By Hunter Fuentes and Jon Stordahl
Trick or Treat
The Brother’s Grimm were noted collectors of medieval German folklore. In the first half of the nineteenth century the pair published their compilation of stories in a work that included such celebrated tales as Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. One of their most famous tales was Hansel and Gretel, the story of a brother and sister and an enchanted cottage inhabited by a wicked witch. There is a wonderful home on Wave Street in North Laguna whose design could easily be inspired by that story. Generations of Laguna kids have grown up knowing the “Witch’s House,” but to the family that built the home and owned it for more than sixty years it had a more benign name; they called it simply the “Beach House.”
This residence began as a collaboration between two Riverside siblings, Bertha Barker and her younger brother, Vernon. His granddaughter, Lake Perry, wrote a book chronicling her family’s multi-generational effort to construct a magical hideaway for the entire Barker family. Titled “The Beach House,” it is filled with personal photos and anecdotes that bring both the house and the family that built it back to life.
Bertha purchased the first lot in 1924 for $750.00. She bought the adjoining lower lot in 1927. The combined property was 140’ x 160’ and totaled half an acre. The Barker’s made the choice to situate the house on the most northeastern corner of the lot only two feet off the property line, a decision that would cause much regret in future years. Vernon had some training in architecture and would eventually become a licensed architect. But, on July 4, 1925, when construction began, he was 29 years old and described himself as an “untrained, intuitive structural engineer.” There were no formal plans, no sketches, no building permits, just Vernon Barker’s fertile imagination, Bertha Barker’s strong will, and lots of family and friends to provide the labor.
Much of that labor was supplied by Bertha’s coworkers. Bertha headed the billing department of the Southern Sierras Power Company in Riverside. The department was staffed by unmarried women in an age where married women rarely worked outside the home. Bertha, often accompanied by several of her coworkers, would come down on weekends to help with construction. This construction sorority undertook many of the most challenging jobs, those chores that make the finished home so unique. One highly laborious task was using blow torches to char wood elements, such as stair rails and newel posts, and then sealing the wood with wax, a kind of ebonizing. It is based on a Japanese technique called shou sugi ban. The finished wood is naturally fire resistant. The ladies also hand stained every single one of the exterior shingles, dipping each into washtubs filled with blue dyes of varying shades. So, in a way this home was really built by women for a woman, Bertha Barker.
The lumber needed was purchased from Laguna Beach Lumber Company. Vernon and Bertha’s father, Leon, also offered a hand in the project. He would shape each piece of wood using an adz giving the finished work an even more rustic look. The cedar shingles on the roof were stacked two, three, or even four deep to create a wave like texture. The original blue color faded away over the decades, but the effect remains. The chimney was hand crafted from eleven tons of rock boulders hauled in from a quarry in Riverside. The current chimney is the second version, the original collapsed in the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933. The interior spaces are just as unique and handcrafted.
I think the moniker of the “Witch’s House” is more whimsical than wicked. Like the Lumberyard restaurant building downtown, there are elements of the Storybook Style to this cottage. It was once surrounded by gardens, but in the early 1970’s the uphill lot was sold to a developer who built the three-story apartment that stands there today. While that cost the property some privacy, it lost none of its charm. Some think of Hansel and Gretel as a scary story, others remember it more as a testament to familial love and the partnership of two siblings, just like the Witch’s House.
