Home as a Castle

Magnus Walker and Karen Caid were looking for a new building downtown to house Serious Clothing, their rock’n’roll novelty clothing company. At the same time, they were house hunting in Hancock Park. Then they found an industrial building near Santa Fe Avenue. “It was pretty gross,” recalls Caid. The upstairs, she says, was “pitch black, skylights covered with tar, black garbage bags over windows and dead rats in various degrees of decay.”

But the nondescript building, a former fabric-cutting factory, had an ample parking lot, a large enclosed garage, hardwood floors, high ceilings and all that space--26,000 square feet of it. They took the plunge. “We wanted something on a grand scale and thought, ‘Why not combine the two?’ ” says Walker, who sometimes doesn’t leave the house he calls his “mini-Hearst Castle” for several days at a time.

Today the space is divided into a modern downstairs office and factory. Upstairs, 11,500 square feet are devoted to living quarters that sport a medieval castle motif: newly installed gothic arched doors and windows, coffered ceilings, stained-glass windows, medieval sconces and, for effect, lots of gargoyles. “When I was a kid I was never much into visiting stately buildings,” says Walker, who grew up in the northern industrial town of Sheffield, England. When his parents came for a recent visit this summer and saw their son’s unique digs for the first time, it was their consensus that there was “nothing quite like it in Sheffield, nor all of England, for that matter.”

But the place he and Caid love most is their narrow 15-by-120-foot garden, a former graffiti-riddled alley behind the building. An oasis of lush green lawns, gardenia trees and jasmine, it’s peppered with their eclectic flea market finds--religious statuary, angels, a lion-head fountain, a Chinese moon gate--as well as candles and ubiquitous gargoyles. “We rarely leave,” says Caid. “Sunday mornings are all about hanging out in the garden. We grab a book and a cup of coffee, watch the kittens play. You’d never know from the front of the building that this was here. It’s our secret garden.”