The Ralph Edward Matteson home was bulldozed last month. Matteson built the home in 1922 and lived there until his death in 1978, at the age of 102. Until its destruction the imposing, three story home on a steeply sloping lot Manhattan Avenue and 19th Street in Hermosa Beach went largely unnoticed because it was hidden by a red brick wall and tall hedges. The wall protected Matteson’s prized rose garden from the ocean breeze.
Paul Revere Williams, the “Architect to the Hollywood Stars” during the 1920s and 1930s, designed the home in his signature classical regency style. Williams’ Hollywood clients included Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. His public commissions include the LAX theme building, the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Shrine Auditorium.
In the tradition of an English manor, the Matteson home featured a grand entry way, sweeping staircases, a large kitchen, servants quarters, a grand salon, and a dark, wood paneled library with secret touch panels. The finer wood came from Matteson’s friend William Randolph Hearst, who was building his hillside castle in San Simeon at the same time as Matteson was building his hillside home in Hermosa .
Replacing the three-story, four-bedroom, 3,700 square-foot Matteson home will be a two story, 5,612 square foot home with a 3,520 square foot basement. The L-shaped home will have an infinity pool on the ocean side with portals for viewing from the man cave basement.
Lisa Vitta of Home Beach Design described the architectural style as zen modern fusion.
She and her husband Tim are building the home for Manhattan Beach resident Jeffrey Knyal, a financier, like Matteson, and founder of Landmark Dividend.
The Vittas said the design is a collaboration between themselves and architects Grant Kirkpatrick of KAA in Manhattan Beach and Chris Stage of Carte Blanche in Culver City.
The Vittas formerly lived in a home they built across the street from the Matteson house. They had considered purchasing the Matteson home for themselves and restoring it.
“Trust me, we would have loved to keep the original house. But the cost of repairs and bringing it up to code would have been greater than building a new home,” Lisa Vitta said.
Neighbor Rick Koenig, a former president of the Hermosa Beach Historical society, said his mother was married in the Matteson house and he held his wedding reception in the house garden. Koenig’s mother was Matteson’s niece.
“I felt physically sick when I saw the bulldozer destroy the house,” Koenig said. “The guy who bought it after my great uncle died came to my house after he sold it and apologized because he had promised me he would never sell, that he’d lived there ‘til he died. But he said the money offered was too much to turn down.”
Knyal paid $4.2 million for the home, which is on a 7,639 square-foot lot. The previous owner paid $640,000 for the property in 1986.
Matteson came to Hermosa Beach in 1905.
“When I was a kid,” Koenig recalled, “he told me he mined gold in Mexico and shot his way back across the border. I asked him if he killed anybody and he answered, ‘Let’s just say there were a few men I met who didn’t go home to dinner.”
“He had a safe where he kept a small amount of cash. But he hid his real valuables behind the touch panels in the library. He’d hide my toys in them and make me find them,” Koenig recalled
“Every day he dressed in proper banker’s attire, a vested suit and bowler and walked to downtown Hermosa to purchase the Wall Street Journal at the newsstand where the clock tower is now on Pier Plaza.”
During the height of his influence, Mattheson was known as “Mr. Hermosa Beach,” Pat Gazin wrote in her Hermosa Beach history Footprints in the Sand.
Upon arriving in Hermosa, Mattheson was named manager of the Western Fuel, Power and Gas Company, which was owned by a family friend and mentor with extensive real estate holdings.
Following his mentor’s example, Matteson invested heavily in real estate. His developments included the Sand and Turf Club (which became the Biltmore Hotel), the Metropolitan Movie Theater, (Now the Bijou Building), North School and the current Bank of Manhattan Beach. He founded the First Bank of Hermosa and the First National Bank of Hermosa. Both failed at the onset of the Great Depression.
Koenig, during his tenure as president of the Hermosa Beach Historical Society, attempted to have the city enact a historic home preservation ordinance.
“We presented the council with three options. The first was a simple designation with a plaque. The second was a break on fees and code requirements for improvements of historical buildings. And the third was Mills Act protection, which extends property tax breaks to homeowners in exchange for them maintaining their historical properties.
The council declined to approve the proposal.
In 1998, Hermosa Beach did established a historic preservation program, but Koenig dismisses it as “having no teeth.”
The Hermosa Beach general plan identifies approximately two dozen residences and businesses as having potential historic significance because of their architecture or their tenants. Charlie Chaplin, Williams Jennings Bryan and Ozzie and Harriet are among the notables whose Hermosa Beach homes are noted in the general plan. But only the former Metropolitan Movie theater is the only Hermosa Beach building to have received state historic landmark designation.
According to senior city planner Pamela Townsend, changes to buildings designated as having historic potential in the general plan require city approval only if the changes involve a change of use or variance. Since the Matteson home was being replaced by a another single family home, approval for its demolition was not required.
Dean Nota, an architect and former Hermosa Beach planning commissioner, said home preservation programs are difficult to implement because taking of property rights must be compensated for. As a result, cities typically rely on incentives, such as code variances and property tax breaks to encourage preservation of historic homes
Nota compared restoring a historic home to restoring a classic automobile.
“You have to take a house down to its foundation, and maybe replace the foundation and then rebuild it, perhaps to a floor plan not to your liking.” he said.
Older beach homes, like the Matteson house, with their small, narrow windows, typically don’t have the expansive ocean view of modern homes because the technology for glass walls didn’t exist, Nota added.
Nota and his wife Linda Jo own what he described as a “stripped down craftsman,” purchased in 1977. Like the Matteson house, it was built in 1922 and is just a few blocks away.
Nota said he and his wife originally planned to tear down their house, but instead adopted the European approach of maintaining the exterior and modernizing the interior. The former duplex’s downstairs unit is now his wife’s art studio and his office.
“I replaced the old wood window frames with new wood frames just a few years ago and now they need to be replaced again,” he said. B
