Less is More

A fading Art Deco home regains some of its clean lines and luster

By Liz Jaros

Home Book Magazine Contributor

“Squares work for us,” designer Eric Deutsch and his wife Nicole agree, referring to the austere, geometric personality of their 1930s Art Deco home on Berkeley Road in northeast Riverside. “We’re minimalists.”

With just one foot in the front door of this couple’s unusual home (in an entry hall floored with aluminum-inlaid, cement-based porcelain tile), it’s clear they’ve got the digs to back the dogma.

Clean lines, stark contrasts and smooth, uncluttered surface areas define the first-floor rooms, which are completely open and can be viewed almost entirely from this central vantage point. Straight ahead, a solid steel monorail staircase ascending to the home’s second floor provides the only structural separation of living space.

Commercial grade aluminum frames and one-inch thick, undivided glass panes are employed throughout the home’s windows and doors to deliver a skin and bones architectural effect reminiscent of the great modernists. They also pull the sun in to create overlays of light and shape on floors that were once covered in smelly-cat shag.

“The carpet was disgusting,” Nicole says, recalling her first impressions of the house when it came on the market in 2004. The home’s owner had lived there for nearly 50 years in the company of many feline friends. Plus, the place was dark and dank, with awkwardly configured rooms and practically no light. But Eric and Nicole bought it anyway.

They’d been living in a house across the street but eyeballing this one for years, the couple claims. They liked its style from the curb and knew the property would make a perfect test canvas for Eric – a kitchen and bath designer eager to spread his wings and tackle a major home overhaul.

“I loved the geometric shapes on top of one another and the hints of curves and radiuses,” Eric recalls. And he was eager to start messing around with additive and subtractive space.

Not a licensed architect, but proficient with drafting software, Eric says he drew up plans for an overhaul himself then hired a pal with credentials to make things official. And with Nicole handling the financial details (and wrestling with the village over tedious permit issues), they were in business.

After demolition and clean-up, one of the first things he did was redistribute the home’s internal support with a pair of steal I-beams. “There was a fireplace right here that was load bearing,” Eric says, standing just right of the staircase. “It was the first thing you saw when you walked in the house and the whole first floor revolved around it.”

An I-beam in the ceiling above allowed him to remove the old paneled beast and create a seamless cooking/eating/living space with no structural obstruction. A frosted glass counter lined with tubular chrome stools from the furniture collection of Swiss-French modern architect and designer, Le Corbusier, marks the transition between the Deutches’ living room and their kitchen.

Sleek and seamless, with no upper cabinets – because Eric believes, they “shrink the space” – the Deutsches’ kitchen has a storage location for everything, and all out of sight, including the coffee maker and toaster. From the adjacent eating area, steel framed patio doors open out onto a deck-in-progress that will complement the home’s interior detailing and ultimately arch around its southeast corner.

This radial curve is repeated in the first floor powder room, where Eric says he soaked, shaped and hung a quarter-inch piece of drywall to create the effect. “This room took us eight months,” he recalls. Installation of the waterfall drip edge sink was a six-man job but worth the effort since it plays so nicely off the Philip Starck X toilet – a square gem of a commode heretofore enjoyed primarily by Europeans.

To the left of the staircase, where the attached garage once stood, Eric created a media space complete with a corner-set, white Italian leather couch. “I’m a big Internet shopper,” Eric admits. It enables him to price and purchase furniture, art and building materials to suit his whims. Throughout the house, he blends finds from the likes of European Furniture Imports and Ikea with pieces conceived by Mies van der Rohe and other progressive designers.

On the home’s second floor, a loft area at the top of the staircase offers access to bedrooms that embrace the same less-is-more principal and bathrooms that offer floating sinks, Caesarstone countertops and cutting-edge luxuries.

“We didn’t cut corners anywhere,” Nicole claims. With more than 2000 feet of white oak flooring, tons of commercial application glass and steel and great attention to even the smallest of details, quality and durability were major considerations throughout the project.

We wanted to make sure everything we did here would not age,” Eric adds. That’s why, after calling in professionals to handle plumbing and electrical elements, he did about 70% of the work himself.

Although the grand plan is to finish up with this house in the near future and move on to another overhaul, Nicole thinks it’s going to be hard for Eric to let go. “He’s always changing things,” she says. “We spent a day painting this one wall green and a week later, he was like ‘I got a better idea for that wall...’”

Admitting that he’s a little obsessed, Eric says rethinking things is a big part of the fun for him. “I’m not a sleeper,” he claims. At least this kind of work gives him a constructive outlet for his interminable energy.