegetables, whole spices—or whatever seems to fit with your food theme, looks attractive, and gets the salivary glands going.

Remember, we eat first with our eyes!

or making demands on them.

So go to the library with the family and let everyone pick out the video titles they think they’d enjoy. And you can also add in a couple of the old chestnuts you’d like to share with them.

Some adults forget—I know, of course, this does not include you—but soooome adults do forget that the library is such a glorious resource. And it’s not just for kids.

Most libraries now even have the ability to fill special requests. You can go online and search their expansive catalog (tied in to many libraries), and have them send titles you want to the library nearest you for pickup.

And if it’s a hot day, the air conditioning usually works just fine in libraries—making it a hot spot for a cool mid-day getaway.

So be a friend of the library!

Dear Cherry, I want to get my kids to stop watching

• For more Cherry, visit CherryCapri.com Photography: Taso Papadakis, Cherry Capri

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