Ray Bradbury's dandelion-yellow home of half a century is on the market
I just returned from a visit to Ray Bradbury's house.
There is nothing futuristic about it whatsoever.
And somehow, that's a beautiful thing.
The beloved science fiction author, who wrote "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" among many, many other pieces, lived there for more than half a century. He and his wife raised four daughters there. His wife, Maggie, died there in 2003, as did he two years ago at 91 years old. (Click here or on a photo to see a gallery of the home, plus many quotes by and about Bradbury and his home.)
The home has been stripped of almost all its personal effects, and yet his imprint is everywhere, sometimes literally. The split-level in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles' Westside has stairs seemingly everywhere; a grab bar at the step-up threshhold between the foyer and the dining room is worn, and I imagine his elderly hand gripping it to steady his weakening bulk. The right-side refrigerator handle is likewise soiled; I picture him sneaking late-night snacks that contribute to his bulk, which makes me smile even as I type that.
Up half a flight of stairs are several bedrooms. The Bradburys added homespun shelves to every single room to contain his sprawling collection of books, tchotchkes, stuffed animals ... "golfballs, birdnests, bits of iron from the demolished railroad tracks" (those last items "little touchstones from around the neighborhood" that his friend Bill Goodwin would collect for him -- "He enjoyed these treasures, and sent me to find more," Goodwin said in his eulogy).
I even opened a shower door and laughed out loud to find the "walk-in" shower so stuffed with custom-built shelves that walking in would have been impossible (shown in slide 17 of our gallery). I wonder what he kept there.
The house isn't huge, at only 2,500 square feet, but you can easily get lost in it or lose your bearings. The rooms are like warrens, and the basement -- where Bradbury did most of his daily writing until his infirmity prevented him from descending the narrow stairs -- is both enormous and claustrophobic, with its own chambers and, of course, shelves upon shelves upon shelves. An odd stuffed cat still sits on one shelf (slide 21 of our gallery), maybe overlooked by the property's caretakers or perhaps just left by someone with a sense of whimsy.
The asking price for the 3-bedroom, 3-bath home is about $1.5 million, said Rory Posin, who, along with Kristian Bonk, runs the firm that has the listing, Results Real Estate Group with Re/Max. A few admirers have talked a bit about trying to band together to buy and preserve it, but that doesn't seem likely to happen in a prestigious neighborhood of Southern California where the real estate market is yet again scorching. A 10,000-square-foot lot is awfully valuable here, and razing of the house seems more likely.
Update, 10-ish a.m. PT, May 21, 2014: Sam Weller, Bradbury's biographer, emailed me to mention that he wrote an essay about the house a month after Bradbury died. It's a beautiful piece called "Come Home" that's worth reading in its entirety. Here's an excerpt:
"On halcyon California days, the girls played badminton on the small parcel of grass in the backyard. And today, all those decades later, a shuttlecock still sits in a rusty rain gutter. Their father, unapologetically sentimental, never wanted to remove it. Leave it alone, he thought, so time could stand still. So the girls could stay young forever.
"'I love my daughters,' the older Ray Bradbury often said, 'but I miss my children.'
Tonight, in the house, the lights are off. Inside, the countless books sitting on the many shelves throughout the home almost seem to know he will never open them again. He used to love coming down the three steps into the living room late at night, pulling the chain on an old green banker's lamp (a prop remnant from the 1983 film adaptation of his novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes). He would pluck a book off of one of the clean white built-in shelves and settle into a plump arm chair and open and read it and think: By God, I wrote that! And, By God! It's good!"
