Houses

Which way to the Michael White Adobe? "The what?" "Is that, like, a classroom or something?" "I have no idea." After the final bell at San Marino High School, students making a getaway to parents' cars or sports practice have little time for a question they don't understand. But follow the echoes of water splashing and the clink of bats hitting balls, and you'll discover a tiny house that looks decidedly out of place between the campus pool and baseball diamond. Here lies the 164-year-old Michael White Adobe, currently on the market for $1. Unbeknownst to many of the 1,150 students enrolled at San Marino, a national blue ribbon school that has undergone $35 million of renovations in the last 10 years, the adobe is at the center of a debate over old and new. Local history buffs say the adobe, built a century before the high school was even founded, represents a valuable piece of the city's narrative and is in need of preservation.

Since curating Frank Gehry's first major retrospective, an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1986, Mildred Friedman has written extensively about the master architect. For her latest book, she has selected 21 of Gehry's most significant, mid-career residential buildings from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The houses predate Gehry's best-known works and, with a couple of exceptions, are free of computer-aided-design structures. Friedman's choices underscore the organic nature of Gehry's early experimentation with form and materials, and they illustrate the creative spirit of the houses.

Regarding the story, "Dreary outlook on home prices," Dec. 27: UCLA economist Edward Leamer tells us, in regard to our real estate market: "When you're sick, you need medicine for the disease, not the symptoms." Given his past predictions -- as recently as December 2007 that there would be no recession in 2008 -- one needs to question his diagnostic acumen and thus his proposed remedy. He believes the disease to be rapidly falling housing prices and their attendant ill effects of foreclosures and "fire sale" prices.

The boyhood home of Pulitzer-winning author Cormac McCarthy, long abandoned and overgrown, has been destroyed by a fire even as preservationists tried in recent months to save it. "We have lost a literary landmark," Kim Trent, executive director of the nonprofit Knox Heritage group, said Wednesday, a day after the two-story wood-frame structure in Knoxville, Tenn., was reduced to a smoldering ruin. It was a blow for a city that also failed to save the early homes of Pulitzer-winning writer James Agee and poet Nikki Giovanni.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has placed a section of the Pitchess Detention Center on lockdown after a possible outbreak of meningitis, a department spokesman said Thursday. The Pitchess South compound, which houses 230 inmates, was ordered quarantined Tuesday when an inmate became ill, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore. The area was expected to be locked down for a week. -- Andrew Blankstein

More than 400,000 people have left their homes after an earthquake rocked southwestern China, killing one person and destroying thousands of houses, state news media said. Thursday's magnitude 6.0 quake, centered in Yunnan province's Yao'an County, left 325 people injured, 24 seriously, the New China News Agency reported. Yunnan Television showed displaced residents sleeping outdoors in makeshift beds of brightly colored quilts. Others packed into emergency tents, bundles of provisions and clothing in tow. Often people leave even undamaged houses after earthquakes because they are afraid to sleep indoors as aftershocks continue to shake the area.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised to build new houses for the victims of massive mudslides in Sicily that killed at least 22 people and left more than 500 homeless. Berlusconi visited the devastated area around the eastern coastal city of Messina and met with survivors who were being housed in hotels. He promised them the government would build new houses -- complete with sheets, flowers and a week's worth of groceries -- just as it did for the survivors of an April 6 earthquake in L'Aquila, central Italy.

A father and son were treated for smoke inhalation from an early morning house fire in Covina on New Year's Day, according to Los Angeles County Fire Department officials. The fire occurred at a home on Cameron Avenue near Grand Avenue. The blaze, which was started by embers from the fireplace, began at 1:20 a.m. and was put out about 50 minutes later, fire officials said. The blaze caused about $30,000 damage to the $1.6-million house.

For landscape architect Mark Rios of Rios Clementi Hale Studios in Los Angeles, home gyms represent a "sustainable solution" to working out. "My clients don't have to get in a car and drive anywhere--and they're a lot more likely to exercise." The homeowners knew they wanted a gym when Rios began renovating their 1937 Lloyd Wright residence in West Los Angeles. Initially, they considered converting a basement area behind their TV room. Rios suggested a quieter, light-filled space--and then proposed additional landscaping.

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico MICHELE CONNOR calls her ranch "a hunting lodge where there's no hunting," 20 acres greened by fields of alfalfa and shared with six dogs, 10 horses, a dozen sheep and a couple of burros, not to mention the chickens, geese and peacocks. It's a scene that reminds Connor of childhood, when she would play with dolls and imagine an escape far from the city. "I would make little corrals and play with little animals," Connor says. "That was my fantasy.