Dang, What A Cool House: The Knollwood Victorian

In the early days of this blog, I made it one of my first missions to go to this house, take pictures, knock on the door, and drop off my business card, asking for an interview. No dice; I never heard back.

Apparently, ApartmentTherapy.com had no better luck than I did -- but they do take nicer photos. Writer Gregory Han, a Valley native, had this to say of the house in its Granada Hills context: "like Paris Hilton at an Amish gathering, it was obvious one person had something completely different in mind."

Apartment Therapy's sources said of the homeowner, "his neighbors began converting their post war 1950's single story home into a Victorian 'eyesore' over the years because his wife had always dreamt of living in one as a child. So the husband spent years converting and adding architectural elements, initially all by himself."

Read the full article here.

Comments

  1. Kim ThompsonApril 11, 2011 at 9:22 AM

    Funny you should write about this. I definitely missed your first article about it and ironically, Jim Summers from GHSNC and also a local realtor, took me for a ride in his awesome Jaguar last week and he stopped at a house he is getting ready to list in the Knollwood area. When we passed that house, he stopped the car and asked me to take a few pictures of it because he loved it. So I did but I was kind of embarrassed because the owners of the house are my very good friends and one of them sits on my NC Board.

    I will tell her that you couldn't get a hold of her. I'm going to speak to her later today on another issue anyway...

    That has always been my son's favorite house.

    You can only imagine the great fun personalities of the people who live there.

    So pshaw to ApartmentTherapy for calling it an eyesore!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Archive: Master of Pirates

Image
Mike Spasoff is a tireless servant to this community -- at least for a few months out of the year -- and that's good enough for me. It's also more than good enough for the 600 trick-or-treaters he delights and terrifies with the elaborate, Disney-rivaling, pirate-themed yard display at his house on San Fernando Mission Boulevard (near Shoshone). When I was a kid, I used to always wish someone in the neighborhood would do something beyond carving a pumpkin. Fortunately, kids in Mike's neighborhood will never have to cope with that same unfulfilled sense of longing that I always had. What makes you want to invest the time, money, and resources into such an elaborate production? I can remember the magic of walking the streets of our neighborhood each Halloween and the excitement of finding a house that did something more than just a jack-o-lantern or a cardboard skeleton. My parents and I always made a special effort to do something extra but it wasn't until we moved to
Read more

Thoughts on Joe's Cafe and cancel culture

On June 1, 2020, the date when people planned to gather in Granada Hills to protest George Floyd's killing, fearful rumors began flying early. The protest was certain to be violent. The claims that it was planned as a "peaceful" protest was certain to be cover for looters. Some started spreading the rumor that "the organizers have cancelled the event," presumably with the hope of making that come true.  I spent that afternoon trying to debunk the myths that seemed designed to suppress the event from happening. Myth debunking has, at times during 2020, seemed like a full-time job for me, starting with my pointless and overmatched efforts to argue with "the pandemic is a liberal hoax" theorists. I still find it difficult to believe that my pleas for evidence-based reasoning would so often be dismissed as radical.  Yet I stubbornly cling to my insistence that without evidence to support them, beliefs are worthless.  On social media, I pled with fear-sprea
Read more

Even XXX Stars Need TLC

Image
"I've never watched a pornographic movie in my life," says Bobi, genial lab tech at the modest, quiet office of AIM Health Care on shady White Oak Avenue. When I press her, incredulous that someone who works in a health care office that caters to the needs of adult film actors has never been exposed to that industry's primary product, she sticks by her story. "They did have one on at my bachelorette party, but I didn't really look at it, and now you couldn't pay me to watch one. I know everyone in the industry, and it would almost be like watching a video of my kids having sex. I wouldn't want to do that." When she puts it that way, it makes sense. Bobi tells me that some clients of the clinic even refer to her as "Mom," and when I overhear her soothing a nervous patient on the phone ("Don't worry honey; chlamydia is a bacterial infection and it can be cured with medicines") I understand why. It's actually rathe
Read more