Let There Be Peace

In 1999, after months of house-hunting in the Hollywood Hills, chef Fred Eric happened to drive through the flats of Eagle Rock. There, on a shady street lined with vintage bungalows, he saw a 1903 Japanese-inspired Craftsman and decided on the spot to buy it. Even its chopped-up rooms, linoleum floors, acoustic tile ceilings and heavy window blinds didn’t change his mind. Or the absence of any vistas in a garden that consisted of a pair of fruit trees and a scrap of grass that marked the path to the garage.

Eric, whose restaurants Vida and Fred 62 brought a certain hip cachet to Los Feliz, saw what the place could be: a spa-like, light-filled refuge from the city. “I realized I didn’t need a view,” he says. “I could create one.”

With contractor friend Johnny Mallozzi, Eric went to work indoors, yanking floors, ceilings, kitchen counters and walls to restore the purity of the house. Out of two cramped bedrooms he carved an airy master suite, complete with a Japanese-style soaking tub. He replaced windows with sliding shoji screens, linoleum with tatami mats and added a Swedish fireplace and a Moroccan bed.

“I like to create relationships between things, set them off in interesting ways,” Eric explains. Like the smooth boulder laid in the floor by his yellow bedroom door--an organic welcome mat--or the velvet-clad French chairs in his Craftsman dining room, or the industrial kitchen sink beside his 1930s Wedgewood stove. “I cook mainly for my family here,” he says, acknowledging the lack of counter space and the stumpy Westinghouse refrigerator he loves mainly for its charm.

In fact, once Eric comes home to his wife, Debra, and 10-month-old daughter, Electra, he doesn’t watch TV and rarely listens to music or entertains. “I work long hours in a noisy world,” he says. “Here, I enjoy the quiet.”

Which is not to be confused with silence.

After finishing the indoors, he built a deck that connects the house to the scrubby yard. With help from his Fred 62 partner, Fred Sutherland, he dug a pond with a splashing waterfall. He hung wind chimes from the eaves and in every room swapped windows for translucent doors, which are always open to the breezes when he’s home. And within the frame of a new fence, he composed pictures: bamboo and palms along the rock-edged pond; a smiling Buddha perched in long grass beneath a peach tree; and borders of philodendron, New Zealand flax, horsetail and helichrysum.

“My approach to landscaping is to make patterns with plants,” Eric says. He plotted borders like plates of food, pairing appetizing tones and textures, which “quickly took on their own life” in the garden.

Cannas, which he thought had died out, popped up in new spots. Helichrysum and bacopa spread, swallowing more timid plants. The gnarled pomegranate tree he pruned to a nub flowered and fruited. And through a gap in the deck, an old rosebush crawled out and burst into bloom. “I laugh at these things, but I also take them seriously,” Eric says, summing up his philosophy about food, houses, gardens and life--anything, he believes, can be improved by making it less pretentious and more comfortable.

This may explain why a guy as driven as Eric would hang his hat in a sleepy neighborhood: “It’s peaceful.”

In Eagle Rock, a man can build himself an outdoor shower, park an Airstream behind his house for guests and make peach ice cream from his own peaches. Says Eric: “The simplest things bring enormous pleasure.”

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Resource Guide

Shoji screens available at L.A. Shoji & Decorative Products, Los Angeles, (323) 732-9161. Plants from Sunset Blvd. Nursery, Los Angeles, (323) 661-1642. Garden rock and stone from Bourget Flagstone, Santa Monica, (310) 829-4010. Soaking tub and outdoor shower from Noriyoshi and Co., Los Angeles, (310) 489-1628.