DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
Issue link: https://www.southbaydiggs.com/i/226629
[ T H E W I L B U R C . P E A R C E H O U S E | F R A N K L LOY D W R I G H T ] When he's not at his job as an aerospace engineer in the South Bay, Pearce is putting painstaking work into restoring the home to the way he remembers it. "I have vivid memories of the house when it was less than 10 years old," Pearce recalls. "Everything was shiny and beautiful and new. My goal is to get the house back to where it matches my memories, and reverse the decades of life it's been through." Known as the Wilbur Pearce house, the home is named after Konrad Pearce's grandfather, an Akron, Ohio businessman who was transferred to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s while working for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. The Frank Lloyd Wright connection happened before the elder Pearce and his wife left Ohio. "My grandmother taught at an art school in Akron, and she contacted Frank Lloyd Wright to come lecture at the school," Pearce begins. "They corresponded, he came to give the lecture, and while he was there they discussed my grandparents' home in Akron, a modern-style house they put up for sale when my grandfather was transferred to LA." Wright told Pearce's grandmother that he was designing homes in California, and he asked her to write to him when she and her husband got settled. His reason for requesting a letter would be music to the ears of modernday Frank Lloyd Wright fans: "He said he would love to design a house for them," Pearce says. Designs for the house were drafted in 1950, but the home wasn't built until 1955. The curved shape of the residence's south-facing side has a functional as well as aesthetic purpose. "Wright used a term called solar hemicycle," explains Pearce. "The curved south face of house allows the sun to come in at the west end in the morning, and again at the east end in the evening." This double dose of sunlight heats the home's concrete slab. A radiant-floor heating system circulates the heat throughout the rest of the home's slab floor. Pearce notes that Wright's early use of passive solar heating is used in homes today. He adds, "Having a warm concrete floor is a really nice way to heat the bottom of your feet. It feels like a warm rock in the sun." Wright presented a number of drawings to Pearce's grandparents, each with a different configuration. The property sits on a ridge with spectacular vistas of the mountains to the north, yet one of the renditions showed a solid wall on the north side of the house. At the elder Pearce's request, Wright redrew the plan, raising the roof and adding clerestory windows to capture the mountain view. He also opened up some of the north-facing walls with floor-to-ceiling windows. "On some days, you can stand in the living room and see the mountains to the north, and then turn around and see Catalina to the south," Pearce describes. The magnificent views are what he enjoys most about the house. "You feel lots of openness, lots of light, and on days when there are clouds in the sky it's phenomenal. Even with a roof over your head you never feel enclosed or locked in—you feel as if you're part of the environment." [continued on page 97]