A quick trip to LA

Last week I drove down to Ventura and LA to visit with friends and family. Here are some highlights.

Adamson House

The Adamson House is known as the "Taj Mahal of Tile" because the owners owned a nearby ceramics factory when it was being built and filled it to the brim with incredible tiles.

I'd never heard of it, but when my aunt mentioned it, I was down because any time you can tour a house owned by someone that owned a tile company, you will NEVER be disappointed that they didn't use enough varieties of tile.

The home was a summer cottage for a wealthy family and it's situated in a perfect spot, just off from Surfrider beach, on 13 acres of waterfront.

The grounds were incredible and after a slight snafu, we caught the first docent-lead tour of the home right after it opened up for the day (only $7/person since it's a state park and not a for profit enterprise!).

Our guide told the long story of the family that was basically so rich they bought 17,000 acres on the coast and effectively owned all of Malibu themselves, but over 20 years they burned their family's fortune fighting lawsuits so they could bar anyone from entering their property and have Malibu all to themselves. The guide told the story as if the owners of the house were the heroes of the journey but I think our docent sensed the vibes of us and another family that we were glad the owners lost their Supreme Court case and a rich family didn't get to own dozens of miles of pristine coastline so the state of California built highway 1 right through their giant ranch.

It was also funny to learn the ceramics company was a fluke, that the family was running out of money fighting court battles for so long that they searched for oil reserves on their property but found they had really dense clays that were ideal for ceramics, then started a tile company a mile away from this house, and used the house as a showroom for the work.

Oddly, we were prohibited from taking any photos of the interior, which is a shame because that's where most of the magic was. But here are some more tile on the outside photos.

It's wild that one family could own all of Malibu at one time and were so fiercely protective that they had armed guards on horseback patrolling the land kicking people off of it. The tour didn't answer too many questions about who exactly the family bought the land from, and what rights those people had to it (the further I dug down later, the more it seems Spain just decreed it was theirs in the 1800s then sold it off to wealthy ranchers).

The family fought the state of California for another 50+ years after to try and keep the place to themselves, but I'm glad in the end the house wasn't bulldozed and instead put on the national registry of historic places so anyone can take an affordable tour of it today. It really was an incredible house with minimal wear and tear or damage even though it was built in a beautiful but fragile spot right on the beach. It's a marvel that it looks so good after 100 years of the elements (the tiles inside in the bathrooms are still wildly vibrant in color).

Post-tour, we got lunch at Duke's in Malibu and I had a pretty great Hawaiian plate lunch in a ridiculously beautiful spot right on the water.

Fires

Driving down, I stayed in Medford, Oregon which is near a 30,000+ acre fire that has been going for several weeks, and the whole town smelled like a campfire with air quality to match. On my way home, I saw something new that I suspect will become commonplace soon: warnings in map apps saying my trip home might be delayed by wildfire closures. Lucky for me, the 5 freeway wasn't closed even though there was a hundred acre fire near it that I never ended up seeing.

Up near Medford on the way home, I got a glimpse near sunset of a fire's smoke pouring over a mountain which gave the whole valley a kind of incredible atmospheric look to the horizon.

It kinda sucks this is the new normal for summers in the West, but I guess we need to get used to it.