Michael Davis
H3K’s Howard Hawkes (left) and Kevin Kemper.
Back in 2004, it wasn’t as if Howard Hawkes and Kevin Kemper were actively searching for a new life together. They’d met as roommates at USC and began their professional careers in Los Angeles—Hawkes, a graduate in urban planning, worked for the Metro Rail Project, and Kemper, a film school grad, began at the William Morris Agency. In 1994, Hawkes’ father, who was in real estate, but whose passion was the meticulous restoration of old homes, invited the two to come home to Santa Barbara and help the family manage their residential rental business and learn the building trades.
Kemper went to work for Cox Communications in marketing, but Hawkes agreed to help his dad. At first, he wasn’t too pleased. “I resented it and hated it the first few years. Here I was, this college graduate getting my hands dirty,” he laughs. But his father had sage advice for him:
“I don’t want you to do this for a living, but I want you to know how to do it. So, if you’re ever supervising, you’ll know what these people are doing.”
Eventually, Kemper joined Hawkes and they renovated and managed rental properties — old Victorians near downtown Palm Springs and newer ranch houses up in Goleta. It was a pretty sweet life in one of the most beautiful settings in California. Then, one day, Hawkes’ uncle invited them to use his Rancho Mirage house for a weekend. It was 2004 and the rejuvenation of Palm Springs was just gaining momentum. At the time, the pair were looking to buy a place in Santa Barbara, but it was almost prohibitively expensive. “Of course, we go into Von’s here and pick up a couple real estate magazines and we see these houses with big lots and swimming pools for $200,000,” says Kemper. “And we said, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing. We have to move down here. We have to find a way to make this work.’”
Kemper says their naiveté is almost painful to recall now. “I remember writing an email to our real estate agent. I said, ‘We want to look at these houses called Alexanders.’ Which now, looking back, is so cute. We were just so novice. But we thought, ‘My God, these are so cool.’”
They eventually found a house in Desert Park Estates. It was not an Alexander. It was by an architect they’d never heard of, Hugh Kaptur. Kemper says, “In those days, they told you three things about buying a house in Palm Springs. Don’t buy the most expensive house in the neighborhood. Don’t buy north of Vista Chino, and don’t buy near the airport.”
“And of course, we did all three,” admits Hawkes. “It was a lot of money and in the flight path, and it was a windy area….”
“But it was also the best time of our life,” continues Kemper. “It was so exciting to have our own pool, to have that hair dryer wind at night. We had the time of our lives for a few years in that house.”
The two men wasted no time putting the skills and experience they’d acquired in Santa Barbara to work in the desert. They found an Alexander in Racquet Club Estates that had been thoroughly botched with an owner/builder Home Depot remodel. They saw huge potential in a complete restoration of the house and then using it as a rental or selling it. They went to Hawkes’ parents, Howard and Helga, and explained their scheme. The couple loaned them the money for the project. “That is also the genesis of H3K because there’s Howard and Helga and Howard here and I’m the K,” says Kemper.
Though the house was in escrow, the situation was a mess and the owner wanted out. Hawkes and Kemper came in with an offer a little over asking. “These were the days when ‘a little over asking’ meant $3,000,” Hawkes laughs, “Not three hundred thousand over asking.”
Initially, they rented out the Racquet Club Estates house while they formulated its restoration. Nine months later, they went at it. They said that in many ways they were lucky because it was at a time when the original owners of many of Palm Springs’ midcentury masterpieces weren’t inclined to put a dime into renovation. In Hawkes and Kemper’s view, this was a good thing. Instead of these masterpieces being ruined forever with ‘contemporary upgrades,’ they were largely intact and just needed loving care to bring them back to glory.
Their Racquet Club Estates gamble paid off big time. They got it on the market in 2006 and within 48 hours it sold for $669,000. Says Hawkes, “That was the highest-priced Alexander in the history of that neighborhood for original square footage.”
As 2007 approached, the hairs on the back on their necks warned them “the door was closing behind us.” Nevertheless, their reputations had been made with that first house and as investors snapped up foreclosures all over the valley in the years ahead, they often tracked down H3K for advice on how to renovate their midcentury prizes in order to flip them for maximum profit. Even though houses were sitting on the market for long periods during the recession, Hawkes and Kemper were approached so often for advice that they eventually had business cards printed up. “Eighteen months later, we had a full office set up in our house,” says Hawkes.
The investors with whom they were working were more interested in volume than taking a chance on minute restorations. Hawkes said that one husband and wife team would buy a house for $180,000 and flip it for $220,000, sometimes just $200,000, but they sold a lot of them. H3K wasn’t doing the actual renovation work, but they advised on tile, color schemes, and the detail work that made a sad old midcentury shine again. Hawkes credits his now-husband, Kemper, for having the foresight to hire good photographers to do before and after pictures of their projects.
After 2010, when a little light showed the end of the recession, Hawkes, Kemper, and their assistant moved their office from a small 10 x 10 room in their home to North Palm Canyon. The demand for their work was steady and they were sometimes juggling nine or ten clients at a time. Their focus was the “hard scapes” of a home, changing the layouts of the homes, choosing the tiles, windows, and fixtures. Quite often, their clients would then hire a stager to come in with furniture to furnish the homes for tours. Kemper says buyers would often exclaim, “’Whoever did this house is great!’ And everyone assumed it was the person who did the furniture.”
Hawkes interjects, “The last person who touched the house kind of took the credit.”
“We came to the realization that we should actually get more into the interior design world.”
Over the next several years, H3K added an interior design director and a project manager, though they were careful to expand slowly and not get too far ahead of themselves…an often fatal course that’s doomed many ambitious companies. They also realized that as a design build firm, they were often working with their clients’ contractors and subs, a situation which did not always engender the best communication or results. “Now we have one general contractor, Henry Hoyt of Hoyt Construction, who we work with on 95% of our jobs,” says Kemper. “He’s a ‘yes’ contractor. He might not be able to do everything we want, but instead of saying no, he’ll come up with three options. That’s the kind of contractor we want.”
H3K’s next great leap of notoriety came when they did actor Kelsey Grammer’s house in Thunderbird Heights. During this time, they also saw the need for a service that would actually furnish the home they’d finished. “You spend a lot of money and now you have a home that’s empty and you need to put furniture in it. We realized there’s just not a lot of great options here for midcentury modern furniture,” says Kemper. “That was the whole genesis of H3K Home—very cool, affordable furniture that people could get fast.”
In 2015, they moved into a stylish building on the corner of Ramon and South Palm Canyon that had once housed (ironically) Santa Barbara Savings and Loan. Their concept is a full service package. The showroom is filled with furnishings that are tagged to show which pieces are available at their nearby warehouse. Clients work with one of H3K’s three interior designers to completely furnish the house. When the project is complete, the home’s new owners need only walk in with their suitcases and family photos.
Hawkes and Kemper have been extremely generous with their time the afternoon we speak, especially considering they have a scant three weeks to finish a complete remodel of their own home in Vista Las Palmas in time for Modernism Week. However, before we part, Hawkes imparts two bits of wisdom that he was told by his father when H3K was formed. “When he sold real estate, he would package things together. He’d find a vacant lot. He’d find a builder, and then he’d find a lender. He’d make it easy for the buyer. And that’s the idea behind H3K Home,” he says. “The other thing he taught us was that if a guy comes to his open house wearing torn-up shorts and drives an old jalopy, but he’s interested in the house, then show him the house like he came in a Learjet and a limousine.”
