Perfect People, Perfect Houses

There is a pervasive loneliness about the house on Somerset Place, a distortion in the perfection that otherwise characterizes the street. It stands apart, isolated by appearance, crouched behind high shrubbery, existing in a world that finds it unacceptable.

Houses do have lives, you know. They come to represent who we are, showy or shy, and reflect both our values and our personalities as extensions of our deeper selves. Like the clothes we wear and the cars we drive, the buildings we live in are us.

It becomes an intriguing game, therefore, to shape the woman in the odd house on a perfect street in San Marino. We know little of Mathilde Victoria Claypool, but we do know something about her house.

It’s a small, one-story, white-washed building barely visible behind the thick, towering shrubbery and a padlocked gate. Even its windows are painted over, giving the place a shimmery, ghostly appearance on a day of radiant heat.

The house is all the more intriguing because it exists on a street of rigid geometry. In a community where the average household income is $100,000, gardeners abound. As a result, the lawns are universally trim and green, the flowers patterned and brilliant. The homes are without flaws.

Like cultured and self-assured matrons, these perfect places view the house behind the shrubbery with disdain. It is simply not of their class.

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The situation came to my attention because the city of San Marino wants the Claypool home changed or else. This is not a community that bears nonconformity with restraint. A tidy regimen of trees and lawns and flowers is important here.

Neighbors began complaining a decade ago that the house was a disreputable anomaly on their perfect block. City crews were sent out to trim back the growth and to clean up a cluttered front yard. But bushes grow again and fences fall into disrepair. So this time San Marino went to court.

Mathilde Claypool was ordered to at least repair her fence. No one seems to know whether she actually did. The gate that blocks the driveway tilts inward. Metal grills lean against it from the inside. A wire stretches across its exterior.

And the bushes and trees continue to grow.

I stood before the house in awe. Not that I’ve never seen an overgrown yard. Not that I have never seen an unattended house. I’ve just never seen one on a street with such precise parameters.

San Marino requires conformity. A car cannot be visible in a driveway for more than 48 hours continuously. Only one family is allowed for each home. Trash cans cannot be visible from the street.

But, still, the city is not without compassion. “I feel bad for her [Claypool],� Mayor Betty Brown said to me. “I’m sure she has had sad moments and needs help.�

Nevertheless, an injunction will be served again soon. She cleans up or the city will do it for her and add the cost to her property taxes. And you pay your taxes or lose your home.

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Claypool has occupied the house for 35 years. Chris Sutton, an attorney who represented her until she stopped answering his letters, says she is an elderly, legally blind widow who just wants to be left alone. She apparently has neither the money nor the inclination to achieve the state of domiciliary perfection valued by her neighbors.

“She’s just barricaded herself in,� Brown says. “She marches to the beat of a different drummer,� a city planner adds. “She’s strange,� a neighbor tells me.

Claypool has never appeared before the city to plead her case. Instead, she proclaimed her position in a letter that equaled the oddity of her situation. “It’s not a public home,� she wrote. “It’s a lifestyle.�

I stood before that strange and shimmery house and shouted like a fool across its “No Trespassing� sign for attention from its occupant. No door opened. Even my raised voice was an intrusion into the block’s serenity.

At a different time and in a different place, we would have taunted Mathilde Claypool as a witch. But we know now that there are no witches, only those who stand apart from the rest of us, who build barriers to protect their ills or their individuality from armies of conformity.

And so the house stands as one woman’s representation, but its existence flies in the face of San Marino’s homogeneity. Change it or move, the city whispers, and let that perfect block in that perfect community settle back into its precise and perfect placidity.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at [email protected].