Part Estates history, through the ample windows of an early modern house

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

“This was the dog on the block when we got it—avocado green and all overgrown,” says homeowner Sandra Allen, as we tour the sprawling circa-1949 ranch house she and husband Tim bought eight years ago. It’s hard to believe; their 2,000-square-foot stucco manse commands the block now—something you wouldn’t normally say about a midcentury modern ranch house.

The 1950s were all about family, and architects complicitly collaborated—centering their houses around the back yard and making entrances as oblique and off-putting as possible. Their message seemed to be “Go away, we’re home.”

Not at this place. Its gaping picture windows look right out onto their corner of a quiet little dead-end street, giving it—and the house on the facing corner—a real presence. But that’s how architect R.L. Poplar must have wanted it back on May 12, 1949—the date on the blueprints of the house he built for Mr. & Mrs. B.A. Carey.

This house, which was built for the Careys, was one of the very first in Park Estates—first was supposedly the place that famous architect Paul Revere Williams designed for the area’s developer, Lloyd Whaley. That may be why the Carey house seems to watch over the subdivision, which in 1949 was still becoming a neighborhood one lot at a time.

The Careys didn’t own this house long. They sold it after not many years, to an Admiral and Mrs. Garrison—a couple who’d traveled the world and decorated accordingly, with exotic imports. The Admiral built a Japanese tea house in the back yard, and when he was home, they entertained. It’s easy to see their little spur of a street filled with formally dressed merrymakers.

The Garrisons owned this house until the Allens bought it from their heirs—but today their Eastern antiques have been replaced by some genuine midcentury American furniture.

The Allens and their progeny, ages 6-13, lounge on two low-slung, low-backed amoeba-like sofas that resemble friendly life forms. For spillover, there’s a wire Bertoia chair, the latest word in modern seating from 1952. Sandra Allen paints; outside, she’s transformed a set of Ikea ’60s modern chairs, and inside her Pop Art canvases are a bright counterpoint to the room’s serious brown walls, brick fireplace and white sliding doors. The doors are another key to this house’s introverted ’50s design.

Enter the living room, and you’re looking right through the doors into the back yard; this house literally embraces it. The three bedrooms, two baths—even the garage—were designed to encircle the yard and its original, gnarled pine tree. The Allens have added some sensitive modifications to enhance that, including a deck—and they’ve replaced the large picture windows that overlooked the back yard with the sliding doors. It’s a change that R.L. Poplar might have wished he thought of, but then so is what happened to the drying yard.

What’s a drying yard? In 1949, many people didn’t yet have clothes dryers—and so, socked in between the detached garage and the kitchen (which still ends in a beautiful oaken threshold) R.L. Poplar added room for a clothesline. The Garrisons had that area tastefully enclosed—added on, in effect—and now it’s a sunken sitting room right off the kitchen, with a view of the back yard.

It makes you wonder what this house meant to the Admiral, a man of the world. His world map still hangs in the garage, in the darkroom he built. Dotted with push-pins and criss-crossed by colored thread marking his journeys, it bears a typewritten quote: “Not to have any place you want to go is the cruelest fate of all.”

In the hands of its current owners, the Admiral’s house is itself a destination.

Tags: 1950s, architecture, home design, Long Beach, midcentury modern, park estates