Before & After: From Drab and Dingy to Color-Pop Midcentury Modern
Green just didn’t suit this cliffside Los Angeles duplex.
Multiple shades of green cast a beat-up-motel vibe over what was once a chic pad built for an advertising exec in the 1960s.
So owner Chris Karlen decided to ditch the moldy greens and went for more of a Mondrian look, painting it white and popping colors over doors and panels.
That wasn’t the only thing he changed. Inside were even more washed-out green hues, plus wood-paneled walls, rotting decks and dingy kitchens. They have now been swapped out for hardwood floors, midcentury modern details and usable outdoor space.
Karlen purchased the Silver Lake neighborhood property in 2004 for $690,000 and began fixing it up about a year after, he tells Yahoo Real Estate. His dad was a plumbing contractor and he has worked in construction with friends who were contractors, which gave him enough knowledge to undertake the project himself.
But it was a painstakingly slow process—Karlen is no big-money house flipper—so he had to do each project one at a time.
“I’ve had to do everything in stages, whenever I had the money to do it. It was way more work than I anticipated,” he says with a laugh.
Especially the unexpected, decidedly nonglamorous projects: The driveway had to be redone, the siding fixed; and the decks were downright dangerous, he says.
That meant living amid construction for almost a decade. During that time, local real estate agent Tracy Do, who tends to attract these kinds of fashionably renovated homes, had her eye on it. When it came time for Karlen to sell, he contracted Tracy and showed her what it once was.
“He brought the ‘before’ photos to show me and I just said, ‘Wow,’” Do says. “I couldn’t believe what he’d done with the place.”
Now the duplex is on the market for $1.4 million. Each unit has two bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms, with very similar open floor plans. The large decks ringing the property look out over the Silver Lake Reservoirs and the San Gabriel Mountains.
