Innovative, small post-WWII coastal homes detailed in book

DALY CITY --They emerge from the Westlake fog in a palette of pastels -- green, pink, blue, yellow -- hopeful postwar homes with inward-angled roofs and curious wood ornamentation.

Made with prefabricated sections of redwood, the Henry Doelger homes sold for as little as $11,000 in 1949 when the first split- level, two-bedroom dwellings sprang up between Cliffside and Fieldcrest drives north of John Daly Boulevard.

Reviled in song in 1962, the year the final houses went up around Westpark and Skyline drives, the signature dwellings of Westlake were lambasted as "little boxes made of ticky-tacky ... little boxes all the same."

But times they have a-changed and folkie Malvina Reynold's sneering sentiment is hardly the final word on a neighborhood that embodies Atomic Age America's optimism. Today's unquenchable appetite for retro has made Doelger's once ultra-affordable tract homes seem pretty hip.

"A lot of them look like jet airplanes that want to take off," said Rob Keil, 37, author of "Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb," which went on sale Friday. "There was this need to create a sort of newness in the suburbs that was related to the space age and technology and the future.

"After World War II and the Depression -- those were the Old World. People wanted to forget what happened in the previous 15 years."

That led Doelger, born into the very unsuburban, unsavory Barbary Coast in 1896, to fashion a chunk of the Sunset District, then Westlake and finally Pacifica's Fairmont, into his own vision of a planned community. He would have continued to Half Moon Bay if coastal regulations hadn't got in the way.

The 6,500 houses and 3,000 apartments his company built in Daly City, were an opportunity for the average working man to buy his slice of the American pie close to Doelger shopping centers, schools and Joe's of Westlake restaurant.

"The same house that you would have bought for $11,000 now goes for about $725,000," Keil said. "That's, I think, testament to the enduring draw of Westlake as a desirable place to live."

Keil, an art director for Gauger + Associates advertising in San Francisco, lives in the Highlands subdivision with his girlfriend, Esperanza Santiago, 34, a career counselor at Stanford University. He grew up in Doelger homes in the Sunset and in Pacifica, but didn't explore their history in detail until a few years ago. "I was doing a little remodeling in our living room and I pulled down some Sheetrock , and I found a pack of cigarettes in the wall," he said. "I thought, 'Someone dropped this in here 47 years ago.' And it made me think of who these people were who built this neighborhood."

That led him to track down the living links to the story, including architect Mario Ciampi, who died in July at age 99 and designed five schools in the area, including Oceana High School in Pacifica where Keil attended.

The author also found Ed Hageman, who designed many of the architectural motifs that adorn the Doelger homes. Living in the Sleepy Hollow area near San Anselmo, Hageman, 90, and his wife of 65 years, Bette, met after he was hired for $18 a week to draft the details of Doelger's seven basic facades. Bette was a receptionist at the office.

Hageman said one of his innovations, the "fish and chips" home on Westbrook Avenue pictured on Keil's book cover, was a fluke design with odd angles that became a hit with buyers around Alemany (now John Daly) Boulevard.

"I drew that one as a joke, it reminds me of a place where you'd go out and buy fish and chips on the roadside," he said. "I used to bring about 20 of these over to Henry a month. He bought every one of them, even if he didn't like them -- 'Oh, looks pretty good.' That turned out to be the most popular house in Westlake.

"It was kind of, trying to jazz 'em up a little bit with plane lines and all that. Just for the heck of it, I start tilting them in different directions, going in like a 'V' in the middle. They caught on and they were using them quite a bit."

These days, publications as far afield as The New York Times and Atomic Ranch magazine sing the praises of "one-nail Doelger's" balance of economy -- he milled his own lumber and centralized his floorplans around one set of plumbing -- and style.

So why all the fuss about a sock hop-era suburb?

"Every square foot of space is usable space," Keil said of the homes. "It's not suburban dreck, it's not just some cheaply built thing that Doelger threw up and split town. He lived there.

"The new 'urban village' concept is basically a smart suburb, homes built around a shopping center or an office building. That's being touted as this new urbanism. Henry Doelger and his people back in 1949 were already doing this and doing a good job of it."

Ruben Bunag, who lives on Avalon Drive in the Palisades area, bought his Doelger home 20 years ago for $166,000. He used the equity on the house, now worth $750,000, to publish Manila Mail newspaper and buy several apartment buildings.