“This is a home, not a theme park,” William Franz has found it necessary to say from time to time since purchasing his distinctive Spanish-style cottage in the Hollywood/Santa Monica neighborhood with fellow OF home and garden store owner, Joe Kacynski.

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“I wanted a Spanish home,” he says. “But I don’t want everything to have to be Spanish or Mexican. If I have family heirlooms or things that I like that don’t happen to be Spanish, they’re staying.”

 

Kacynski laughs, clearly the guilty party in the decorating dogma department.

 

Franz isn’t finished. He points: “The sombrero may need to go.”

 

Whatever compromises have been forged on

Santa Monica Avenue

, the result is top notch, and the homeowners are showcase their dwelling on the upcoming neighborhood home tour. Unlike some of the other historic structures in Hollywood , not much is known about this circa 1930s home, other than the origin of a soundproof room in the garage where a drummer from Lynyrd Skynyrd used to practice (his girlfriend was the homeowner at the time). Its most distinctive architectural feature is a walled front patio.

 

Franz and Kacynski are two of six Hollywood residents and fast friends who own OF on Skillman. While Kacynski is a full-time shopkeeper, Franz is one of the group who juggles store responsibilities with his “day job.”

 

Their home, like the store, has been in their lives for about three years.

 

“We were headed to San Miguel, ,” Kacynski says. “And we’d actually put an offer on this house the day we left for that trip.”

 

Franz adds: “David (Glover) and George ( Martinez ) and everybody said, ‘You’ve got to see this house.’ They knew that having lived in California , we really wanted to get more of a Spanish Mediterranean house. I like the Tudor houses … but this was something that wowed us. We like this neighborhood, we like the people here, and this house really fits our style.”

 

Franz says, “I remember walking by on one of the home tours and thinking, ‘That could be a really great house.’”

 

And it was on the trip that the six friends brainstormed OF into existence. What followed was a 36-month juggling act to create a home and a business in tandem.

 

“We didn’t do most of the work on the house until about a year ago,” Franz says. “Except that the first year we did paint the whole house and have the windows stripped.”

 

The new look for the windows is one of the most striking changes. When they contemplated the newly laid-bare original wood windows, they decided not to re-paint and, instead, opted for a dark mahogany stain that accentuates the Spanish character of the dwelling.

 

Franz says, “It is funny how much work we’ve done to the house because when we first walked in, Joe’s words to me were, ‘We can just move in — we won’t have to do anything but paint.’ Shortly after that, the list of things that would really make it ‘our house’ happened.”

 

So it was that some sections of walls gave way to arched openings, giving a more open flow to the house as well as creating some necessary modern amenities such as a laundry room.

 

“Joe has an engineering degree and studied landscape architecture, and is very into the yard and the outdoors,” Franz says. “He does all the flowers at OF, and if you look at most of the arrangements, they’re very natural. They can be high style, but they’re not big hotel-type centerpieces. I think he has taken the look of a home garden into home floral.”

 

Most of all, Franz and Kacynski are pleased to live in an area where it feels like home, like a “real neighborhood.”

 

          “We have such good neighbors,” Kacynski says.

 

Franz nods: “We love our neighbors. It’s the kind of neighborhood where everyone walks, where we walk. Friendly. We had a progressive dinner party for a bunch of us up and down the street.”