Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier
San Francisco residents Lois and Jon Baer talk about the restoration of their 1906 Los Altos home. In their landmark house they will be able to use the antiques they've been collecting for years. They look forward to moving in this summer. Because of their attention to detail and their reverence for the house's origins, the Baers will qualify for significant property tax reduction under the Mills Act. The Los Altos Historical Commission lists 122 properties in its inventory of historic homes.
Town Crier Staff Writer
Los Altos Historic Resources Inventory provides a tool for encouraging preservation
When Jon and Lois Baer first looked at the Los Altos house on Pepper Drive, they saw a living room painted purple. Another room was filled with dirty fish tanks, a third with bird cages. When a contractor opened a wall, 40 to 50 dead rats fell out.
But the Baers, who have been living in San Francisco and searching throughout the Peninsula for an old house, could see the potential in this 1906 three-story historic property. Last July it became theirs.
Lois, an attorney, said, "We were the only ones who bid, probably because people ran out screaming."
Jon, a venture capitalist, said "I always knew someday I'd have an old house."
This is a story not just of the Baers and their meticulous restoration. But it's a story of the Los Altos Historical Commission's inventory of historic resources, still in draft form, that functioned as a tool to allow the city and the Baers to work together so the Baers could preserve an exceptional piece of Los Altos history.
Once the house was theirs, the Baers began creating plans for restoration, "an extraordinarily expensive" project, Jon Baer said. Then they brought their plans to the city for approval.
But this is a house that breaks all the rules of the city's current design guidelines. It's a three-story home in a town where even the thought of two-story additions gives some neighbors apoplexy. It's a house too big for the lot, violating the city's floor area ratio of living space to lot size. It's a house that raises questions about the daylight plane. It's a house that at 37 feet is 10 feet taller than the city's maximum height of 27 feet.
Here's where the city's historic inventory comes into the picture. Because of the extraordinary efforts of members of the city's Historical Commission, these volunteers, beginning in 1990, have created an inventory of historic resources in town that lists 122 properties.
Hidden behind a jungle of overgrown greenery on an unpretentious side street near downtown, few knew the Baer's house, known as the Day House, existed. Because of its low profile and poor repair, the Day House could easily have fallen victim to a wrecker's ball had it not been identified by the historical commissioners and put on their inventory.
But the Day House had been identified as not just historic, but as a landmark, the highest rating a house can have for historic merit.
So when the Baers came to the city with their plans, there already was the documentation that this was not just any old house. It was worthy of special historic consideration.
"That definitely plays into how the city reviews a plan," said Los Altos City Planner Larry Tong. When a project needing variances is one that "preserves and maintains," said Los Altos Senior Planner Jim Mackenzie, it is given "strong consideration."
Steve Aced, chairman of the Los Altos Historical Commission, said "The commission is trying to encourage preservation, but also to enhance it by making it possible for homeowners by offering them support and guidance through variances."
While all the houses in the inventory represent a piece of Los Altos history, not all are of equal significance.
Of greater importance, is the building's historic significance - to the local community, to local people or events, or if it had been designed by a known architect or in a distinctive style.
The commissioners decided "to favor history over architecture," Aced said. He also pointed out that as new information is discovered, a house can be re-evaluated.
At the same time, the commissioners "were concerned about property rights," said Vance Phillips, the Los Altos building official who works with the historical commission.
"We tried not to just say, 'this is an old building and you can't do anything to it,' but 'this is an old building and put it into a context.'"
Context then became the key to the survey, providing the setting for the properties, Aced said, in the introduction to the inventory.
The context framework is chronological: prehistory, agriculture 1890-1940; residential, institutional and commercial, 1907-1940.
By 1911 there were only 50 homes in Los Altos, according to the inventory.
And the Day house was one of the first, predating the lovely, well-preserved historic Shoup homes that line University Avenue and began being built in 1907, when official subdivision of the town by Paul Shoup and the Los Altos Land Company began.
The Days arrived in Los Altos in April 1906, the day before the San Francisco earthquake, Jon Baer said. Construction on their house began in July and was finished in October.
"That's why there are relatively simple moldings because they couldn't get materials right after the earthquake," Baer said.
Because the Baer's house is on the inventory, it qualifies for consideration for the Mills Act, a "state-passed, locally enabled" bill, Baer said, that allows a reduction in property tax for houses of historic merit.
And the Baer's house qualified. "The net effect," Baer said, "is a 40 to 60 percent reduction of property tax. It's wonderful. It helps us, and we're extraordinarily grateful."
In Los Altos there are two other historic properties benefiting from the Mills Act: the Edgewood Lane home once owned by Sarah Winchester of Winchester Mystery House fame and another on Yerba Santa Avenue designed by well-known California architect Ernest Coxhead.
The next step for the inventory, Phillips said, when the commissioners finish a review of it, is public hearings and then adoption by the city council.
In the meantime, even though the inventory is not adopted, "It's used in its draft form," Phillips said. When the planning department comes across something that is old, "whether or not it is in the inventory, they can ask the historical commission to review it to make sure the historical commission is not losing historic structures."
But just because a house is on the inventory, does not mean it will be spared demolition. Historic preservation is a balancing act of preserving historic treasures and property rights.
The little Romanian brick house on Paco Drive is an example of that. It was in the historic inventory, it was reviewed by the historical commission, but it was deemed not significant enough to save.
"In all honesty, it was not a landmark house," Aced said.
Landmark houses are protected from demolition, he said. But not all houses, just because they were built before 1940, can be saved.
Jon Baer's advice: "If you don't like an old house, don't buy an old house. Buy it for the character and charm. Houses are living things. Don't take something charming and turn it into tract housing."
Jon has been collecting antiques for 20 years - he has boxes of antique doorknobs. All light fixtures in his house will be antique gas lights that have been wired. Antique French doors from Lois Baer's aunt's house in Brooklyn have been installed from the kitchen to the back "stoop."
In a storage unit Jon keeps antique porcelain toilets, some with round "pill" tanks, rows of antique porcelain sinks and marble counters, all ready for their house.
"The idea is that on the outside it looks right and on the inside it looks right, too," Jon said. "The whole idea was to make it match. That's not a requirement. We're trying to do a quality job."
And they are, with their exquisite attention to detail.
The Baers have highest praise for the city, "for helping us to take a vision and turn it into reality."