An Eye for Details

Where Gene Young found a space, he filled it.

Artisan, painter, furniture maker, metal worker and sculptor, Young, who died of natural causes last week at the age of 95, also found a way to reinvent, reshape and rethink most any household object.

In his stepdaughter’s house in Thousand Oaks, where Young spent the last years of his life, his artwork fits into nearly every corner, covers nearly every piece of furniture, fills every doorway. A design alchemist, he could turn a ceramic bowl into a table, make painted walls appear to be wallpaper, and fashion wood into faux marble.

His eye was for details, the small spaces that needed decoration.

“He had his hand in everything in this house,” said his stepdaughter, Helene Acton, surrounded almost entirely by her stepfather’s work. “Everything he saw had to be improved on.”

With his passing, Young leaves behind nearly a century of artwork: walls, cabinets, metal gates and, perhaps his greatest accomplishment, the home he built around himself in the hills near Simi Valley.

“His was a fooling kind of art,” said Dawn Kowalski, an admirer and neighbor in the puzzle-piece Santa Susana Knolls, an area that mirrors Young’s tendency to make things fit. Here, mansions are tucked into brambly hillsides, and tiny hunting shacks fit into the space between.

The small shack that Young lived in grew to become a kind of Shangri-La. Nicknamed The Gate, it was wooded, wild and evolved continuously over the 30 years he lived there.

It was a long road to Simi Valley for Young.

He was born Eugene Astrov in Russia in 1904--a period he never spoke about even to his closest friends. His family fled when he was 8 years old, passing through Ellis Island before eventually settling in Baltimore. His sister chose the name Young, borrowed from silent-film actress Helen Young.

He studied classical art at Maryland Art Institute, then owned an antique restoration shop in Baltimore. He served in the Army Air Corps. But what he really wanted to do was get to California, his stepdaughter said, where nature and daily life brushed up against each other.

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He eventually arrived in Burbank, Acton said, and found work with William Haines, a former silent-film star who became the designer to the stars. Young’s ornate painting and refinishing decorated the homes of stars such as Joan Crawford and Cary Grant, as well as other high-society folk.

Young liked to tell the story of when he was called in to solve a problem for the owners of the Hope diamond, who were planning a party to show off the gem. At the last minute--after moving a chest--they realized they had a huge blank space where the wallpaper didn’t reach. Young was called in to match it up, meticulously detailing the wall with paint. He left, just as Nat King Cole was walking in, ready to perform.

He moved into Santa Susana Knolls in the 1960s, drawn to the cheap prices and nature on every side. He and wife Ruth--a musician he met at a boarding house in Burbank and who died in the late 1970s--built their lives in a two-bedroom shack, just the way many Santa Susana residents have.

“You probably have to be quirky to be drawn to a place like this,” said Holly Huff, who has lived in the Knolls for 27 years. “When my husband first told me about it, he said, ‘I found this place where you can’t wear a dress.’ It was mud and brambles, all bikers and hippies.”

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During the prohibition era in the 1920s, the neighborhood was a center of drinking, according to Kowalski, who writes for a neighborhood newsletter. Some of the homes still have chutes into the basement, remnants of the speak-easy days.

From the time Young moved into the neighborhood, he spent the rest of his years turning his home into art. When he filled up his space, he moved onto Acton’s home, and then friend Dianna Baker Davis’.

“He turned it into a museum,” said Davis. “I was so affected by his humility. He’d hand me a work of art you couldn’t get in any gallery . . . and say, ‘Oh, here’s something.’ ”

Young’s world was art. He didn’t live lavishly; he never even had a television. But he was always doing work for free.

He was quiet, but articulate. “A lesson in refinement wherever he went,” according to Davis. He revered the masters, but couldn’t abide modern artists such as Picasso.

He worked well into his 80s, refinishing and building, detailing and painting.

And then, at 83, he cut off his thumb while working on a lathe.

He had to learn to paint without a thumb--slowly, laboriously, holding the brush between his two index fingers and inching it across a cabinet, as smoothly as he could.

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He finished his last work when he was 90, an ornate cabinet, full of drawers and detailing. After that, when his vision went, he could no longer work.

“That was devastating,” Acton said. And so he moved in with his stepdaughter. He walked slowly--”any slower and he would have been going backwards,” Acton said.

He never went back to the home that was so much a part of him.

It’s just as well.

“I’m glad he never saw what happened to his yard,” Kowalski said. “It was overgrown, very mysterious. They bulldozed it. He would have been heartbroken. It was his utopia.”

But Young’s house still stands, and his works survive in the homes of those he cared for, the people he blessed with his talent month after month.

“He left behind a lot for everybody,” Acton said. “He always said that’s why he lived such a life.”