Flight 415

The editor of the new SF-based travel magazine Everywhere has made his family’s Bernal Heights home an urban “boneyard.” (Yes, that’s a good thing.)

LEFT: Tall glass doors by Nana Wall Systems bring the outside in. RIGHT: The couple enjoys their terraced backyard from a pair of red trapezoidal chairs by Konstantin Grcic for Magis. Lappin and Avril first admired them in black at the De Young’s Museum Cafe. The woven ottoman is by Monument from Roche Bobois. (photography by Kee Photography)

Judging by the sum contents of Todd Lappin’s Bernal Heights home—the only one in the neighborhood painted the exact color of the Golden Gate Bridge—it would not require a stretch of the imagination to think that the former editor at Wired and the now-folded Business 2.0 might, in a previous life, have been a 1940s American naval officer guiding submarines through enemy waters, or a bomber pilot doing his part to protect the country’s airspace. You’ll find, for instance, that each appliance in the naval-laboratory-inspired galley kitchen is labeled with tiny engraved metal signs salvaged from the naval shipyard at Hunter’s Point, so that the microwave takes on the identity of “frequency analyzer” and the coffee machine becomes a “fuel pump.” (All of this classification was recently confusing to a visiting repairman, who took one look at the “control amplifier” tag on the dishwasher and said, in all sincerity, “That’s not a Bosch.”) The steel drums serving as end tables throughout the house came from a bomb shelter at Yale University; the ground-floor bathroom is outfitted with a mechanical Japanese-style toilet by Brondell, a tow-truck hold that acts as a soap dish and a goggle-cleaning station; and an old radiation detector in Lappin’s home office—with blinking lights and noises identical to the rough idle of an old Rambler automobile—keeps him entertained while he’s editing his most recent publishing endeavor, a user-generated travel magazine called Everywhere (its premier issue, featuring a vibrant montage of Tokyo stories and photos from globetrotters all over the world, should be on stands December 3).  Walking into the house, you would find it hard to ignore the salvaged segment of a Boeing 707 fuselage hanging on the living-room wall, its trademark oval passenger windows backlit by a simple string of lights. Lappin purchased it for $350 at an airplane “boneyard” in Tucson, AZ, better known as the place where Patrick Dempsey’s character in the 1987 movie Can’t Buy Me Love brings his amour to view the moon’s craters. Lappin’s associations with the place, however, are considerably less sticky-sweet: “We’re normally shielded from seeing aircrafts exposed and torn apart,” he explains. “We prefer to see them as masterworks of technology rather than the highly evolved cousins of an aluminum beer can. It’s like seeing a cadaver, or an anatomical dissection. Fascinating, but unsettling.”

LEFT: The machinery in the “Control Panel” was found at the Alemany Flea Market and on eBay. RIGHT: Lappin spent a weekend refinishing this piece of Boeing 707 hull.

As proof of the opposites-attract theory, Lappin’s wife, Nicole Avril, a former executive director of GenArt and a trustee at the Headlands Center for the Arts, is a minimalist at heart. The 37-year-old, who now works as a director at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, has, as she says, grown to appreciate the home’s atmosphere of “scientific-industrial modernism,” and has even contributed her own discoveries to the look. (Credit her with finding the laundry-room door—from an old medical examiner’s office, it reads “Autopsy: Authorized Personnel Only”—at Urban Ore in Berkeley.) Still, Avril admits there are a few things in their home that she could live without. “I’d love to clear some of the surfaces of old military paraphenalia, and I’m not a fan of war-themed items in the house,” says Avril, whose own collection of works by local emerging artists, scattered in the living room and upstairs master bedroom, includes a 2003 inkjet print by Ken Fandell called The Sky Above My Girlfriend’s Head, as well as Woman Working, an aquatint etching by Hung Liu. Avril’s less-is-more sentiment may be attributed to a desire to raise their now-three-month-old daughter, Miel, in an environment of peace-related objets, but may also reflect a bit of residual distress from the home’s major two-year renovation, during which the 1906 “neutered Edwardian” (as Lappin affectionately refers to it) resembled a veritable battlefield. “This is a picture of Nicole making her ‘holy-shit’ face,” says Lappin, narrating a series of “before” pictures on his Flickr account. “It was squalid. When the previous owners moved out, they left us with dirty underwear and beer cans and graffiti.” (Surely, there must have been some redeeming quality? Some good reason to leave their cavernous, 1,800-square-foot Victorian flat in the Mission, for which they were paying—thanks to the wonders of rent control—just $1,600 a month? “Redeeming qualities? It was cheap,” Avril says frankly.) Only four real elements of architecture remain from the original house, which the couple purchased through a friend of a friend in 2003: a few exterior walls, the Douglas fir floors in the living room, a portion of the roof and a piece of molding near the staircase. This is mostly because they had to gut the home for the remodel, but it’s also thanks to the “modernization” the house suffered in the 1940s, which stripped all the details that typically provides the charm of such turn-of-the-century structures.

LEFT: The salvaged Scandinavian Airlines beverage cart. MIDDLE: a model of a Boeing 757 soars atop an old sailors’ locker. RIGHT: a cockpit loudspeaker from a Boeing 707.

Architectural designer Christi Azevedo drew up blueprints for the house that included a 700-square-foot addition (now the kitchen and dining room) and plans to replace the crumbling foundation and make the ground-floor areas (the laundry room and Lappin’s home office) a legal height of at least nine feet. They also incorporated the hull of the Boeing jet. “That was Christi’s test: I told her I could get big pieces of airplane to use in the house. She didn’t run screaming,” says Lappin, whose aviation collection also includes a vintage Scandinavian Airlines beverage cart filled with glassware from TWA and Pan Am; a pair of custom-designed aluminum closet doors in the master bedroom, which were riveted and scuffed to resemble airplane wings; and a staged aircraft “crash site” in the newly landscaped backyard. A bent propeller, various gauges, a few pieces of mangled aluminum “airplane skin” and a wing lie on the yard’s top tier, next to the fan palm and among the tufts of Mexican feather grass, clumps of lavender and stands of horsetail.  “I don’t see this stuff as debris or memorabilia,” explains Lappin, who is a member—“offline,” he specifies—of such techno-blog communities as Dorkbot and Laughing Squid. “What interests me is the history of technology. The things I’ve collected speak to an earlier time when our feats were physical. They were built upon atoms, not binary code. They were seen as marvels of human accomplishment: ‘We can master the skies! Jet from coast to coast in five hours! Build giant battleships and aircraft carriers that dominate the seas!’”

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