The architect went mad not long after designing the San Jose house I grew up in.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when I discovered that. There was always a bit of mystery, or madness, to growing up there: the lion that had lived in a rock-walled pen next door, the apparent blood stain on the floor of my brother’s room, the bones in the attic.

    Our family of six moved into the house in the Rose Garden neighborhood in 1969. I was six years old…

…with two older brothers and a younger sister. My parents still live there today. My father is architect Pierre Prodis, and I always found it fitting that our family lived in a house designed in 1926 by Louis Christian Mullgardt, the same man who designed the original De Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as well as the President’s House, known as "The Knoll,” at Stanford University.

    "The architect rose to the occasion to create an absolutely unique, if modest compared to his earlier designs, structure,” Jack Douglas wrote of our family home for San Jose’s Preservation Action Council newsletter in 2001.

    The house was built just off The Alameda, the graceful thoroughfare that had been lined with great estates, including the Hart Mansion and a Julia Morgan-designed estate.  Entrepreneur Charles Stevens and his wife, whose San Francisco home had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, told Mullgardt they wanted a house that was "earthquake proof.” He complied. The house has the outward appearance of a Polynesian-inspired bungalow, with a long awning stretching across half the house. It appears one story, with a pop-up second story in the back (the servants quarters for the elderly couple.) It was one of his last three commissions, including the art gallery at the Bohemian Grove.

    The most interesting architectural feature, however, is the exterior wood-framed diamond pattern. While decorative, it is entirely functional, providing a strong wooden exoskeleton to brace the house. The pattern is interrupted by sets of French doors nearly encircling the house. The ceilings are high. The rooms are huge. The rectangle that is the living and dining room is 20 feet by 40 feet.

    And sometimes, to us four kids, it seemed a bit scary. It didn’t take long to find out about the lion that had lived next door _ right outside the kitchen window, behind the stone wall that lines the path. We peeked over the wall to see the cyclone fence enclosure butting up to it. It held garden tools when we saw it. I always wondered whether that was a myth or not, until I saw former San Jose Mayor Janet Gray Hayes a couple of month ago. She is in her 80s and lives nearby. She remembers the lion.

    My two brothers lived in the old servant’s quarters upstairs. My brother Geordie’s room had a door to the attic. On the floor in front of it was a red stain. Geordie thought the butler had been killed there. There were bones in the attic, too. But the stain was paint. The bones were rodents’. But there was an unexplained splintered hole under the handle of the master bedroom door. I remember hearing that Mrs. Stevens had gone crazy and rammed her hand through the door. My mother says she never knew the true story _ maybe someone was trying to break in.

    The house squeaked and creaked. Delicate white curtains blew into the bedroom I shared with my sister when the French doors were open. It was enough for the two of us to call out to our mother, after she kissed us good night, "You come back and check on us!”

    As I grew older, and the house was filled with dinner parties and dances with the carpets rolled back, my fears were replaced with an appreciation of this grand old house and the man who designed it. An original architectural rendering from 1926 is framed in the butler’s pantry, where my Dad still makes his signature martinis. If this house was the doing of a mad architect, who died in a state mental institution in 1942, then I embrace the madness.

—julia prodis sulek

Here’s the complete slideshow:

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Inside Stories, Inside Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.