Life is breezy in Edward Killingsworth’s model condominium

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

It’s been summer for seven weeks and Louis Gonzalez still hasn’t gone anywhere—but then if you had a Bluff Park ocean view, from the coolest condominium Killingsworth never built, neither would you.

Killingsworth is the late architect Edward Killingsworth. The architectural firm he helped create still calls Long Beach home today and his is probably the longest name on a short list of modernist architects who penned some of the city’s swingingest midcentury homes.

In 1959, 14 years before helping design our current civic center, Mr. K gave us tomorrow’s apartment today: the Marina Tower, a little 12-story, 150,000-square-foot condo complex on Ocean Boulevard. We’ll let Cara Mullio and Jennifer Volland tell it, in their excellent Long Beach Architecture: The Unexpected Metropolis.

“Priced from $57,000 to $76,000, the initial sales were weak,” the authors wrote in their 2004 book, which arrived the year Killingsworth left us. “Feedback from prospective buyers indicated that the apartments were too large and too costly.”

So it went the way of that one freeway they were going to build down Seventh Street—nowhere.

“It would have been a magical building,” Gonzalez says. “It was just out of their price range. And people weren’t ready for condominiums. Condominiums were an East Coast thing then. They were new.” A little too new, despite the added enhancements of something called a “convertible den,” and the Marina Sky Terrace, a rooftop lounge.

It was a lucky break for Gonzalez and partner Owen Powell, this house’s third owners. Orders were to tear down their three-bedroom, two-bathroom model house when enough units were pre-sold, so as to build the tower there and on the lot immediately east. Hard to believe people weren’t sold on this view.

“This summer, I haven’t gone anywhere. Usually we travel, but we haven’t had the June gloom this year. The weather’s been really nice,” Gonzalez says, as we sit in red vinyl-and-chrome chairs by one of the legion of 1950s-1970s designers the couple collects.

We admire the view and the house, as Gonzalez has done for much of his life.

“Ever since I saw this house 30 years ago, I fell in love with it,” he says as a breeze blows in past the open glass doors, through the square stucco columns that are fake here, but would have been made real to support the condo tower. Both men loved the house—and hated its drapes.

“Just layers of fluffy drapes. I think they were gold. The first thing we got rid of,” Gonzalez says. “And it had a shrub about seven feet tall in front. This house was hidden from view for many years. You couldn’t see the ocean. That was probably the second thing we got rid of.”

The couple also demoed about 17 ficus trees in the backyard (Powell is a landscape designer), replacing them with period-correct paving stones and peastone—and multiple seating areas: vintage steel patio furniture and a sleek mod outdoor sofa opposite a space-age fireplace.

Minus an unwanted bedroom addition, their house is roughly 2,400 square feet, but its location, and their tender renovation, focuses your attention outdoors and away from details—the original intention. In a way it’s a pity; the view of passing tankers distracts you from seeing the yellow-gold linen-and-bamboo fabric on one wall of the living room, or a pristine Danish modern wall unit: part entertainment center, part storage, part desk, all style.

You overlook the array of vintage Bertoia chairs and you almost don’t see the custom sky blue baby grand piano with a custom Lucite bench, legs and top that Gonzalez commissioned. The ocean breeze calls you.
“No air conditioning. Maybe one day a year it might get a little warm,” Gonzalez says. “But as soon as I open this door, you can feel the breeze in every room.”

Tags: Bluff Park, edward killingsworth, Long Beach, marina tower, Shelter