One-of-a-kind house returns from the ashes

Before Anne and James Hubbell's Wynola, Calif., home was reborn this year, before it caught fire in 2003, even before its first indoor kitchen was built in the early 1960s, the place looked different from other houses.

Like a Hobbit's retreat, perhaps, or oversized shells from some distant sea bottom. Its materials were raw, its contours irregular and organically curved.

The designer wanted it to look as if it had grown out of the hilltop. But to really understand the place, you had to hear the story.

In 1958, James Hubbell, an artist and artisan, and Anne Hubbell, a teacher and musician, decided to build their dream house in San Diego County. They were in their 20s, and James was working for Sim Bruce Richards, an architect and follower of Frank Lloyd Wright, who relied on Hubbell for ironwork, stained-glass windows, mosaic tile works, and fanciful sculptures.

The Hubbells decided they would build their own place the same way, on a 10-acre ridge studded with oak, manzanita and granite boulders, the ground thick with chaparral. For the land, they paid $3,500.

They built a room or two at a time, letting the lay of the trees and rocks dictate their plans, adding as new sons arrived and the needs of Hubbell's art studio arose. Over time, the couple boosted the site to about 45 acres.

Eventually, the household grew to include four sons and eight buildings loosely circled around a hilltop pool. While James Hubbell won larger commissions from clients worldwide, his home became an architectural celebrity, cited in the American Institute of Architects' guide to San Diego County.

Then, in late 2003, came a sky filled with smoke and flames. The fire blackened 300,000 acres, destroyed more than 2,200 homes, and killed 15 people. The Hubbells, who had been in New York, saw the smoke from their landing plane. In a day and a half, as the flames advanced, they grabbed what they could and fled.

The following morning, Hubbell sneaked past barricades and spent 45 minutes watching his home smolder. Four of the eight structures were gutted. Anne's harp was gone. So were hundreds of heirlooms and artworks, tools, furniture and more.

There was no insurance; the location was too vulnerable to fire, the buildings too unusual, carriers told them.

"I'm determined not to let it ruin the rest of my life. I'm not going to give it my misery," James Hubbell said that day. With firefighting helicopters zooming above, he returned the next day with his wife and three of their sons.

"The ground was gray, the sky was gray, everything was gray," remembers Marianne Gerdes, a family friend who joined the Hubbells. "Your feet sunk into the ash because the ground was all burned, a few inches down."

Yet Hubbell, she recalled, was "pulling out philosophical words" about how the San Diego River would carry the house's ashes to sea, with transformation to follow.

Within a week, the Hubbells were cleaning up, trying to get power restored, their well working, and the rebuilding under way. Their son Drew, an architect, got the reroofing permits. Mark Tighe, a Ramona, Calif., builder, artisan and reclaimed-materials specialist who had worked with Hubbell, took on roofs, doors, windows and more.

"It was a real adventure," Tighe says. Because so much of the stone, concrete and adobe work had been shaped around a now-absent wooden framework, he had to "build it in reverse," fitting door frames and windows around surviving walls and floors.

Though starting over in their 70s was a struggle, both Hubbells agree, it made them appreciate the energy and generosity of family, friends and community; it made them resolve to refine and streamline their living space. And it prompted them to ready the property to serve as a cultural and educational venue when they're gone.

The first step in recovering from the fire, Hubbell knew, would be putting the studio operation back together. A team of five or six employees usually worked three days a week on the property.

The first studio, the main house and the master bedroom were gutted in the fire, leaving only stone, iron, concrete and charred adobe walls that would have to be chipped away and replastered. But the boys' room survived with only one significant loss: the stained-glass bathroom skylight, which crashed to the floor. After weeks of living with family and friends, the Hubbells spent the next three years using the boys' room as their new home base.

Much of James Hubbell's studio and gallery space escaped damage, but the largest studio building was a near-total loss. About $40,000 worth of colored glass, much of it imported from France, fused, warped and shattered inside along with many of Hubbell's tools. Other casualties included three sheds that held hundreds of artworks.

In the reconstruction, Hubbell chose not to change the footprint of the buildings. But he did want more light to reach into the original studio, "to be anchored to the ground, but open to the universe." He and Tighe raised the roof 21/2 feet and added clerestory windows.

For almost all the reconstruction wood, Hubbell used reclaimed cedar, freshly milled from local fire-damaged trees. In the bathroom, Hubbell and his helpers made a mosaic of Anne's mother's china, which had broken in the fire. Spotting the old wrought-iron door hinges in the ruins, Tighe sandblasted them, powder-coated them, and put them back to use.

With the fourth anniversary of the fire on Oct. 25, the Hubbells are still trying to buy insurance. They've laid out nearly a mile of new trails on the property. There are plans for a new building to hold archives. A studio staffer has rehabilitated more than 40 of James Hubbell's small bronze and iron sculptures that came through the fire. And Hubbell's watercolors have taken on new tones.

"I did get really interested in black," he says. "Gray black. Blue black. Indigo. ... "