South Westgate

286 South Westgate Ave. was a heaven to grow up in. I was three when we moved there in 1969. I got my own room with a skylight, a built-in desk and matching twin beds. My brother was next door, with a Jack & Jill bathroom between us. The house seemed to push out in all directions like an erector set. It looked to me more like the space stations that were then emerging in our cinematic consciousness than a house. 

While I had no idea what a unique, carefully thought-out house I was moving into, I could feel the excitement of my parents— to be able to design and build a family home for themselves in their early thirties. The fact that it all came together was a concerted effort; but it began with my mother. My mother’s last grandparent had just passed away, and with her small inheritance of eighteen-thousand dollars, my parents could afford to pay Cathy Koenig, an artist with a long, silver hair braid down her back, for a slice of her goat-inhabited, sloping hillside tucked in beside a long driveway in a neighborhood of West Los Angeles. My father designed the house, a contractor and small crew worked on it, and three years later it was ours. The shared spaces of the house were vast, almost holy. Our living room was three floors high, with a view of the canyon and the tops of eucalyptus trees that seemed to watch our every move. I loved the sunny kitchen, the cool earthen tile floors, the built-in nooks, bookcases and sitting areas. I loved the sliding glass doors that led us out and onto the switchback pathways that ran down into the wild ivy nasturtium-scattered land below, then up to a field that was ours to roam. 

The house drew people to it. Every Christmas, neighbors and friends flocked to the cantilevered decks that overlooked the gully to talk and drink my father’s frothy rendition of eggnog, and to eat from a spread of deli food and New Orleans oysters. By the time I was a teenager, I came to love the privacy the house allowed my brother and me. With our own reaching wing, we could retreat and sink back into the world of our imagination. We could be creative, or just rest uninterrupted—possibly what my father yearned for in the small post WWII cottage he grew up in. Recently, when I asked him what he liked most about 286 Westgate, he said that it was a successful piece of sculpture, the way it revealed patterns of light and shadow. Now that he’s helping the most recent owners update and renovate the house, he was pleased with how well it was designed. As I watched him amble back into his home office to work on his on-going projects, I thought it must be gratifying to know you put something so beautiful into the world that over fifty years later, it still has the power to bring joy and solace. 

— Anne-Marie Martin