Rose Garden Resident

Cover Story

Photograph by Vicki Thompson

Details Work: The Julia Morgan home at 1650 The Alameda includes many original details, including the elaborate leaded glass. This is a view of the front yard from the upstairs master bedroom.

Julia Morgan-designed Rose Garden mansion gets overdue restoration

Rare mahogany, walnut adorn home's walls

By Mary Gottschalk

One of the grande dames of The Alameda is looking good again. The Julia Morgan-designed mansion at 1650 The Alameda has been undergoing extensive restoration since the beginning of this year, becoming once again the sparkling jewel it was when completed almost a century ago.

Bob Cullen is the man behind it all.

"The whole idea is to put it back into the condition it was" when it was constructed around 1910, Cullen says. "Hopefully, you won't recognize the work. We've done sensitive repairs with updated wiring and new heating and air conditioning."

Like many other Rose Garden area residents, Cullen has been aware of the mansion for years.

Sitting on the corner of The Alameda and Villa Avenue, it is distinctive for its porte-cochere entrance on the side, built with a high central step for exiting horse-drawn carriages.

Once dark and gloomy, its leaded glass windows now sparkle, it has new paint inside and out and the yard's landscaping has been spruced up with a row of white rosebushes blooming across the front of the ironwork fence.

Cullen learned of the house's lineage from his Morse Street neighbor Leonard McKay, San Jose's preeminent historian.

"I had talked to Mr. McKay quite a bit," Cullen says. "It was very easy for me to say, 'That's what I want to pursue.'

"It's historic, it's a Julia Morgan, it's part of The Alameda and part of the history we have in San Jose."

Cullen, an attorney, says he had been looking for a building to house the offices of his Cullen Group real estate business.

"It was the first one I wanted to try and do something with," he says of the house. "It was vacant, a block from my house and I knew the history."

The house was built for James Pierce, vice president of Pacific Manufacturing Co. A Santa Clara-based mill established in 1874, Pacific Manufacturing was the largest supplier of wood products on the West Coast, supplying everything from lumber, doors and moldings to coffins and caskets. It closed in 1960.

It is no doubt due to Pierce's occupation that the interior of 1650 The Alameda is a museum of rare mahogany and walnut woodwork.

The entryway and staircase are lined with large pieces of walnut burl, book-matched so it is obvious adjoining slabs were cut from the same tree, creating mirror images.

"Who knows where it came from?" Cullen says. "Walnut burl is probably the most rare and difficult to get because car companies used it for years. So much of the walnut burl throughout the world has been harvested.

"These panels are unusually large. You could not afford this walnut burl; it just doesn't exist anymore."

Cullen says he continues to be amazed at the woodwork.

"All the crown moldings and beams are 18 to 24 inches. How did they do this with hand tools?" he asks.

Hand-carved oak leaves surround the living room fireplace and Cullen says he's found tile and other details similar to those used by Morgan at San Simeon, the legendary edifice she designed for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. She started designing it in 1919 and worked with Hearst on it until 1947. Morgan was California's first female architect.

Fortunately, none of the previous owners of 1650 The Alameda, which Morgan designed just 11 years before she started on San Simeon, ever painted over the wood.

Cullen hired an expert in wood finishing to remove the old varnish, clean and refinish the wood throughout the house and make a few small repairs where needed.

Rewiring the house to update it proved more of a challenge.

Not wanting to damage any of the existing walls, electricians had to hand-feed new wiring between the interior and exterior walls. It was a difficult and tedious job.

Cullen left the original electric panel in place to show what was there. The new equipment is out of sight in the basement and attic.

Linoleum had been laid in several rooms, which had to be scraped off so the wood flooring beneath could be refinished.

Cullen says it's obvious the Pierce family was well-to-do.

"It's a house definitely built for a wealthy family. It has upstairs and downstairs rooms for servants. It's 5,000 square feet, and there were three large bedrooms with walk-in closets and lots of bathrooms. There were three bathrooms upstairs and two downstairs," he says.

Cullen says he hasn't moved any walls, but he did take out two bathrooms, which had been leaking and causing water damage. Those have been converted into storage cabinets.

New ropes were put into the sash and weight windows, so they all now open and close.

The original Samson Junior intercom system, with labels for main rooms--Pierce, north room, east room, maid, cook and kitchen--has been cleaned and polished, although it is no longer functional.

The house also had a water-radiating heat system. Still in place is the outside coal chute that emptied into the basement, where scuttles were filled and then lifted to the kitchen on a dumbwaiter.

One of the treasures Cullen found in the home is a set of the original blueprints with Morgan's name in the corner, the job number, her client's name and a date of Feb. 7, 1908.

It's popularly believed Morgan destroyed most of her blueprints when she closed her office in 1950, but Mark Wilson, author of the upcoming Julia Morgan, A Legacy of Beauty, calls it a "pernicious myth." She gave them to her goddaughter as well as libraries at the University of California, Berkeley and California State University at San Luis Obispo, he says.

Wilson's book is scheduled for publication in late 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Morgan's death.

One of the most definitive books on remaining Morgan architecture erroneously lists The Alameda house as demolished.

Cullen points out while the house's address was originally 1290 The Alameda, it was changed in the '40s or '50s to the current 1650 number.

Wilson was pleased to learn the house still exists and plans to visit it for possible inclusion in his book.

Prior to its purchase by Cullen, the house had been identified by a large brass sign as the offices of Arden D. Zimmerman, a chiropractor who used a machine called the Specific Adjustment Machine to free nerve pressure on the spinal chord.

Zimmerman drew patients from around the world and wrote in December 1986 that he had "machine-adjusted more than 48,000 individuals at this time."

Following treatment, which he wrote could be accomplished with one visit, patients were required to rest for two hours before leaving.

Cullen says before he started renovating, some rooms had been divided into small stalls, where patients were sent to rest.

Unfortunately, none any of the original furnishings for the house remain.

"When Dr. Zimmerman died, his family had a garage sale in 1995 or 1996," Cullen says.

Zimmerman's wife, Marian, never put the house on the market, and it sat empty for a decade until Cullen approached her.

"Two years ago I wrote a couple of letters to the family, and they got into the hands of Dr. Zimmerman's stepson Barry Paulsen. We talked and negotiated a deal. We entered into a contract in April of 2005, and we closed it in January 2006," says Cullen, declining to say what he paid.

In addition to using it for his own offices, Cullen has leased space inside to the staff of World Art Glass Quarterly magazine. Cullen met publisher Mark Walton when he called him for consultation on the leaded glass windows in the house.

He is considering leasing additional office space within the house.

Cullen is well aware of the curiosity the house and its restoration is generating and says under the right circumstances he might open it up for special events.

Julia Morgan

Born in San Francisco in 1872, Julia Morgan became California's first female architect, America's first independent woman architect and the first woman to be accepted to the architecture section of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During her career, Morgan designed more than 700 buildings. Hearst Castle, built for William Randolph Hearst, is among the buildings she designed. Her commissions were greater in number than any other major American architect, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

Morgan was known for her use of locally available materials, integrating various architectural traditions and paying attention to fine details to produce livable interiors. Morgan closed her office in 1950 and died in 1957.