Once upon a time, there was a cream-colored French provincial house.
It rose majestically from a knoll just down the street from the town hall in Los Altos Hills, which is situated on a bluff overlooking Silicon Valley. Built in 1926, the Winbigler house was listed as one of 31 historic properties the town hoped to safeguard.
Then, one day, it was gone. New property owners, who had said they would incorporate the old house into a new design, instead salvaged some architectural pieces and demolished the rest.
It’s a tale for our times: As new money replaces old, historic properties increasingly face the twin dragons of neglect and renovation. The situation has been particularly acute in Los Altos Hills, where newly minted millionaires see the 1-acre minimum for lots and the woodsy wildness of the hilly terrain as ideal settings for some discreet grandiosity.
“You can’t tell the story of our country without talking about historic landmarks,” said Michael Crowe, national historic landmark program coordinator. “Yet there is no funding for people to maintain these.”
Despite almost 37 years of national preservation efforts, the health of historic properties depends almost entirely on the intentions of their owners and the communities where they are. The rights of property owners take precedence unless a city specifically protects a historic area or certain historic properties. There is no significant protection even if a property is placed on the national or state registers of historic places.
The fates of the Winbigler house, the Shumate House, Morgan Manor and the Griffin House show the wide disparity in what can happen — even in a town like Los Altos Hills, which last year elected a pro-preservation slate to the council.
Townspeople were shocked by the demolition of the Winbigler house in August 2002. It was not so much that the house had a historic pedigree as that it had become almost the Lone Cypress of Los Altos Hills — a landmark recognized by everyone.
The town fined Gordon Campbell and Maria Ligeti $27,000 and halted their work, saying they had violated the construction agreement that allowed them to exceed the town’s height limit in return for keeping the old structure.
The couple then sued the town and council, among others, saying their intention to demolish the house was implicit in their application for a building permit, which the town had approved. None of the principals would comment.
When an ambitious rehabilitation began at Morgan Manor, a massive 1914 Elizabethan-style house filled with European design treasures from the Renaissance and Jacobean periods, the town told the owner he would have to pay for an architect versed in historic properties to monitor his work.
Kelly and Christina Porter bought the property on Stonebrook Court in 1999 for something less than the list price of $7 million. The Porters knew they had bought a fixer-upper but, as with more modest projects, the full extent of the work ahead was not immediately apparent.
The foundation, which looked fine from a distance, had giant holes that had been swathed with duct tape, spackled and plastered to look like the real thing. Wallpaper was peeling off in archaeological layers; the oak floors were pocked with water stains; bird droppings coated smashed windows.
The house had had several owners since Percy T. Morgan killed himself in the living room in 1920. A financier and banker, Morgan began building the house after his doctor prescribed a European vacation for Morgan’s workaholism. Morgan began collecting architectural pieces in Europe, then returned home and had the mansion built to house them — very similar to what William Randolph Hearst was doing at San Simeon on the California coastline south of San Francisco.
The Porters are not merely bringing the old house back to life but are transforming it into a home for a 21st-Century family. Some of the corridors and rooms were small and dark, so the Porters fashioned new, period-correct windows and took down some walls. They have built a family room and terrace behind the house’s enormous kitchen.
The couple have been careful to introduce antique architectural elements to the changed spaces so the house retains the historic feel they fell in love with. One of Porter’s proud finds was an artisan from the Czech Republic trained in making molded plaster ceilings. For the family room, Batbajar Gongorzav designed an intricate checkerboard of ornate squares and — adding a touch of whimsy — fashioned several squares showing the couple’s children as mythical animals.
“We’re fixing it for the next 100 years,” said Christina Porter, who has directed most of the interior work.
The three-year revamp of the 1915 Shumate House on Viscaino Road in Los Altos was more reconstruction than restoration.
Lisa Puri, the architect-owner, said the house was in such disrepair that many exterior elements could not be salvaged. The best she could do, in many cases, was to replace rotted elements with copies of what was there originally. In other cases, she had to rebuild entire structures, such as the guest cottage, in the spirit of the architecture because there was not enough left of the original structure to copy it.
Puri spent two years in a townhouse with her husband, Jay, and two sons before the site was repaired enough for them to move onto the grounds. The home now looks like a vintage Italianate villa.
Much of the living room and dining room retain the original redwood paneling. The library has mahogany bookshelves and hand-painted silk wallpaper.
“It was a labor of love,” she said, echoing the Porters’ feelings about their home.
Officials at Foothill Community College in Los Altos believe the Griffin House, which the college bought in 1959, is probably beyond salvation.
A crude beam props up one corner of the porch roof. Many of the cedar shingles that distinguish the California shingle-style house snap off in pieces from dry rot.
Inside, the walls have been stripped of almost all their redwood paneling. Plaster has fallen off between large ceiling beams. A bat flies up the stairs to the shell of a second floor.
The large windows that encircled most of the home once provided Willard M. Griffin, a founder of what became Del Monte Co., a view of the pastoral beauty of his 98 acres of orchards and fields.
The college occupies most of that land now.
A longtime community effort to save the house collapsed in the 1970s. Now, the college estimates it would take $4 million to restore the house.
“We just haven’t been able to garner any support,” said Bernadine Chuck Fong, college president, “and, of course, it’s not our mission as a college to restore old homes.”
Crowe, the preservation director, has heard that before. “That sends a strange message to their students, that we don’t value our cultural resources. But you should,” he said.
Los Altos Hills council member Dean Warshawsky, who with Breene Kerr was elected partly on his preservation stance, said the issue came up again and again when he was campaigning.
“People really have a hunger for the historic aspects of our town,” he said.
“They want to see that personality survive.”
Council member Kerr believes such historic properties are priceless.
“Experiencing a building that was built long before you were born kind of puts things into perspective,” he said.
“In a community where we are constantly trying to come up with the next big thing, that’s valuable.”
