THE DYNAMIC DUO / TOM LYSTER AND LAMONT LANGWORTHY

Meet Sonita and my Dad, Tom Lyster

Tom represented several roof truss companies starting in 1959 when they were being introduced in Southern California. He had Sonita show how strong roof trusses are.

Tom had a roof built on the ground so that Sonita could walk over the roof. I remember my Dad saying that Sonita checked the roof with her leading foot to make sure the roof would hold her weight.

Tom Lyster on the right with Gang Nail Truss. This is the company that invented the Gang Nail plate that gets pressed into the lumber at the connection of the adjoining wood members.

Trussco was the company Tom was working for when Sonita did her walk of fame !

When my Dad moved our family to Laguna Beach and bought a lot in a gully with a water course running through it, he told Lamont Langworthy he could design the house however he wanted as long as he used roof trusses. Lamont and my Dad came up with the attic truss for the top floor and master bedroom area.

This is our family house being built on Diamond Street in Laguna Beach in 1964

This photo is of Lamont and our family at the Diamond Street House was taken by Julius Shulman.

You can see the simplicity of the construction. 4 X 4 posts at 4 foot on center for the wall framing, 4 X 4 top plate, and the trusses sitting on top of the walls. All of the framing was exposed and as a kid I was always trying to find where they hid the nails that held the house together. The carpenters hid them very well.

Here you can see my Mom, Jackie, up in the attic truss, in another photo by Julius Shulman.

Once our house was complete I was looking out the window to the gully below and I saw a man put a for sale sign in the ground for the lot below ours. I alerted my Dad and he ran down to meet him. I watched them talk for a bit and then the sign was removed from the ground. My Dad had asked him if he could build a house on the lot and pay him when he sold the house. He agreed. This leads to the Bridge House and the Bridge Truss.

The second man on the Bridge Truss is Lamont and the third man is my Dad, Tom.

Here they are setting the second truss. The stream runs right under the house.

This is another great photo by Julius Shulman of the completed Bridge House.

Here is my Dad, Tom Lyster, featured in an article about the Bridge House in 2009.

The Bridge House paved the way for the Concept House. This was a prefabricated house that Lamont and my Dad came up with. This is the first one going in at the bottom of Park Avenue in Laguna Beach. My Dad built this one on speculation just like he had the Bridge House. It was completed in 1968.

I remember getting out of Junior High School to come down and help direct traffic on this day. Little did I know at the time that seven years later I would be working for the man on the left holding the rope. His name is Bob Rider and he is one of the best people I have known. Lamont and my Dad surrounded themselves with great people.

These are photos from the Concept Environment brochures.

This Bridge Truss allows the structure to cantilever a third of the length of the structure. A carport was built out of concrete block for two cars and then two 12 X 64 foot units were set on top.

 Los Angeles Times Home Magazine in 1970.

There were 100 of these units built and placed throughout California.

Tom and Lamont wanted to bring the Concept House into a Cal Expo Show with this helicopter but it was booked at the time.

Because the units could cantilever a third of their length, you could  stack them up, and so they did. This one was placed on a steep lot above Aliso Beach in Laguna Beach for Fred Lang. Fred wanted an office space for his Landscape Architecture business. Some of my friends worked for Fred and said it was a great place to work.

I have been building all kinds of compex structures on tough buiding sites in Laguna beach and this is right up there for a dramatic build !

Advertisement for The California Redwood Association. Lamont used redwood plywood on most of his houses in addition to milled cedar and redwood. It was a great material that is no longer manufactured.

A recent house that Lamont designed in Laguna Beach with my wife Marci and me. We sold it as a spec house the same way my Dad used to do.

Here is the Dynamic Duo after all these years.

I got to hear Lamont tell my Dad, " Tom, We did some cool stuff !"

Rockledge, Fred Briggs Architect, 1975

Original plans from the Hand Drawn Era

Construction of concrete structure, framing and deck beams being installed, 1975

Deck reconstruction and resealing of Mahogany siding in 1999

Ramp to move the 35 foot beam that weighed 1500 pounds down to the deck level

Beam set in place with three hand lifts that are supported by thirty foot tall scaffolding below

New 2 1/2 inch by 6 inch Teak decking being installed with weatherproof blind connection from below

Stainless steel angle connector being installed with weatherproofing applied over the top of the beam and angle connector to protect the structural beams below

Completed Teak deck with glass rail reinstalled and Mahogany resealed, 1999

Recent photo taken from the North from Villa Rockledge

Drone footage at 

https://vimeo.com/185164613

“I was cleaning my shop the other day and came across this set of plans.

It was 1975 and I was the youngest man on a crew of forty that built the Boyd Jeffries house. It was designed by Fred Briggs and was one of the largest houses being built on the California coast at the time. It was a hard edged modern design with no trim. The glass was run into formed channels in the concrete vertical columns rather than using traditional glass stops. The concrete forms were lined with 1X6 clear re-sawn western red cedar to give the concrete a wood texture.

The wood siding was Mahogany and the window and doors were Teak and also storefront anodized aluminum.

There were twenty craftsman working on placing the rebar and pouring the concrete. There were another twenty craftsman building the forms, lining them with the 1X6 cedar and setting the forms and then stripping them after the pour.

The concrete work and framing were done to perfection and all work was checked with string lines and spacer block gauges so that the work was within no more than 1/16” variation in 50’+ runs.

The general contractor was Harry Wanket out of San Diego County and he specialized in building very large houses.

There was an on site wood shop with complete milling operations for both the Teak and the Mahagony as the Teak dulled the blades due to a high sand content.

Working with this crew was a great opportunity as a young craftsman and taught me early in my career as a carpenter and future builder the techniques to build to the exacting standards necessary to build the incredible modern houses that are being designed today.

That was 1975 and I was 21 years old.

Then 26 years later I was called by a construction management company out of Utah to come repair the automatic Teak car gate. They had been referred to me and heard I was knowlegable about Teak.

Once I was on the site fixing the gate they asked if I could repair / replace the 2,000 square foot deck that sat 35 feet above the beach. I had been a part of the crew that set these beams and the 2 1/2” X 5 1/2” Teak boards to make the deck in 1975.

This was now 1999 and the deck was over 25 years old. The glu-lam beams had rotted like all deck joists do but these were 6X24 and 6X36 beams that we had set with our yard crane when the job was built.

I thought about how to do the job for several days.

I considered a large crane from the highway but decided against trying to work with Cal Trans and close a lane for several days.

We considered a barge from the ocean and a helicopter.

I then talked to the neighbor to the north in the old Villa Rockledge. I proposed I remove a row of his pine trees to get the crane down off the highway and on to a shared back driveway and then plant new trees when we were done. It was going to work, but then he decided against it.

So I went back to all I learned from the old timers and asked myself how they would have done it. Then it hit me, old school, a ramp. So we built a long ramp from the back driveway down to the deck area. We built a scaffold up from the beach to satisfy the new safety requirements that have changed quite a bit since we built the deck in 1975.

The lumber truck delivered the beams to the lower driveway, we slid them onto the ramp and eased them down the ramp and rolled them onto 3 hand cranes, or Genie Lifts, that can each lift 500 pounds and lifted the biggest 35’ beam into place. It weighed 1500 pounds.

We then attached a continuous stainless steel “L” angle to the side of the beams and the bottom of the decking to make the connection from below resist the water intrusion that had caused the beams to rot.

Prior to attaching the Teak down, we ran Bituthene rubber that covered the top of the beam and the angles on each side and about 1/2” more to create a cover so that the water would not work it’s way into the structural beams or the Teak decking as it had before.

It was a real treat to be back working on that site and reliving all the memories of the initial construction.

I recently toured Villa Rockledge and was able to get some current photos of the house.

About 15 years ago I was able to work with Fred Briggs again remodeling the first house he designed when he graduated from USC Architecture School.

It was a very small house in Corona Del Mar but was treated just as important as all the big jobs he had done. He had Jana Ruzicka design the landscaping and Claire Robinson design the interiors. The owner was the librarian from USC and I remember talking to her about the break up of the USSR as that was just about to happen.

I always learn many things on many levels working on these jobs.

The one thing Fred kept repeating to me as we were working on the little job, that really stuck with me, was “defer, defer, defer. Always defer to the architect”.

But I already knew that from the Rockledge job.”