For a quarter of a century, the pink house on Begonia Avenue has been a Corona del Mar landmark. Sure, it was briefly painted purple, but most people know it as the pink house, the strawberry shortcake house, the Painted Lady of the Flower Streets.
But as of Tuesday, it’s gone gray. Quiet Rain gray, to be exact, a beach-appropriate color with blue tones that will be quite beautiful if not quite exactly as eye-catching as the old raspberry pink with white trim.
“It didn’t start out to be pink,” said homeowner Naomi Hooper, who has lived in the house since 1973. In fact, when the Hoopers moved in, the 1947 home was a tiny, two-bedroom beach cottage painted green on the outside with one bathroom that had black and white wallpaper and bright orange carpet. (“It was a riot,” Naomi said.) The family did a couple small upgrades over the years, but in 1983 and 1984, they ripped down half the home and turned it into the Victorian five-bedroom home it is today.
Naomi and Tom Hooper knew they wanted a brightly colored exterior, in the style of San Francisco’s “Painted Lady” Victorians. So Tom bought 120 cans of paint — quart cans, the smallest sizes he could find — and they began painting combinations of colors on the rear of the house to see which worked best.
“We started with blues with grays,” Naomi said. “We went to lavender and blues. Greens. We did everything but nothing was working. Then as an absolute desperate measure, we took the last two colors and put them up — lavender and pink. We looked up there and said, ‘Oh my God!’ That was it. They were both beautiful. We said the house chose the color, because we had no intention in the beginning of choosing the pink.”
At first, the neighbors rebelled, the Hoopers recalled. “Oh, we got hate mail, we got threats of lawsuits,” Naomi said. “We had people shout things. The mailman would tell us how it was going. ‘You know, people are coming around,’ he told us one day.”
Eventually, the pink home became a landmark. The Hoopers’ two sons, now 34 and 29, loved growing up in a house that everyone recognized. It briefly was purple and was visited by the Purple Society and was the topic of a local newspaper’s Easter story. But within months it was pink again, the pink house of Begonia Avenue.
Now, the neighbors are used to the color, Tom said. “I’ve talked to four neighbors and everyone of them is mad,” he said. “They want to know why are we painting.”
The reason they are painting is that the house is for sale, and real estate agent Eliisa Stowell worried that the pink exterior might make people think the house was pink inside as well. (It’s not.) The home has been on the market since spring, and the Hoopers agreed it was time to shake things up. (Read an earlier story about the home here.)
So on Tuesday, painters began spraying the home, obliterating the pink and sending a wave of sadness over Naomi. “This is hard,” she said. “My 12-year-old granddaughter is very upset about it.”
The Hoopers said they know of only two really bright homes that will be left in the village. “Everything is in the spectrum between white, brown or gray,” she said. “I like the bright ones.”
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