By Clarence Cromwell
Professional advice is needed before the Monte Sereno City Council can give permission to tear down a 92-year-old house at 18041 Withey Road, councilmembers told the house's owners, Carl and Laurie Cooper, Aug. 6.
The council set aside until Aug. 20 the Coopers' application for permits to raze the building and put up a larger, similar-looking structure on a spot 25 feet west of where the historical building is now.
"Once you demolish this house, it's no longer a heritage resource," Councilmember Dorothea Bamford said.
The Coopers' engineer already recommended tearing down the house, as did the city's Heritage Preservation Committee on July 25. Alexander Burga, of Burga & Associates structural engineers, stated in a July 29 letter that the house's concrete foundation is in "very poor condition" and parts of walls and floors are rotten.
But the council asked its staff to get a report on the house from a structural engineer--one specializing in historical building restoration--and from a historical preservation architect. They want to know whether the building is historically and architecturally important and whether it can be saved.
The Coopers need a conditional-use permit to change the old house because the council recently added it to Monte Sereno's inventory of historical buildings.
In addition to demolishing the historical house, the Coopers want permission to build the replacement house taller than the city building height limit, with three stories. Only two-story buildings are allowed in Monte Sereno.
The Coopers also want to increase the square footage by 1,963 more square feet than the town's zoning ordinance would allow--a total of 12,458 square feet.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, August 14, 1996.
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