Architectural Record 2015-04

114
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD APRIL 2015 BUILDING TYPE STUDY RECORD HOUSES
the garage into a huge kitchen. We would have none of that.”
Given the property’s cultural and historic status, the
city’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR) also had a say in its
modification. “We needed to consider what was extant and
could be preserved, and what could be restored or replaced
in kind,” says Lambert Geissinger, historic-preservation
architect at the OHR, which adheres to the Secretary of the
Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. “For a single-family
residence that’s still a home, not a house museum, we have
some flexibility in balancing the preservation of historic
character with accommodating upgrades, or the ways people
live now.” Among the elements OHR sought to preserve were
the building exterior, including its flat, uninterrupted rooflines;
the original window frames; and interior cork surfaces.
O’Herlihy, who’d renovated two Neutra houses, had the
advantage of having visited Shulman, then in his 90s,
when he lived here. By that point, exuberantly wild grounds,
dubbed “Julius’s jungle” by its owner, had long since subsumed
Eckbo’s gardens (which McKee recalls as “beautiful,
but too perfect” for her father). In tandem with O’Herlihy’s
renovation, landscape architect Mia Lehrer tamed the setting
without reinstating the original design, for which no known
documentation exists.