Behind the house were a couple of small buildings, one of which was office-size - a meditation “Zen den,” Ellingwood thought. The pièce de résistance depicted a faerie woman with flowing hair whose fingers turned into peacock feathers. Inside there was a “captain’s quarters” - a room designed to look like the hull of a boat with a built-in water bed and drawers - and numerous stained-glass windows that the couple who owned it had made themselves.
He and his friend meandered past a pond to an inviting teal house built in 1958, “a whimsical masterpiece,” Ellingwood told me. But when his best friend came across an intriguing listing in Woodland Hills - a bedroom community in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley - the two men decided to visit on a whim.Įntering the property beneath the canopy of a grand deodar, Ellingwood, a big man with a gentle presence, felt as if he had been transported to a ranch house in Northern California, much like one he often visited as a child, all old growth and overgrown greenery - olive trees, citrus trees, sycamores and redwoods. Chad Ellingwood wasn’t really in the market for a home in the summer of 2006.
