A 1970s house practically guaranteed to give you a giant happy face
Thought no one could never, ever love shag carpet and harvest gold appliances again?
Come into this house and see if it can change your mind.
Created over the course of the last 10 years by the homeowners, this exuberant 1970s home in Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood isn't a "time capsule" home in the traditional sense. It's not a perfectly preserved museum, but a cobbled-together labor of love.
At a recent open house, we heard visitors giggle and gush over the Naugahyde and velour furniture, the foil wallpaper the bean bags, the fake fires, the boomerang-pattern Formica in the kitchen, the inflatable pillows and dolls — the endless, endless details to discover, all of it in like-new condition.
"I want to be friends with them!" we heard one person exclaim to a companion, in a voice that was both delighted and ever so slightly desperate. It was that kind of house.
We can't tell you much about the people who lived here, because the listing agents declined to divulge much. They would allow that at least one occupant (the owners are a couple) is in The Industry, as Angelenos call Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment machine. Our own research turned up evidence that the woman is a costumer.
They bought the house in 2005 for $550,000. It was built in 1973, but it's unclear how much of the house is original; the laminate kitchen countertops and the Marmoleum floors, for instance, were installed by the current owners.
The house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms in 1,644 square feet. The lot size is barely bigger, at 2,447 square feet, but they've managed to squeeze a bamboo-screened sort of "tiki garden" in one space, and they co-opted the top of a carport for a "secret" deck with hot tub (accessible only from a short ladder leading through a window over the bathtub of an upstairs bathroom, and probably not permitted).
And if you're wondering, as we did, whether this is just an elaborate staging job, the listing agents will disabuse you of that notion. So will the master suite's walk-in closet full of vintage or vintage-style clothes -- neckties as wide as a highway, hot-pink chenille bathrobes, shoes with toes turned up "I Dream of Jeannie"-style.
"They live like this!" the listing agents said. We got the feeling the agents were asked about that a lot.
