My Dream House

This is my favorite house in all of Los Angeles. I've always been a fan of old-fashioned, Victorian architecture and I would love to live in a house similar to this, if not this one. I just happened to stumble upon this abode one day while driving around town and since then I've been obsessed with it. If I'm anywhere near it, I will go out of my way to drive by it. After the first few times I did that, I decided to look it up and found out it has a lot of history. First, it was used as the Addams Family's home in a 1970's reunion television special which I used to own on VHS so it's no wonder that this house instantly spoke to me! It's also been used in several other television shows and films over the years, including Beverly Hills 90210, Willard, and Ben.

Perhaps my favorite story about the house, which is now known as the Higgins-Verbeck-Hirsch House is from back in the twenties, when the home was moved from it's original location to it's current address on Lucerne Ave. Because Wilshire Blvd. was being widened, the Verbecks, who owned it at the time, decided to relocate it and while it was being moved, threw a party inside the moving mansion with over 100 guests, including the mayor!

Anyway, while this house represents my wildest dream home, I'm far more realistic about where I should actually be living, but I still think its sad that I don't have a house to call my own. I knew when I moved to Los Angeles that it would be tough to ever own real estate here because of the exorbitantly high prices, and apartment living seemed appealing to me anyway, as it was a cosmopolitan and urban way of life that was different to anything I was used to. But now, approaching my mid-thirties, I long for a house to hang my hat in. Scoring a huge, old Queen Anne style dwelling is my fantasy, but I am also drawn to several smaller, more humble types of homes, like bungalows and craftsmen (very common here in SoCal), but one of my favorites is the good ol' farmhouse style, like this one:


The "T-Shaped" or "L-Shaped" style farmhouse has long been a favorite of mine, in part because the farmhouse that I grew up in was just a very plain, cracker-box style ranch house. I've always been obsessed with houses that had upstairs, attics, wrap-around porches, and other cool and unique features. Houses hold so much life and history, so many memories and stories. I get sad when I see old, abandoned houses just sitting there reverting back to nature. I feel that most houses have a soul, which is why I also believe in and am obsessed with the idea of 'haunted houses,' but on the other hand houses can have such positive energy. My grandparents lived in a house with amazing positive energy; it was built by hand by my ancestors and inhabited by them for probably over a hundred years. Now, it sits empty as my grandparents, who passed away in the last decade, had left the homestead back when I was in high school in order to live closer to civilization due to health concerns. One night in college I took some friends and we drove out to the house to look around, and already by then it was starting to crumble. Some sort of wild animal (beavers? rats?) had already made a complete wreck of the basement staircase as twigs, trash and debris were covering each stair in a pile several inches thick. It was such a strange sight that I've never gotten the image out of my head. Even the last few years my grandparents lived there, the staircase that went upstairs was in bad shape and I would definitely be too scared to attempt walking up it now, if it's even still standing. One of my (many) dreams in life is to someday have enough money to be able to completely gut the house and rebuild it in the same location using the original bricks and design but updating it to make it more functional as a vacation cabin that all of us descendants could use, and have talked about that idea with several of my cousins who agree.

It's such a shame that someone like me, who has always been fascinated by houses, architecture and interior design has never really had the opportunity to work on a house of my own. In college, my parents bought a house for my brother and I to live in, and I did go a little crazy (especially since it was a given that we would only live there a couple years and then 'flip' it, back before 'flipping' was a thing any of us had heard of) and completely redecorated the house, wracking up quite a bit of credit card debt in the process that haunts me to this day.

So if anyone reading this has a house just sitting somewhere (especially in Los Angeles) that is not being properly utilized, you should feel ashamed of yourself, or better yet, you should just turn it over to me!