It Came in Through the Window:
Upgrading a Belmont Heights Spanish Revival
Mark Estrada's interest in Long Beach history begins inauspiciously, just over Orange County's eastern foothills in Rowland Heights. It was the 1960s, and developers were just beginning to harvest a bumper crop of same-looking tract homes from LA and Orange County farmland. He went to work for a lumber company in Corona, a city where "Spanish Revival" means a suburban tract home with an arch out front and a Taco Bell up the street. That lumber company moved him to Long Beach where, within a short time, Estrada went on to manage the Signal Hill Home Depot.
Then his story bends time, sort of. Estrada went to work at a B & B Hardware store (the one at Redondo and Fourth), where, he says, "I was exposed to the significance of Long Beach's historical homes."
B & B specializes in vintage hardware—doorknobs, windows, sinks, porcelain fixtures and more. (His current favorite: a 100-year-old Craftsman door.) Working there, he says, has "really awakened a passion in me to restore these places to their former glory."
Estrada says this during a conversation about one of those homes, a Belmont Heights Spanish Revival.
Estrada likes the high, coved ceilings typical of the Spanish Revival. He's seen some around Long Beach where the open beams are like rings on trees, each generation of homeowners leaving its autobiography in some detail of the woodwork, even "delicate, filigreed carvings."
The Belmont Heights home in question, built in 1926, belongs to John and Mareen Rossbach, a computer guy and a sales executive with the same Fortune 100 firm. They're determined to maintain the look and feel of a house closing in on its centennial while making some important upgrades—starting with the windows. "Living near the beach here, the old wood ones were just rotting away," says John.
Finding replacements was a challenge: The originals were very cool swing-out French casement windows—think French doors made of glass and wood, but (here's the key) without a center mull. When both sides of the 5-by-4-foot window were open, the Rossbach's had more than lots of air and a great view: it's how they got furniture and appliances into their home. "We've got this weird little jog in our entryway, so the windows were really the only way to get big stuff in and out of the house."
The couple asked Estrada for help, and while he searched for French-casement windows, the project blossomed—from three windows to seven or eight, and then into something completely new and different: an upstairs deck with room for a fireplace, barbecue and spa.
Call it the First Rule of Home Construction—"One project leads to another"—or a corollary of that other First Rule: "Every project will cost twice as much as you figure, and take twice as long."
They were undaunted. "We just wanted a Jacuzzi," says Mareen. And pioneering neighbors had built already similar decks with breathtaking results, John says: "We'd go up to their decks, and they'd have these great views and real quiet."
The recent rains were an unpleasant surprise—I suggest something like Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, with rain pelting down like gravel and whip-cracking tarps flapping from a roof opened like a heart surgery, but John says no, just a couple of small leaks and reasonable delays, really, all of it diminished by the certainty that this spring they'll have a deck that adds about 325 square feet of livable outside space—a real complement to the promise of Long Beach living, when the first Spanish Revival captured balmy year-round weather and homes that brought the outside indoors. Even if it had to come in through the window.
The District Weekly
Article-Will Swaim
Photos-ZackPiánko
