When we arrived, George Ehling was tiling the inside of garage. He had simultaneously a design underway for the floor and walls, completely independent of one another and harmonious. The other single garage, a board formed concrete structure at street grade, was also a work in process. George had on sloppy weekend work attire that might suggest a hobbyist who retired at night to a corduroy lazyboy and comfy standard issue living room, but we were about to get a genuine Hollywood tour, complete in showmanship and talent.
Our group, organized for Obscura day by de LaB, was waiting for the rest of the members to arrive, but George could not wait. He kept trying not to start the tour, with irrepressible fits and starts we were drawn into his property. What might have been a short journey up his hillside property was an odyssey of tile work. The front wall, the exterior stairs, the every small landing, and entire façade of his house is covered in tile. It is hard to relay the extent and intensity of the work. Expected tiled features, such as a fountain or fireplace, met with the completeness of tiled walls and ceilings, and then extended to the unexpected bed, bookshelf or tiled rock. Architectural follies contained an outdoor shower and laundry facilities.Ehling’s work is not charming due to obsession or naiveté. The work displays great variation in style and scale. He is an excellent colorist and inventive in has pattern making. There are examples of figuration and abstraction. He explored shifts from neutrals to color using the same patterns. He traveled to Europe to study tiling techniques, but got most of his tile from the trash behind tile suppliers in Los Angeles, with a few special pieces purchased from Europe. George made the formwork himself from coffee cans, buckets, plywood and wire mesh. He was a strong man working in Hollywood in front of the camera and behind as a scene builder. His concrete capitols are casts from the studio’s prop departments. George’s enthusiasm has a beguiling innocence. He is very enthusiastic and passionate. He was also funny and surprising.
George likes to share his work with people. We were invited to hear stories of his family and neighbors over the years and saw pictures of a rescue he made when he pulled a drowning woman in the Seine River. He cut quite the muscle-bound figure. He started the project in his forties. George appears to be a fit 70 year old, except he is in his 80’s. His wife doesn’t want him on a ladder anymore, but he says he does not lack the energy for the work. The nights when he can’t tile are harder to fill, but he is learning to use the internet. His stories of the process paint a picture of his family and a neighborhood. He talks about how many people have stopped to talk to him over the years while on the ladder and it seems this was a very important part of the process, describing a particular kind of neighborhood feeling that George said existed before “ this area got fancy.” His neighbor’s son, who is his son's age and still close to the family, drove us up to his house, which says something about what it was like to grow up in the neighborhood 30 or 40 years ago.
It was hard to tell what kind of house this was before George arrived. It is an intimate estate now because the totality of its treatment serves to incorporate its outdoor spaces, it seems both rambling and intimate at the same time. It was certainly a well appointed house with handsome rooms but not particularly large by today’s standards. The other reason it difficult to picture the house in its previous incarnation is that George and his family have been inventive in the way they have chosen to live in it. They rent out two different areas including all of the bedrooms. You have to wonder if it is for the income or the social interaction. George had consolidated his family closely around the grand living room, with his son’s room in a very small library off of the living room, and the master bedroom in a salon style room open to the living room and to the courtyard at the back. In the courtyard are the architectural follies containing an outdoor shower, George’s temple of the body as he called it, and spire topped laundry enclosure. George said he wouldn’t do filming, but he loved doing photo shoots. They pay good money and they left the food, which he and his wife could live off of for days. When his piano virtuoso son was young they used to invite neighbors into the house for concerts, they put out a spread and ask for a donations. The continuity created by the equal embellishment of indoor and outdoor spaces, the continuity between family and community, the creativity of both George’s work and his way of living are a charming example of Southern California life.
