As majority shareholder in Genevoise des Pompes Funèbres, a prosperous funeral business founded by his maternal grandfather Alois Graber in 1919, Felix Zeichen (1949-2007) combined wealth and eccentricity in equal degree. Packed off to California by his father to study state-of-the-art undertaking methods in the early 1970s, Zeichen did his best to comply with the paternal injunction while at the same time contriving to spend a considerable portion of his time on Catalina Island where, following an enthusiastic initial visit, he purchased Holly Hill House, a quaint hillside dwelling with a green- and red-striped conical cupola, built in 1889 by one Peter Gano with the assistance—as legend would have it—of his blind horse Mercury. (more…)