Want Room to Grow? Buy the Lot Next Door

Imagine seeking refuge from urban Los Angeles by retreating into a private garden located where a neighbor’s house once stood. Buying the lot next door to expand your garden is an indulgence that precious few can afford in the pricey environs of the city.

But a few have managed to take advantage of rare opportunities to buy adjacent lots to dramatically increase the size of their gardens, while adding precious privacy. In defying the notion that every parcel of land needs to be developed, these homeowners have, in their own way, contributed to a sense of urban renewal in their neighborhoods by increasing the amount of green space.

Up in historic Angelino Heights overlooking downtown Los Angeles (where the famous Carroll Avenue Victorians are located), Jim and Paula McHargue bought the lot next door and found room to plant 32 trees, including citrus and apples, eucalyptus and peppers, spiny floss silk trees and even giant redwoods. The trees crown the top of their hill like a little park and block the view of a neighboring two-story apartment building. The apartment dwellers now look out on trees.

High in rustic Laurel Canyon, Elena and Mike Fresco have accumulated 13 lots, and in the process were able to get rid of a number of tiny outbuildings of questionable legality on one property.

These old canyon properties--intended for modest summer homes--are only 25 feet wide, but they are 100 feet deep. Put together, the Frescos essentially have their own private little canyon.

Near Hancock Park, Scott Goldstein and wife Lauren Gabor have partially reassembled a parcel that had been split into four parts in the 1940s.

One tractlike house--completely out of character with the neighborhood--was removed and the corner property turned into a native plant garden and meadow. Another dwelling was extensively remodeled into a guest house. Still another house was purchased, remodeled and sold but not before the lot was reconfigured (a “lot adjustment”) to allow room for a new office for Goldstein, a film director and scriptwriter. All of this was done by the book, with permits and variances, and the reconstituted property now has all of its former grandeur and privacy (and then some).

The McHargues’ good fortune in acquiring the lot next door followed some decidedly bad luck. The vintage house beside them, which had been condemned by the city, burned to the ground in 1988, setting fire to the McHargues’ carefully restored Craftsman-era home, destroying almost half of it.

It took them 20 months to rebuild their home, but the burned-out property next door just sat there. It finally came up for sale in 1997 and Jim, 52, and Paula, 44, quickly bought it.

“This way, we could control what happened there,” said Jim McHargue. “We could just see a big apartment building going up next door.” They decided to keep it and make it a garden. “When we bought this property, we finally got peace of mind.” The two lots total almost a third of an acre.

“Many people asked us what we were going to do with all this land,” said McHargue, who took early retirement from the U.S. Treasury Department. Many responded with disbelief at the idea of making it a garden. “This is L.A., after all,” said McHargue. “You’re supposed to develop and build on vacant land, not plant a garden.”

During the last two years they’ve cleared away the rubble (though they saved the old retaining walls and front steps), dug out an asphalt parking area and planted a lawn around an old (and fire scorched) palm tree. To block the view of an apartment next door, they put in a row of wispy peppers and eucalyptus. These big trees take up considerable space and never would have fit on their original lot.

Their old property had a huge ‘Mermaid’ climbing rose, planted as a Mother’s Day present in 1933 by the previous owners. The McHargues know this because they are only the second family to own this 1908 house, buying it in 1986 from the 103-year-old daughter of the original owner/builder.

Everything on the house was original, including the plumbing and the stained-glass light fixtures, and nobody had ever painted over the handsomely stained indoor woodwork that is so typical of the Craftsman era. Even the sleeping porch upstairs was intact and usable.

However, not much of the original gardens survived. They are trying to make the new plantings look like they belong with the vintage house, one reason for the big lawn, a typical feature in the early 1900s. The McHargues have planted additional antique roses, such as the old ‘Shot Silk’ (1924) and ‘Texas Centennial’ (1935). They moved the entire rose garden--full of vintage varieties--from their original lot to the newly acquired one. Roses also grow on two large trellises put up to screen views.

Although the plantings are only 2 years old, the big, open garden already feels quite private and suburban, even though it is only blocks from downtown Los Angeles.

Multiple Properties and Tax Bills

There are a several drawbacks to owning multiple lots. One is that the McHargues now receive two property tax bills. Since the city shows the new lot as being vacant, the city assumes it is weedy and unused, so the McHargues also receive regular, threatening weed abatement notices and must do the necessary paperwork to clear things up. And since all the irrigation water comes from the original property, the utility company wonders why the homeowners are using so much water, not knowing that the McHargues are irrigating two lots. “They keep offering us low-flush toilets,” said McHargue.

If you think two tax bills are too much, imagine what it’s like paying the taxes (albeit small) on 13 properties, each with its own bill from the county!

The Frescos, both 53, didn’t buy all of the properties at once but acquired them over the years. They certainly didn’t set out to own an entire canyon. Their house sat on a short street in a small side canyon. They knew the owner of several empty properties across the street from their house. Many years ago, he gave them permission to garden on the land and they grew vegetables there.

In 1988, the couple had a chance to buy five skinny unimproved parcels and four years later they got the chance to buy two more. A small house, which became a studio, and several ramshackle rentals were on these last two.

One thing kept leading to another. The studio had access problems, so when four more little properties next to it came on the market, they bought them so they would have plenty of room for the driveway.

“At this point we figured we might as well buy the rest of the street,” said Elena Fresco, which is how they ended up with 13 lots, “though all together, they are probably not much bigger than some lots around here.” Some of the properties they purchased are probably unsuitable for building on, so they weren’t terribly expensive, she said.

They have discovered some fun stuff on their old properties. One was a vintage outdoor stove and cooktop, dating back to when these properties were used as summer encampments. It was neatly installed in a brick retaining wall, though both were buried under leaves. Stamped on the cast-iron door: “Hancook Outdoor Fireplace, Pontiac, Mich.” They also uncovered and have since restored an old brick patio that was hiding under the oaks and cottonwoods.

Below the patio, which provides a nice view across the canyon, is their only flattish piece of land. Here they have planted vegetables, fruit trees and wildflowers.

On the hillsides they grow more wildflowers and are grubbing out the non-native castor bean, tree tobacco and horehound, replacing these invaders with true natives like ceanothus and sage. Elena is excited about the prospect that one day she might lure quail to their new garden of natives.

In the meantime, plenty of butterflies frequent a butterfly garden they planted on another of their many lots.

Native Plants Return to Hancock Park Lot

Director Goldstein, 45, and wife Gabor, 39, a production designer, are also growing native plants and wildflowers, but in the center of town near Hancock Park, on a flat, 70-foot-wide urban lot.

Their house was built in 1917 on the center lot of three in Windsor Square. The house was Will Rogers’ first in Los Angeles. The adjacent corner lot was used for a stable, the south lot was a rose garden.

(Will Rogers Jr. told Scott that his father could ride his horse to work at Culver Studios without crossing a single major street in 1917.)

Rogers only lived there for three years. The two lots to either side of the house were sold in 1949. A developer subdivided the corner lot into two, building a 1950s tract house on each, which was totally out of character with the grand old homes in the neighborhood.

In 1988, Goldstein and Gabor had been searching for a house for more than a year when they drove past their future home. They liked it so much they left a note asking the owners to let them know if they ever decided to sell and the owner called that night. The family bought it within the month. “That was obviously meant to be,” said Scott.

In 1994, they managed to buy the larger of two corner lots next door and immediately began work on the native plant garden and meadow. With a variance from the city in hand (not easy to obtain), they built a wall between the garden and the street, to block as much traffic noise as they could. Dense plantings partially conceal the wall and create an almost parklike setting when viewed from the street.

When neighbors asked what they were doing, the couple teasingly responded they were building a tennis court, “which is exactly what they did not want to hear,” said Goldstein. When they told them they were actually putting in a garden, “They said ‘Yeah, sure.”’

Inside the protected and private confines of the 6- to 8-foot walls, they planted a pretty good representation of what flourishes in the Santa Monica Mountains. Spreading hummingbird sage lines rustic paths. Native iris weave between shrubs and trees from the chaparral that surround a meadow of native sedges, which are grasslike but more durable. In the corner of the lot an earth-toned wall fountain does its part to drown out city noise.

Goldstein and Gabor acquired the third lot just last year. They turned its house into a guest house, complete with its own handsome garden. This one is almost classical in its formality and neatly flows into the garden around the original house. The gardens are surprisingly quiet and peaceful. When Gabor is playing hide and seek in the garden of natives with the couple’s two young children, she says they could be a thousand miles from the bustle of Los Angeles, not merely on the other side of a wall.

Write to Robert Smaus, SoCal Living, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012; fax to (213) 237-4712; or e-mail robert.smaus@latimes.com.