Why are people shredding old midcentury homes? I think I know; a look at EARTHSONG
Why are people shredding old midcentury homes? I think I know; a look at EARTHSONG
Chris Pratt content
Howdy y’all.
Caught this TikTok video:
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about a great old house destroyed by a remodel. Worth watching. The video is by Quinn Garvey (IG, Tik), a 27 year old director of photography and magazine collector in LA who covers estate sales and archival mags on her socials. The vid is an exhaustive, great look at an overhaul and destruction of a tasteful and beautiful midcentury modern house. The house was built by Chase Revel, not a celebrated architect but a talented one (and also a bank robber… according to court documents…), in 1959… and its design responds to the Case Study houses and other major works from around then, but is not too in thrall to them: there are proto-hippie elements in there, and lots of wood paneling and dark hues throughout. It’s more… like a den or Swiss countryside (and LA) than the prominent MCM homes of LA that we know at first blush. Light… but not light light. There are a lot of idiosyncratic decisions in the house that worked so well, Garvey goes through them… here is my fav pic from before the remodel, sent to me by Garvey:
A TikToker (Bella Poarch) bought it after its owner died, two winters ago, and now she is selling it. (Quinn found a poster from the owner’s 85th birthday party, it describes him as an “MIT Engineer, desert rat, titanium aficionado, casino owner, philatelic specialist, Grand Canyon master, cobra pilot, femme charmer, think tank thinker, technical paper editor, classical music lover, and watch winder;” obit here.) In the interim Poarch (well, her decorator) reworked its interiors to denigrating effect, as Garvey’s video describes in fine detail. It’s been listed now for $5m (she bought it 4.3) and this is what it looks like now:
Disgrace. Most traces of the original design are now only really found in Garvey’s post (and Revel’s book), and I reached out to her, and she’s sent over photos, more of which are at the bottom, and has opinions about the house. In short, the interiors have changed for the worse. Among the incivilities:
tearing out the perfect kitchen above for this thing:
Note that the island here is not even. They removed the onyx countertops and made the whole thing grey.
White bedroom (just bad)
destroying a tiled sunken bathtub for a lame oversized shower in neutral colors, keeping the stained glass. Says Garvey: “The primary bathroom just feels cruel. The tile in the original was stunning. The remodel comes off as such a diluted version of what was. I loved the dark wood and the plants that framed the stained glass window. The insistence to lighten that space up with white countertops, light wood, and brass fixtures leaves a sterile environment.”
Getting rid of a beautiful (or at least dope) circular sofa (looks like Baughman for Coggin to me) for a white staging sofa, facing the wrong way….
Updated the bar in the tearoom, despite leaving the entire tearoom alone (deranged… attended to in detail in the video)
Throughout the hut features a pretty conservative and limp overhaul, and furniture that is either ugly, uninteresting or is just not at all harmonious with the specifics of the house, depending how charitable one feels. The lighting is also not very good. It is worth noting that the garden was unchanged and remains pretty special.
Garvey has been posting previews for Handled, an estate sales company in LA, and covered Revel’s house and estate when it was up in January 2023. Here is the video she shot then, which gives more insight on him and the house in its original state:
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It was one of those old beautiful Palisades houses hiding in plain sight. She offers the following:
Earthsong was one of those rare homes that until now no one had ruined with a modern bathroom or some fake Scandinavian-style open concept kitchen. It was so specific and the assumption was it would go to a very specific buyer. Which is what I’m so up in arms about: This remodel took character out of the home, and left a confusing hybrid. It doesn’t feel like it translates anymore. Oftentimes real estate agents will have the interiors of a home painted in a fresh coat of white before it’s listed so potential buyers can see themselves living in the space. It feels like this home endured a really sad version of that…except they left the very specific exterior: the gardens, the tea house… I’m not sure who they think is going to resonate with this bizarre concoction of old and painstakingly new.
Garvey’s social accounts are good and worth a follow (I signed up for TikTok today in fact to check out her stuff), and the work she did exposing the house’s details, the very specific taste here… is excellent, and contributes greatly to the design conversation. It is nice and granular, easy to follow and has a point of view. Again, great.
As for the view from here… I don’t have a big, visceral reaction to this remodel, though the more I watch it, the less I like. The subtext to a lot of these videos, and much of this content—like Chris Pratt and Schwarzenegger’s kid destroying Craig Ellwood’s Zimmerman house (a major one) in Brentwood; complete disgrace, he should be caned—is “can you believe this?,”—can you believe another set of people bought another unique house and then went against it in the worst possible way? I can believe it and don’t share the surprise for a few reasons. One, living in New York, you don’t really see anyone’s home, and so many important architectural icons are on the clock to get destroyed to begin with—they shut down Billymark’s West just the other week; or just read about the original Penn Station—that it’s just part of daily life. But it’s indeed awful. It’s offensive… dumb... lazy.
But it’s not insulting or surprising. This is what happens to beautiful buildings. These tasteless, misguided (but consistent) interior do-overs happen every day, and have been happening—since forever, which is why buildings get protected… It’s eternal, and part of how property works, and I try to be positive with this newsletter—lots of bad design out there, I try to veer away from it—and so it’s not worth it karmically to cover this beat.
But sometimes you gotta weigh in. It certainly isn’t worth ignoring, and it’s definitely something. It’s a real thing that begs lots of questions. Why do these exact redesigns happen so consistently? Who does these things? Do they know it’s bad? Is there anything good to say about these overhauls?
I think these bad do-overs happen primarily because of money. Not much of an explanation. But money trumps everything, and it really, really trumps good-looking furniture or design. Even if you really like good-looking furniture, money is always more important. Especially to someone with lots of money. You need to remember that. Says Garvey: “The Chris Pratt debacle is the result of wealthy people loving the idea of maxing out square footage… and collecting properties to have a conglomerate in a neighborhood. They bought that Ellwood and immediately demoed it so they could be closer to his mother in law across the street. That one really hurt. I shot the estate sale of that home, and bought a coffee table there that I’m still using today. That home was in phenomenal condition.”
It goes back to housing as an investment. Speaking very macro, property, since the 1980s, has far eclipsed wages. By far. Maybe not for a movie star, but for everyone else. And that—and leverage—define our economy now. This makes design important, but downstream, and in a narrower context than we think. Furniture must reflect… the investment value a house has. For these types of houses, the design’s aesthetic purpose is not as important as the… transactional purpose. What does this mean? Staging furniture.
We all know what staging is: A house can be staged (redecorated, cleaned, set up with furniture, etc) in a way so that it sells for more money. In fact that’s what staging actually does. (Which is impressive.) Staging furniture, these days tends to be white, boring, minimal, clean, the same aesthetic that gets in the crosshairs of literary magazines when they critique design, but which doesn’t get in the way of the nuts and bolts of a house: it shows off the square footage, and is kinda quiet. (It also costs money; the WSJ story gets into it in pretty good detail.) Practically speaking, it’s not a bad idea to put this Godless and boring furniture in your hut if you want to sell it for a little bit more: a plain, simple white couch is, these days, still preferred by people with nice houses—like, I don’t know, the Kardashians. And it also doesn’t look old, or lived-in, and doesn’t distract, like some obscure sofa or lamp that doesn’t look brand new might. To be sure, it doesn’t do anything for people who just want the house’s lot.
These specific-looking staging furniture—and these types of remodels—are conservative by nature. They make one house look like another house, and they change a home’s interior from a statement by its architect or builder (or previous owner) into, first and foremost, a clarion that it’s a tradable asset. That’s it. Going deeper, this plain, white, dull aesthetic is subservient: to the architecture—it doesn’t outshine it—and to the square footage, and to the idea of character in a houser to begin with. (I also should be fair: Plain white furniture only looks like shit now; it didn’t look bad the first time we saw it.)
And the reason we feel like we see it so often and everywhere is because houses are much more fluid financial instruments now, and so any house that’s more for sale than it is beautiful has this kind of garbage decoration in there. And who can blame these owners? Not all houses sell right away, and houses aren’t fungible assets… but I don’t know, if you’re rich enough, they are. That’s how I see it. So more houses are for sale, and are for sale more often, and since uniform/new staging furniture is the best way to sell a house on the percentages, we are here. The aesthetic is liquidity. Maybe you just keep the staging furniture there, or do a remodel based on that look.
Which feels like what happened. The occam’s razor explanation is that if you get the “good” staging furniture to begin with you kill two birds with one stone.
Aesthetically it creates a cycle of uniformity. With the “right” furniture, a home sells for more money. And selling a home is the only real way to make money. Homes are investments, homes stay staged—in the photos we see—and seem to eternally be for sale. And so taste, downstream, has oozed and devolved to a reality in which many think staging furniture is actual furniture. And while there is better furniture out there, definitely, buying it signifies, to me anyways, that you are living in your home and not flipping it.
As for the how of the Earthsong redesign… well, I blame the devil. In reality, Poarch, the third-most followed individual on TikTok, is a young, busy person... and the Occam’s razor explanation is she is near-definitely hired someone to re-design her crib. And that person did a rough job.
The sad thing is, there are not many other options for the designer. The morally right thing would be not to put that kitchen island in there. But not every client request is morally right. And so this is the pressure point. If the designer leaves the great furniture there as is, the correct aesthetic decision, they don’t get paid. That’s not to say the house—the one Garvey covered in 2023—could not be improved. I can think of a couple ways. But they’re high risk. I do some interiors (get in touch if you’re interested) and if I was hired to do this one I wouldn’t change much. When you buy a house in the 10 figures, though, you want to make it your own. It’s an education issue, I think.
The bright side here is the joke is on anyone who moves into the place now. And that the design inside lasted 50-plus years, which is a nice win for beauty in general. Things change. What can you do? There doubtlessly are ways sellers can stage houses that appeal to wealthy consumers and don’t sacrifice restraint and taste, while still highlighting “light” and the footage in some way, but we haven’t seen much of that. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this.
Says Garvey:
The brutal remodels will persist in L.A… at other open houses I’ve been to, I can see the gears turning: People imagining the quick reno; coming in, adding a waterfall edge countertop, jacking up the price, and flinging it onto the market.Whereas I’ve seen the home will sit for quite some time.
More often than not, the homes I see at estate sales are heavily renovated or just demolished. They typically are untouched time capsules people love walking through, but which don’t stand a chance because of what the plot of land is worth, or because the homeowners lived there for a million years and it might be a little dilapidated. I don’t believe this was the case for Earthsong, it was poor judgement and horrible taste.
She’s right.
More pics of the before:
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Thanks for reading.
Snake
OH SHIT WE WERE AT THAT ESTATE SALE IT WAS A F*CKING GEM!
well, now i'm also gutted.