Lukens House Resurrected - Page 2
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Owners prior to Chapman "basically tore everything out of the house and stored junk in there," Chapman says. "They also lived in it, but there was no water, gas, or electricity for 20 years…Everyone thought the inside had burned, but basically they [the residents] just lit the fire in the fireplace, and the ceiling became black with soot."
"The whole property also became a church for a time," he says. "They had services there—[and] the basketball court had been turned into a parking lot."
To get the restoration underway, Chapman engaged Barry Milofsky of M2A Architects, and then went about restoring as much as they could, using four Soriano original house drawings that they obtained from Cal Poly Pomona, and, he says, tried to be "as carefully as possible to reproduce [elements] from pictures based on finding molding shapes that were still intact."
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"What we did change is that we opened up the whole back of the house," says Chapman. "Where the dining room is now was the kitchen originally; and where the kitchen is [now] was a bedroom. There had been so much termite damage…the city allowed me to open it up and relocate the kitchen to where it is now."
Another change was to the area that "was a hallway at the back of the house behind the kitchen, with a furnace and storage area, probably for him [Lukens] to wash out ceramics. That area was turned into a master bath."
After restoring the house, Chapman began studying the greenhouse, which had been sitting derelict for 30 years, all of its glass broken. "Another building had been added onto the back of it, a space for [Lukens'] kiln," he says.
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Chapman noticed that "all the lines of the greenhouse line up completely with the lines of the house. Soriano had sited the building to line up exactly. If you look at the greenhouse, it is a plinth with glass walls and a floating roof. He {Soriano] really used the vocabulary of that building to interpret through a modern lens and create something that would balance with that."
To appreciate this iconic home's architectural features, outdoor movie screening area, and landscaped gardens, take a virtual tour of the Lukens property here.
Backstory extra: Former owner Mike Chapman also tells this great story: "Glen Lukens had a student in his ceramics class who wasn't really good at ceramics. He could tell he was a good kid, and introduced him to architect Raphael Soriano. The moment he introduced him, that ‘good kid' decided to be an architect…He was [architect] Frank Gehry. Lukens liked Gehry so much, he paid for his first year of architecture school at USC…He was kind of the grandfather at USC."
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