Carpenter decks out home in Mission and Arts and Crafts styles

By day, Dirk Rash works on some of the largest and most luxurious houses in Orange County, Calif. A carpenter by trade, he also interprets architects plans, frames walls, lays foundation and cuts roofs. His clients are homeowners with the substantial resources to have their sometimes extravagant dreams brought to life.

For example, theres the $100 million home Rash helped build in Irvine, Calif., with 37,000 square feet of space and separate houses for the kids and for the gardener. And the house with 14 staircases in the cliffs above Pacific Coast Highway in south Laguna Beach, Calif.

Ive been building here for 45 years, Rash said. I started from scratch.

But at night and on the weekends, Rash works on his own more modest home in Fountain Valley, Calif. Inside the circa-1965 ranch-style house, he has re-created an entirely different era.

He scours flea markets and fairs on weekends, repurposes wood from the high-end remodels he works on and tells family and friends to keep an eye out for pieces that might fit with his homes American Arts and Crafts and Mission-style dcor.

What he cant find at flea markets, Rash creates, sometimes so convincingly that its hard to tell the difference between authentic antiques and the copies hes crafted. He gathers ideas by poring through books on builders, history and architecture and from tours of Arts and Crafts houses like the Gamble House in Pasadena, Calif., designed by architects Charles and Henry Greene in 1908.

For example, the idea to use ebony pegs in the bathroom cabinets came from photos of another Greene and Greene house, the William Randolph Thorsen House in Berkeley, Calif. The bathroom also has a beautiful Asian-influenced design, including a folding screen with a green-and-white landscape scene and a long wooden bench bought from a Chinese couple at the Long Beach, Calif., swap meet.

Greene and Greene copied the Chinese in a lot of their stuff, Rash said. They werent above plagiarizing, either. If they can do it, I can do it, he added with a smile.

Rash designed the stained-glass doors in the master bedroom in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. They let in a golden afternoon light accented with green and amber brown.

Next to the doors is the piece hes perhaps most proud of. His son-in-law had spotted a large wooden item at a thrift store in Santa Monica, Calif., that was likely once the back of a dining-room buffet. It was carved with long-stem irises in the style of a much-earlier era. Rash turned it into the mantel over the bedroom fireplace, added wood on either side and carved it with long-stem irises to match, down to the downward folds of the petals.

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Carpenter decks out home in Mission and Arts and Crafts styles