At Home with Chappell and Kanner

In 1987, Catherine Kanner and Winston Chappell were newlyweds living in a Santa Monica apartment. They had met two years earlier at a school reunion at Oakwood, a high school in North Hollywood, where he had been a faculty member, and she a former student. Every Sunday morning, Kanner perused the real estate section of the newspaper, searching for a house where they could raise a family. At the time, Pacific Palisades was in what they called ‘impossible land.’ They were on a limited budget and were looking for homes mostly around Topanga and Sunset Park. However, one listing in the Palisades really grabbed Catherine’s attention, so she drove over to check it out. The house, which was the least expensive listing in town, was located on Hampden Place and was in serious disrepair. But Catherine, who fell in love with a four-lot garden across the street, could see the home’s potential. She only had to convince her husband. ‘I thought Pacific Palisades was the place where the Stepford wives lived,’ Winston jokes. ‘I thought you had to have a baby pram.’ One visit to the house and Winston was sold. As a residential designer and a contractor, he could envision exactly what the house could become. Fortunately for Catherine and Winston, the house had been listed one week early by accident, before realtors had seen the property. This reduced buyer competition for the couple, allowing them to enter escrow the day after Winston first viewed the house. Soon, they were gutting the house, and Winston redesigned the interior to create a loft-like space overlooking the garden across the street that made it feel ‘like living in a tree house,’ Catherine says. After two years in their new Palisades home, Catherine and Winston had their first child, Annakate. On nice days, the couple would walk her around the neighborhood, occasionally stopping at open houses in town just to look around. One afternoon they came across a house on Radcliffe Avenue, which overlooks lower Temescal Canyon. ‘It was just part of our walk,’ Catherine recalls. ‘But at this house, we looked at each other after we walked through and asked, ‘Do you like this house as much as I do?” Unfortunately, the house was not only outside their budget, but was taken off the market several days later. Upon the suggestion of Catherine’s mother though, the couple wrote a letter to the owners requesting that they contact them if they ever decided to sell. Six months later, they received a call. The owners were putting the Radcliffe house up for sale, and thanks to a drop in the real estate market, Catherine and Winston would be able to afford the house they had fallen in love with months earlier. What they really treasured was the footprint of the house, which had won a design award upon its conception in 1948 and was built shortly after. And although Catherine and Winston rearranged bedrooms, enlarged the master bathroom and converted the garage into a home office, they liked the existing house so much that very little was changed. They loved the modesty of the front of the house and that the front door was part of a covered patio that opened up into an inner garden. ‘It’s kind of a surprise when you walk through the front door,’ Catherine says, explaining that most people expect to be walking inside a house when they step through the door, but are pleasantly astonished when they enter a gorgeous green courtyard. They moved into the house in 1990 and, the following year, their daughter Rebecca was born. The home, with its inner courtyard, proved perfect for raising children. Because both Catherine and Winston do freelance work, often from home’she as an artist, he as a residential designer’having a house where the kids could play outside, while still being monitored through most windows in the house, allowed the parents to work and the children to play without major disruptions. Just as their new home fit their needs perfectly, so too did their block (500 Radcliffe). Neighbors dub themselves ‘The Rad Pack’ and their yearly block parties have become traditional. One summer, The Rad Pack decorated Winston’s truck with red, white and blue crepe paper for the Fourth of July parade and filled it with all the kids on the block. They even took home a trophy for their efforts. As an illustrator and a residential designer, Catherine and Winston have also enjoyed living on a block full of people involved in the creative arts, from writers and artists to photographers and musicians. Catherine, who earned a B.A. and B.F.A. in Fine Arts at UC Santa Cruz, creates from the garage-turned-home office at the front of the house. There she works on newspaper, advertising and editorial illustrations, books, graphic designs and more. For 15 years she created illustrations for the Los Angeles Times editorial page. She has illustrated several books including CETUS, The Whale: An illustrated Companion to Moby Dick, In the Direction of the Beginning by Dylan Thomas, The Owl & the Pussycat by Edward Lear and Timeline by Michael Crichton. She also wrote and illustrated a book of her own called The Book of the Bath that describes the history of baths and bathtubs and offers ideas and recipes for different baths and more. She is currently working with the Los Angeles Ballet Company creating graphics, logos and other printed material. Since she danced ballet as a child, working with them has allowed her to combine two of her favorite interests. Last holiday season, she also designed sets for The Nutcracker. To give the performance a Southern California feel, her sets were created to look like a Spanish Colonial home and the beach. Occasionally, Catherine also does drawings and other kinds of fine art, like the beautiful pencil drawing portraits hanging in their living room. ‘I really approach a job where the job speaks to me and tells me what it wants,’ says Catherine, who is obviously a versatile, talented artist. ‘I don’t impose the same thing on every job.’ Winston, a Harvard University graduate, works as a residential designer from his office in Santa Monica, which he shares with Catherine’s brother, Stephen Kanner, a prominent architect (with whom he sometimes collaborates). He specializes in historic restoration and also does fantastic work in historic reproduction, in which he designs new spaces to look historical. Still, he also enjoys designing modern architecture; one of his modern home projects, located on Mulholland Drive, was recently featured in Architectural Digest. His focus is generally residential design, which he enjoys because he gets to design personal space for people. ‘I feel like it’s like portraiture,’ Winston says. ‘I listen to the client and it is my responsibility to give them want they want.’ Catherine adds, ‘It takes a special kind of person to do residential design well because you’re dealing with a client or a family on a personal level, designing for a relationship.’ Winston is also a longtime member of the Pacific Palisades Civic League, which reviews architectural plans for new homes and remodels of existing homes in Tract 9300 (basically from Chautauqua west to Marquez, excluding the Huntington Palisades and hillside locations), to encourage better design and prevent structures that do not fit within the league’s guidelines regarding height, setbacks, lot coverage and landscaping. Daughters Annakate and Rebecca are also quite creative. Annakate, 18, who just graduated from Crossroads High School, will enroll at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts this fall, where she will major in dance. She is an accomplished ballerina and a great photographer. Rebecca, 15, is a student at the Frostig School in Pasadena. She is a talented artist and painter and has attended Brentwood Art Center for several years. This summer she plans to work as a junior counselor at Little Dolphins camp in Temescal Canyon. Meanwhile, Winston, who was at first skeptical of moving to Pacific Palisades, has changed his mind about the town. ‘Once I came here and once I had children, everything about the Palisades made sense,’ he says. ‘It’s very oriented to family life in a terrific way.’