2,640 square foot 3 bedroom 2.5 bath Harold Stoner Storybook home built in 1922. Last sold for $1.505 million in 2011 (94K under asking). Stoner designed more than 60% of the homes in the Balboa Terrace neighborhood.
About Storybook Style — 1920 to 1930s
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Storybook or fairytale style often has much in common with the bungalow, English Cottage, Tudor Revival, or Norman/French Revival styles and is often subsumed in those definitions. Its defining characteristic might best be described at the kind of house you'd imagine Seven Dwarves or some happy Hobbits heading home to at the end of a hard day of work.
Whimsical with towers, turrets, columns, and colonnades, the Storybook house often has mullioned casement windows, arched or half-round doors, stucco siding, half-timbering, and ornate hardware or lighting fixtures. This is a style that makes an extremely charming small house, though replicating such unique hand-crafted and irregular spaces today would be very expensive per square foot.
Design elements might be taken from a variety of folkloric sources, not just English fairytales. Moorish tile and arches from the Arabian Nights, or intricately carved woodwork straight out of the Russian fairy tales about Baba Yaga, would not be out of place.
As with the bungalow and ranch, the Storybook style originated in California. It was the child of the returning WWI veteran, who had discovered the charms of French and English residential architecture, and the Hollywood starlet who contributed her imagination and optimism with childlike enthusiasm.
SALES HISTORY
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1998 $445K
2004 $1.401 million
Interior Photos HERE
More about Harold G. Stoner HERE
