I kept clicking refresh, looking for the house on Revello Drive.
I scanned the Los Angeles County recovery website for a week for any word about whether a house in Pacific Palisades might have survived the fires. I searched online for nearby landmarks — ones that survived, ones that succumbed — to convince myself the house still stood.
The reason for my dedication was just how distinctive this house was, both in its character and what it marked in my life — the crossing of that elusive shadow line between childhood and adulthood. My family rented the home when I graduated from U.C.L.A. in 2017, nine people packed into its four bedrooms.
It was a Spanish colonial jewel, with a terraced backyard overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway. The house was filled with rattan screens, stained glass, spiral staircases and arched decorative doors that led to all the rooms. But by far the greatest feature was what my family came to call “the gargoyle bar” — a lower-level room with fresco walls, a low-barreled ceiling and a bar propped up by two gargoyle statues. Here we ended each night, listening to music and laughing.
The owner told me that the wacky house décor had all been collected from various old Hollywood movie sets, as the man who built the home was a set decorator. Some of the artistic flair also came from the owner’s father.
We celebrated in this house, toasting our family, who had immigrated from Ireland — far from gargoyle bars and Pacific Ocean views. As we all get older, we gather on trips less and less frequently. The visit to Revello Drive lingers in our memories, all these years later.
Last week, as I refreshed the recovery website once more, the house on Revello Drive popped up — not as it is in my memory, with its white plaster facade and tile roof, but as a bright-red house icon: the county website’s online marker for a destroyed home. I clicked on the two pictures accompanying the notification. The house was reduced to rubble, save for the stone chimney, which stands defiantly, ocean waves still crashing in the background.
As I broke the news to my family that the house was gone, a striking thought kept coming up: What if the gargoyles survived? We reasoned that the bar was below street level, and the gargoyles were made of tough stuff.
We can always hope.
