House History

And a link to a 12 minute video about the history of the house:

https://youtu.be/g_u-2JBpQeQ

SUMMARY of VIDEO

Arthur Roland Kelly was a prolific Los Angeles architect who designed more than 500 buildings during a career that spanned roughly 50 years. Born in Iowa, Kelly graduated from the University of Illinois and moved to California in 1902. After a brief period working with the architectural firm Greene and Greene, he established his own practice. During the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in association with architect Joe Estep, and later with his son, architect Joseph Kelly, until his death in 1959. Among the architects who apprenticed with Kelly early in their careers was Paul Revere Williams, FAIA, who would go on to become one of Los Angeles's most distinguished architects and the first African American architect to be elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Around 1925, Kelly designed and built a home for himself in Alta Canyada, now La Cañada Flintridge. The house was featured in sales brochures for the Alta Canyada Suburban Estates development, and documentation from the Assessor's Office confirms its early history. No original building permit exists because the house predates the issuance of building permits in the area. During this period, Kelly worked on a number of projects with contractor Walter Burch of Bavin and Burch. Their most notable collaboration was the Westlake School for Girls, now Harvard-Westlake School, completed in 1927.

The connection between Kelly and the Burch family took an extraordinary turn many years later. The owners of Kelly's former home were Michael Burch and his wife, Diane Wilk, both architects. Michael was Walter Burch's grandson. When Michael and Diane began restoring the house, they were unaware that it had been Kelly's personal residence. They discovered the connection through their research into the history of the property. Several years later, Kelly's grandson, while going through his grandfather's architectural archive, discovered correspondence between Arthur Kelly and Walter Burch. He stopped by to share the material with Michael, revealing another remarkable connection: Kelly had also designed the Hancock Park house in which Michael's father had grown up.

This came as a considerable revelation. Michael's grandfather had died long before Michael was born, and the architect of the family home had never been identified. It had generally been assumed that Michael's grandfather had both designed and built the house himself. The discovery that Arthur Kelly was actually the architect connected the two families and two houses in an unexpected way, linking the home Michael and Diane had purchased with the home in which his father had been raised.

When Michael and Diane purchased Kelly's former home, the house was largely intact but required extensive restoration. The first phase of the project concentrated on necessary repairs and rehabilitation, including replacing the plumbing and seismically retrofitting the structure. Later modifications from the 1960s, particularly in the kitchen, were sensitively removed, and the original finishes were restored. The completed restoration brought the house back to a condition much closer to Kelly's original design.

Then Michael and Diane had triplets. The beautifully restored house was suddenly too small for their growing family. Rather than move, they undertook a major addition that approximately doubled the size of the original house. The original footprint is shown in pink, while the addition is shown in yellow. Although the project doubled the square footage, the work was carefully designed to comply with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic Properties.

A fundamental principle of the Standards is that new construction should be compatible with the historic building while remaining clearly distinguishable from it. The addition accomplishes this through differences in both elevation and materials. The new portion of the house is approximately one foot lower than the original structure, and the flooring changes from the original materials to tile. The ceilings are also differentiated. The addition incorporates vaulted ceilings and heavy timber, while the original rooms retain their more decorative stenciled beams and plaster ceilings. In this way, the addition feels compatible with the historic house without attempting to imitate it.

The house's historic significance was eventually recognized by the City of La Cañada Flintridge. At the time of the restoration, the city did not yet have a Mills Act program. Michael and Diane advocated for the establishment of Mills Act protections in the city, and through their efforts La Cañada Flintridge subsequently established a program allowing qualified historic properties to receive Mills Act protection. Kelly's former home was designated as a historic structure and was able to receive Mills Act protection.

The photographs that follow show the house as it appeared when Michael and Diane purchased it and after the restoration and addition. The remainder of the presentation will examine the transformation of the house through before-and-after images, concluding with an examination of how the restoration and sympathetic addition, despite doubling the size of the original structure, adhere to the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation.