Added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 15, 1983

If you know just one building in Avalon, the “big city” on Santa Catalina Island, it’s the Catalina Casino. But if you recognize TWO, the other one’s probably the Peter Gano House, aka the Holly Hill House. It’s one of the most distinctive structures on the island, with its crimson-colored cupola mounted atop a windowless rotunda. Perched high up on a hill overlooking Pebbly Beach Road, it’s also one of the first buildings you see as you disembark from the ferry and head into the center of town. 

The Peter Gano House is one of the few standing reminders of the earliest phase of Avalon’s development. It was begun in 1888, the year after Avalon was first surveyed and divided into lots by George Shatto, and finished two years later. At the time Catalina was home to some shepherds, a single hotel and a few very small businesses to support the nascent tourism industry. Think about all the time, vision and willpower it must have taken to build a house there: you’d have to prepare the lot, source tools and building materials from the mainland and construct the thing with limited assistance, all without much in the way existing public utilities or infrastructure. It would take a person with money, and experience in engineering and construction to even conceive of such a project. A person like Peter Gano. 

Gano was a retired civil engineer from Cincinnati who settled in Altadena in the 1870s, where he bought a few hundred acres of land, planted a vineyard, built a house and devised a system to bring water to his land. He and his neighbor Jimmy Elms used to boat over to Catalina for camping trips, and after Elms opened a fish and bait business in Avalon, Gano sold his property in Altadena and moved permanently to Catalina to start life anew. 

The house Gano built was no ramshackle cottage. It was a fully decked out Queen Anne Victorian, three stories high, with some remarkable woodwork courtesy of Gano himself, who spent much of his free time at the lathe in his workshop on the bottom floor, turning out furniture and balustrades and decorative spindles for the house. Aside from the local stone used for the foundation and bottom floor, most of the materials were brought over on Gano’s boat, Osprey.

To haul the heavy stuff up the hill to the building site, Gano built a pulley system which could be operated by his trusty horse Mercury, a retired circus performer. The plaster walls of the house are reinforced with horsehair (I’m guessing at least some of it originated from Mercury’s mane), which Gano admired for its strength. It’s said that Gano honored Mercury’s role in the house’s construction with a horse-shaped weathervane on top of the cupola, though it might have been a later owner, and it’s now long gone. 

There’s no architect recorded for the house. The prevailing theory is that Gano worked from an architectural pattern book, which was fairly common back then, and introduced some idiosyncrasies of his own. For example, in his workshop on the ground floor, Gano built a lovely decorative fireplace made of bricks and pebbles. You’ll find porthole windows to peer through from the bottom floor, and stripes of alternating dark and light-stained pine boards for floors. Over the main entrance facing Avalon Bay, Gano constructed a mosaic of pebbles, glass and abalone shells that spells out “Lookout Cot.” (short for “Lookout Cottage,” his nickname for the place). All these uncommon details add up to a highly personal home.

Just as he had in Altadena, Gano built the system of pipes and cisterns that brought and stored water from nearby springs. His engineering expertise also kept the guests at Avalon’s Hotel Metropole supplied with fresh water.

There is a rumor told that a one-time paramour of Gano’s wasn’t very keen on the house, they broke up as a result, and henceforth Gano banned women from entering Lookout Cottage. If there’s any truth to that story, then Gano was prepared to make one exception. A historian digging into the house’s history on behalf of its current owners found that Gano originally built it with the idea that his sister, in failing health, would come stay with him. Whether or not the love-turned-sour story is true, Gano was a bachelor his whole life, and said to be a solitary dude. He lived in his house from its completion in 1890 through 1921, when he sold it to the Giddings family and moved back to Pasadena. The Giddings gave it the nickname “Holly Hill House” that’s stuck ever since.

Gano couldn’t have chosen a more symbolically appropriate time to leave Catalina. William Wrigley, Jr. had just bought the island in 1919, and the next major phase of Avalon’s development was underway. Gano represented the old guard of O.G. Avalon residents; the Wrigleys represented the new wave. 

The original house has undergone minor alterations over time. Around 1957 the original west veranda and south porch were glassed in, which entailed removing Gano’s original curved railing on the veranda. The exterior is thought to have been yellow originally, and now it’s white. The cupola roof was at first decked out for Christmas, with alternating red and green bands of fishcale and straight shingles; the original roof burned down in 1964, and now the cupola is a dark crimson color, a nice fit with the Spanish tile that you can find all over Avalon. 

The current owners purchased the house in 2011, and embarked on a major restoration. They peeled back drywall to uncover brick and rough-hewn stone walls in the kitchen, and opened up an entire stairwell that had been hidden by a previous owner. They uncovered the west veranda again, and repaired the “Lookout Cot.” sign. You gotta imagine that Peter Gano would be proud that he and Mercury’s handiwork has held up so well. 

Thanks to Gail Fornasiere at the Catalina Island Museum for sourcing the historic photos.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “Holly Hill House, Santa Catalina Island” (Islapedia.com)

+ Holt, Grant: “Peter Gano: A Pasadenan on Catalina” (Pasadena Museum of History, July 13, 2020)

+ Moore, Patricia Anne: Peter Gano House’s NRHP nomination form 

+ Sanford White, William with Steven Kern Tice: Santa Catalina Island: Its Magic, People, and History (White Limited Editions, 2002)