A modern relic

THERE IS no state-of-the-art media room, no marble spa bathroom, nor some of the other luxuries one might expect at the home of "High School Musical" creator Bill Borden and modern architect Melinda Gray. Their Santa Monica house is a simple ranch, a 100-foot-long rectangle fronted by a loggia, its seven archways formed of fat bricks salvaged from an old kiln. "Our kids go to the same school as Jamie Lee Curtis', and when she came over, she said, 'You're like hippies who made enough money to buy a big house,' " Borden says. "It's just not a fancy house."

The once-ramshackle hacienda was built by a Swedish boat builder in 1932 for Leo Carrillo, the cowboy movie star best known as Pancho, sidekick to TV's Cisco Kid. Lesser folk might have restored the fanciful structure as a period piece or just torn it down, but those options were anathema to self-proclaimed "complete modernists" Borden and Gray, who instead applied their contemporary design sensibility while preserving the integrity of the vernacular architecture.

As the producer who launched the MTV musical "The American Mall" this week and the creative force behind Gray Matter Architecture, the couple didn't lack for resources or imagination. Nonetheless, it was a challenge reconciling what the house had been and what they wanted it to become.

"When we first bought it, one side of me secretly hoped an earthquake would bring the house down," Gray says with a laugh.

"With every change I have had to ask myself, what will I do here that makes the most sense while trying to be honest about how it was in the beginning?"

With thick adobe walls, low tile roof and long eaves that make air-conditioning unnecessary, the house was green for its time. But it also had been cast into shadow by mature oaks and nearby mountains. "I couldn't even read a book in the daytime," Gray says. "It really needed natural light."

She installed a skylight that floods the living room with sunshine, illuminating wooden trusses and beams. The kitchen, closed off and claustrophobic, became more airy once a wall was removed and another skylight added. New open shelving, poured concrete islands and an unrestricted flow into the adjacent work space and lounge created a great room with a Spanish accent.

In the loggia, Gray hired retail storefront glaziers to painstakingly fit glass into the brick arches. For the larger openings, she designed steel walkout doors and a 10-by-6 1/2 -foot window on a sliding track.