It’s harder to research your own house

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Uncovering your house’s history sounds easy when someone else is telling you about where they live, but it can take hours of deciphering old building permits and trade notices—and they don’t always tell the whole story.

I’ve been trying to learn about C. Waale, the man who built my house, almost since I bought it. It’s a 1928 bungalow that’s Federal-style on the outside (clapboard siding, columns supporting a tiny porch) but Mission-style inside, with wall niches, varnished wood built-ins and a mock fireplace in the living room.

So, a few years ago, I did a building permits search on microfiche at city hall (they’re open to the public). I met C. Waale—and discovered that while the paint was still drying on my house, he built the grandiose, 1928 Norman-style edifice across the street. It has twin turrets in front, faux stonework painstakingly stamped into the stucco, a Renaissance-style front door (with a round top)—and then, oddly, a Mid-Century modern garage with a sloping roof.

C. Waale must have been quite an architect, I thought—and then dropped the whole matter when I saw something shiny. I revisited it about two weeks ago, inspired by all the other homeowners I’ve met writing this feature. I finally met Darrell Ebert, who owns what I’ve always called the “castle house,” and he told me that C. Waale was actually a painter—despite building at least three houses in our area.

“He was an artist, and the upper story originally was designed as his studio,” says Ebert, who bought the place with a business partner in the early 1980s from Waale’s niece, who lived in Chino. (It came with one of Waale’s oil paintings.) “After he died, the wife went ahead and closed off the stairway and had a second kitchen added and made it into a duplex.”

Our one conversation answered years of questions—but who was C. Waale? A jack-of-all-trades, apparently. Ebert, who now owns the house outright and rents it, says the artist reportedly hand-cast the stately plaster shield over the front door himself, as well as the embossed stucco detailing inside. Waale also made two frescoes: one of the Venice canals in the living room; another of two swans, in the downstairs bathroom.

Then, Ebert says, in 1951 and 1952 Waale’s widow (or whomever owned the house then) had that modernist garage built and covered entirely in gunite—the new craze. Ebert says the house was featured in Sunset magazine, but I read through every 1951 Sunset magazine at the Los Angeles Central Library (plus the better part of a year of Southwest Builder and Contractor, a trade magazine that published building notices) and I couldn’t find mention of the garage—or confirm the 1928 build date for Ebert’s house. (That’s partly because the microfilm for the 1952 Sunset magazine was listed as “missing from the shelf.”)

My house was easier to background—’cause I own it. The Los Angeles County Tax Assessor in Signal Hill will only show you your building permits—and only if you own the place. Mine revealed that my house had tinted plaster inside (including a pink-and-blue bedroom, which my wife and I discovered recently when we chipped 80 years of paint off the ceiling) and “good” quality construction and tile work. That’s literally the option someone checked, 80 years ago. “Special” was the nicest quality—but my house isn’t “special.” It’s the next-best thing.

And that’s about all we know so far. Ebert says that C. Waale built my house for his sister, a “Mrs. Dick Austin,” according to the permits, and that he built another house down the street for his other sister. But who was Mrs. Dick Austin exactly, and what was C. Waale’s first name? Someday, maybe we’ll be able to answer those questions—but not yet.

Tags: c. waale, houses, Long Beach, Shelter