While I’ve been busy ZIPping around Long Beach during the last few weeks, I’m taking a break from that today because of an extraordinary home hitting the market on Naples’ exclusive 70-home Treasure Island.
If you know anything about local architecture, you’ll immediately recognize the Naples Canal-front home as an Edward Killingsworth-designed house. It checks off most of the famed Long Beach architect’s trademark features: its horizontal structure, its post-and-beam construction, its flat roof and most importantly, its generous use of glass that drags the exterior world into the home’s interior.
In the case of this home at 5586 Naples Canal, the exterior world is the landscaping around the house and the calm water of the canal and its slow parade of nautical traffic.
Killingsworth built this three-bedroom, three-bath house in 1955 in his signature Mid-Century Modern manner, as the date indicates, for Dick and Margaret Russell.
The two were children of Treasure Island and lived almost their entire lives there. It’s where they met in childhood, where they lived and entertained, where they raised their two sons and where they reveled in the entire waterfront lifestyle. Dick was the first commodore of the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club and Margaret was an expert swimmer, and the two enjoyed a life of travel, visiting Australia, Africa, Vietnam and the Galapagos and Virgin islands, along with frequent sailing trips to Catalina.
The home is now on the market for the first time, following the death of Margaret late last year at the age of 109.
Keith Muirhead is handling the sale of the home for the Russells’ sons, Richard Jr. and Robert, both now in their 80s. The listing price for the 2,192-square-foot home is $3.75 million.
“It’s almost totally original,” said Muirhead, while acknowledging that that’s not exactly a selling point.
What’s most important: The house has retained its original architecture, which (along with its prime location) makes it a prestigious property. Killingsworth has designed several homes in the Naples neighborhood, most notably the Frank House (Case Study #25) at 82 Rivo Alto Canal, and the Opdahl Residence at 5576 Vesuvian Walk. While those two have been upgraded and restored beautifully while maintaining their original design, the Russell house has also remained true to its design, but it will require some major upgrading inside in terms of flooring and paint, as well as modernizing the kitchen and bathrooms which, along with the architecture, are still the way they were in the 1950s. Though Muirhead has had the floors carpeted for purposes of showing the home, there’s still plenty of linoleum along with severely outdated appliances in the 1950s-looking turquoise kitchen—not an unpleasant look for a traditional mid-century design, but for many, it may seem quaintly old-fashioned.
Much of the indoors features wood beams and tongue-and-groove ceilings. Both the formal dining room and family room have wood-burning fireplaces and floor-to-ceiling glass. The family room also features wood paneling and built-in shelving.
The kitchen’s breakfast nook overlooks the home’s inviting courtyard.
The upstairs primary suite has cathedral wood ceiling and built-in bookcases along windows overlooking the canal and the home’s private 34-foot dock from which you can sail into the open water without having to lower the mast in order to glide under bridges.
While both Muirhead and the surviving Russells hope a new owner will restore and preserve the home, there’s a pretty fair chance, given its excellent location and changing tastes in building style, that the home will be purchased solely for its land and the structure razed to make room for a new mansion.
Of course, a person can do whatever they like after spending $3.75 million with plenty left over to make their ideal home, but the city as a whole and architectural history both suffer a little bit whenever a Killingsworth property is demolished to be replaced, almost invariably, with a gaudier and less impressive building.
