The Big Yellow Blues: Summerland's Big Yellow House Foreclosed

Part 4: The Big Yellow Storm

Marketing West, recognizing the success of their family-style dinners served in an old home, created a spin-off firm, Great American Restaurants, and ran with it. By 1978, there were 17 Big Yellow Houses in California and Nevada, with 9 in the south, 8 in the north. Northern sites included Reno, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Modesto, Livermore, and Sacramento. The restaurants in Livermore and Santa Cruz followed Don Turner’s Orlando model and were housed in rail cars. More restaurants were in the projections.

The company had also opened The Feed Store on lower Santa Barbara Street in 1974, and, in the face of rising interest rates and development costs in 1980, started a chain of less expensive, mall-based Annie Butterfield’s Pot Pie restaurants. The first of these was located in the Mesa Shopping Center in Santa Barbara. Two others were opened, one in Cerritos and one in Colorado Springs.

But 1982 came in like a cold front, and sales dropped across the chain by 30%. The Feed Store and Annie’s were closed by the end of the year and expansion plans were tabled. At The Big Yellow House, the family-style dinner gave way to individual servings. This was a plan designed to bring in customers for more than just the big family occasions for which people cherished The Big Yellow House. Because the new model reduced the quantity of food served, prices could be lowered, with entrées that were selling for $6.95 reduced to $4.50.

It was too little, too late. Great American began franchising the existing restaurants to the resident management teams. The Sacramento and Santa Rosa restaurants along with two others in Northern California were snapped up. In Summerland, George and Kaye Bevilaqua, always close to the Summerland restaurant, purchased the franchise rights for $250K.

In July of 1983, Great American filed for Chapter 11 to attempt to get back on their feet. But the news drove customers, who now thought the chain was defunct, away. The downward spiral continued and two months later, on September 15, Great American announced the closing of the 9 remaining southland restaurants.

The Bevilaquas settled in at the Summerland site, and hired a new manager, Ken Stiritz. They maintained the existing business model of individual entrées and remained successful for many more years.

During their tenure, both manager Stiritz and the Bevliaquas were asked several times about the resident spirits. Stiritz told a reporter in 1990, after he’d been there six years, that he had never spotted Lathim’s Hector or any other spirits. He did say, once the place was shut down for the night, he didn’t go back.

Kaye Bevilaqua had a different story. She would sometimes arrive in the morning and catch a glimpse of a man in a dark suit entering one of the dining rooms. But when she went into the room, he wasn’t there. She also admitted to leaving the radio on loud all night to make the spirits tired so they’d sleep during business hours.

Closing Chapters

In 1990, Jerome and Mary Ann Bohnett, and Jerome’s brother Tony, took over the lease. The Bohnett brothers, nephews of Newell Bohnett co-founder of Sambo’s Restaurants with Sam Battistone, kept the restaurant open and made changes incrementally. Jerome had worked at Brophy Brothers and The Harbor Restaurant. According to Jerome, who now owns The Nugget in Summerland and Goleta, they focused on improving the business by shifting to a menu of individual servings, updating the dining rooms and facilities incrementally, moving the gift shop upstairs, and by downplaying the ghost stories. “There was an occasional flickering of lights,” Bohnett said. “Nothing more.”

After the Bohnett’s relinquished their lease in 2004, Cal Carey stepped in to run the restaurant. But everything he did seemed destined for failure. Reviews that came in during his tenure were some of the consistently worst reviews imaginable for a restaurant.

“The desserts taste like something bought from a market. The gift shop was gone. The service was cold and the food mediocre.”

“The food wasn’t as good as it used to be, really good things had disappeared from the menu, and the service was slow.”

“What a difference. These people did not know what they were doing! The food was not up to par, the service was nil, the atmosphere had changed considerably! We wanted to be fair, so we stopped in one more time. It was even worse than the first time.”

But it got worse.

“Upon our arrival no one was there to seat or greet us.”

“[The waitress] returned to let us know that they were out of most of what we had ordered. After much back and forth we came up with items we were allowed to order. The food itself was not worth more than one or two bites and we left our plate full. As we drove away, I turned and said to my son. ‘Wow! Do you feel like we had just left the TWILIGHT ZONE and barely escaped with our good health?’”

“What a disaster. At the end of our meal my husband spoke with the manager who seemed to have little time or energy to listen to him. When he mentioned the lack of cranberries for the turkey dinner, she said, ‘Oh, we usually run out of food by four thirty, you can’t make a reservation for six in the evening.’ We will never return. The bathroom was filthy, the wallpaper was peeling, it looked run down, uncared for and sad.”

And finally…

“We seemed invisible to the waitress so we disappeared.”

The debacle ran down until a final post to SantaBarbara.com in December of 2005 from James & Salley Forsight. “We have tried three or four times over the past eight weeks to eat at The Big Yellow House. When we went by last week, they had a notice on the window that they lost their liquor license. There is no furniture in the building. Looks like they went out of business.”

The Big Yellow Sale

It was true, The Big Yellow House as a restaurant had seen its last days. June Young had passed away in 2003, and her children, rather than manage the building chose to sell. The choice to sell was more contentious than even the bright yellow paint on the structure back in 1971. Brad Frohling, broker for the listing company, Radius Group, posted on their site, “From the moment the Radius Group sign went up on The Big Yellow House, residents reacted. From the potential buyers, from residents near and far, from our own agents, the response ran the field from serious inquiries to private citizens looking for re-assurance or simply to share their memories.”

During 2006, the Young heirs completed a sale to Bernard Rosenson who proposed to make significant updates to the interior and reopen as The Yellow Rose of Summerland in September of 2007.

Rosenson, then 61, had also recently acquired The Wine Cask in Santa Barbara. He came to the restaurant business after owning and operating health care and retirement facilities for 30 years. He entered the restaurant business when he acquired The Sky Room restaurant located atop his high-rise retirement community, Breakers of Long Beach, in 1997. He renovated the restaurant and reopened it in 1998 and in the course of doing so found a passion for fine wines and fine dining. He opened Wine Gallery stores in Calabassas and Oxnard, and acquired a winery in the Santa Ynez Valley which bottles a line called Coquelicot. He made plans for a fine dining establishment called Bernard’s in Calabassas.

In Summerland, Rosenson took out a construction loan in August of 2006 and obtained permits to begin the renovations. The interior of The Big Yellow House was almost completely gutted. Original light fixtures and much of the old “Australian gumwood raised paneling” was removed, though most of the hand-tooled wood features inside were preserved. The stairwell, the fireplace and bookshelves, and the sideboard in the original family dining room along the east wall are all intact. Also still in place are the original 1910 tile floor in the sunporch and a small portion of the hand-painted friezes, also in the sunporch.

Cracks began to appear in the Rosenson empire as construction progressed. In 2007, Rosenson purchased the Wine Cask in the old El Paseo mall in Santa Barbara. The cost and focus required by The Wine Cask apparently slowed the work at The Big Yellow House. The opening was pushed to December of 2007. Then it was March of 2008. Then silence. In the slipsteam of the economic downturn of 2008, Rosenson stopped paying rent at The Wine Cask and the mortgage for the property at 108 Pierpont in Summerland.

In March of 2009, SIMA Property Management stepped in and closed The Wine Cask for back rent. I left messages for Rosenson but received no reply. Seven months later, in October, First Regional Bank of Los Angeles completed foreclosure proceedings on the property in Summerland. At the time, the Pierpoint Avenue property and improvements were valued at just under $3 million, while the assessed value remained at $4.4 million.

Listing

First Regional’s plan for the property is to finalize an asking price in the next weeks or months. Listing agents have been assigned, and buyers have already courted the bank. There have been discussions of an office complex and a mixed-use facility of shops, a small restaurant, and offices.

According to LoopNet, a real estate listing site, The Big Yellow House is “one of Southern California’s most notable landmark properties located on the coast of Santa Barbara. The 7,618 square foot building is situated on the largest commercial parcel in Summerland totaling .51 acres. Dramatic ocean views, patios, old world detailing, and an abundance of natural light. This Victorian/Craftsman style property presents a once in a lifetime opportunity to purchase this unique property.”

Look for a For Sale sign to be perched on the lawn or under the eaves soon. Fans of the site expressed their hope that the building would not be razed or significantly altered. Many still hope the restaurant that served them so many memories over the years will return in capable hands. But it is unlikely another restaurant will fill the space. There are now a row of restaurants along Via Real to compete for local dining and tourist dollars.

On my recent visits to the house, I failed to find any spirits in the basement or anywhere else. One area upstairs in the rear of the home seemed quite cold, but no one made contact. Down between the floorboards I found a single playing card, a two of spades. The beautiful old house now just seems filled with possibility.

See my update to this story from February 2010.