Turning the clock back 40 years on a Bluff Heights condominium

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Radios, ashtrays, vacuums, cabi-nets—everything looks fast in Long Beach Heritage president-elect John Thomas’s Bluff Heights home, which he had gutted three years ago and transformed from 1970s condo to 1930s-era Art Deco apartment. A photograph his partner J. Christopher Launi took of a small 1935 tile mural at Long Beach Polytechnic High School may sum it up best.

“Speed is the greatest factor in modern life,” reads a line in the mural, which depicts the Greco-Roman messenger god Mercury (or Hermes) overlooking an airplane and two streamlined trains. But speed is just one of the principles that defined Art Deco when the decorative style debuted at the 1925 Paris Exposition.

“Basically it was saying ‘Victorian and Art Nouveau [styles] need to get out of the way,’ and ‘Let’s make things look like they’re moving when they’re standing still,’” says Thomas, who discovered Art Deco during a sixth-grade field trip to the Queen Mary.

In an effort to create something jazzier than the staid styles still in vogue in America, European designers borrowed and simplified design elements from nature and transportation—and Egyptian motifs from King Tut’s tomb, recently discovered—to make a sleek look that could be organic and geometric simultaneously.

And so, while Thomas says every room here has a different theme, their furnishings share details like the stair-step “skyscraper” design found in his radios and clocks and the circular sweep of two round wooden “keyhole” cabinets (one with Egyptian-style sun rays carved in its doors).

On mirrors, toasters, clocks and elsewhere is the stripped-down figure of a leaping gazelle. Thomas ascribes this to women’s influence on Art Deco.

“It was a perfect storm in the world of architecture changing, women’s rights increasing, and women having a say in the design area,” he says.

His collection—everything from Queen Mary artifacts to Fortune magazines to dishes to clocks—demands your attention, but slowly your eyes look beyond to see the rooms which house it.

In the bathrooms, retro Kohler sinks and toilets perfectly complement black-and-teal and pinkish color schemes, inspired by the colors in antique mirrors. Thomas kept the original tub in one bathroom, but replaced the fiberglass shower stall above with zig-zag tiling. One medicine cabinet is American—with streamlined florescent fixtures—but the other is a three-part affair from Italy.

And in the kitchen, Hoosier-inspired cabinetry is a family affair.

“My grandmother had a kitchen like this that was green and yellow,” Thomas says. And so, while the electric stove and dishwasher had to stay, everything else is a tasteful riot of color—plus vintage Bakelite or plastic drawer pulls, and the blinding silver of chrome toasters, antique aluminum cookware, even recipe books.

Wood-framed club chairs and sofas in dark organic colors and curvy side-tables define the living room—plus a chrome serving cart with a gorgeous array of Jazz Age barware. The master bedroom boasts an original, Art Deco bedroom set from Sears, Roebuck and Co.—dresser, vanity, and double bed—that’s an estate sale find from Palos Verdes.

“The lady was moving into assisted living. We were fortunate to get it,” Thomas says. “She said it was a gift from her parents when she turned 16, and she was 87 then.” It’s a little feminine for him, he adds, but too nice to pass up. His collection of wind-up tin toys—including a miniature railroad with tiny trains which run in concentric circles—more than compensates.

“I’m just a big dumb kid at heart,” Thomas says. Maybe so—but he knows Art Deco.

JOHN THOMAS AND J. CHRISTOPHER LAUNI DISCUSS AND SIGN COPIES OF “LONG BEACH ART DECO” (WHICH THEY CO-AUTHORED WITH SUZANNE TARBELL COOPER) SASHA’S LIVING WITH STYLE | 3237 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90803 | SAT 6PM | RSVP BY JULY 9 TO 562.987.3784

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