Ray Kappe’s Monumental Fireplace, from House Feature to Historic Artwork

In 2025, with my nonprofit House Museum, I started a preservation initiative called “Project Chimney” and began rescuing six surviving chimneys of historically significant homes that succumbed to the Palisades Fire for a permanent memorial in the Santa Monica Mountains.

To help my team with the selection process, I turned to the Getty Research Institute. It was there that I learned the story of Los Angeles–based modernist architect Ray Kappe’s Erdley House.

In 1959, Kappe (1927–2019) was beginning his career. Hal and Celeste Erdley, whose family grew to include five children—Lori, Karen, Alyssa, Julie, and Jeremy—commissioned him to design a hillside home in Pacific Palisades. The developing neighborhood was idyllic for young professionals seeking expansion along the sun-filled Southern California coast. Kappe’s Erdley House was built on El Medio (“the middle”) Avenue, in the middle of Los Angeles’s urban sprawl and middle of the century.

The residence shared a likeness to Kappe’s parents’ home on Woodcrest Drive in Sherman Oaks. “I told [Kappe] how much I liked that house,” recalled 97-year-old Celeste Erdley when I spoke to her after the fires. In response to her wishes for a similar design, Erdley House included an elevated entryway, post-and-beam construction, and large rear windows to frame the California landscape of coast live oaks, mule deer, and chaparral flora.

Original drawings of Erdley House are held in the Institute’s Special Collections. The floor and site plan features hand-drawn graphite lines that render a midcentury modern home intersecting the fluid slope of a Palisadian hillside. Three rooms deep, the horizontal home aligns with the street, creating a layout for the Erdleys to travel railroad style between bedrooms and communal spaces. The entrance opened to the family room where a concrete block fireplace and chimney stood. Like one of Sol Lewitt’s concrete block structures, Kappe’s masonry core held a weighted presence at the home’s center.

Kappe aligned with the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, who brought concrete blocks to prominence in Los Angeles in the early 1920s through his Millard, Ennis, Freeman, and Storer residences. This high-density, fireproof material was adopted in increased measures throughout Kappe’s architectural career. At Erdley House, however, unreplicated at other homes, Kappe’s fireplace and chimney exceeded industry standards to include a built-in 15-gallon fish tank, television alcove, and extended concrete block surround. Its raised hearth sat 12 inches above the floor, serving as a place for warmth, relief, and family portraits.

This modular structure was designed to contain fire, yet as flames engulfed the home, Kappe’s fireplace system was all that survived. Like a military defense, the chimney held its place as a landmark amidst unrecognizable terrain. Now, Kappe’s surviving chimney is one of seven that will stand as a memorial in the Pacific Palisades—commemorating loss and honoring the resilience of LA’s fire-affected community.