One Spanish Colonial Revival Architect Launched California Style

SANTA BARBARA (By Ann Herold, LATimes) February 2, 2006 — For a place discovered by Spain, there was surprisingly little Spain in Southern California's architecture, which may be hard to imagine today when cruising parts of L.A. and San Diego and nearly all of Santa Barbara. But for the first three centuries after the Spanish reached California's shores, the only visual features that said Spain Was Here were bits of baroque church decoration — elaborate arches and ornamental carvings, fountains and wrought iron — incorporated into the mission buildings by the padres.

The homes built by the Spanish arrivals most often were simple adobes in the Mexican style. As Americans began filling up the state in the 1800s, they brought with them the building styles they knew, like architectural security blankets: simple shingled farmhouses and, for the more endowed, the Victorian or Queen Anne or Federal house. There was a movement in the late 1800s to construct public buildings that evoked the state's roots, with Southern Pacific Railroad erecting a string of train depots in the Mission Revival style throughout the state.

But almost no one thought of building "Spanish."

Today you can't escape the "Spanish" look, inspired — good or bad — from an architectural style that came to life in the early 1900s. Called Spanish Colonial Revival, its practitioners were familiar with Spanish Colonial buildings in Mexico, but headed in their own direction. Architect Bertram Goodhue helped start things off with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition buildings in San Diego, but was then quickly distracted by Modernism.

That Spanish Colonial Revival became a beloved architectural style is almost an accident; its most brilliant executor, George Washington Smith, falling back into the profession decades after a financial reversal led him away from it.

George Washington Smith was born on the first president's birthday — hence his name — in 1876 to a well-to-do Pennsylvania family. Smith went to Harvard to study architecture but dropped out after two years when his father could no longer afford it. He worked briefly at a friend's architectural firm but wasn't able to make a living. He joined a bond firm as a salesman, doing so well at it that by 1912, at the age of 36, he was able to move with his wife to Europe to study painting.

The war prompted the Smiths to return to the U.S., and they went to California so he could paint in this new Eden that wealthy Easterners were talking about. They found Montecito as enchanting as it was described, and in 1917 Smith polished off his drafting tools and designed and built a house for himself on Middle Road, not far from what would become the enclave's "lower village" at Coast Village Road. It was done in the rustic style of farm buildings that he had found visually captivating in southern Spain. It was an instant sensation.

"I soon found that people were not really eager to buy my paintings, which I was laboring over, as they were to have a whitewashed house like mine," said Smith.

By 1919, at 43 years of age, he had a flourishing practice. He couldn't have known this at the time but Smith was about to lead a vanguard of architects — Reginald Johnson, Carleton Winslow, Wallace Neff, Myron Hunt, John Byers, Gordon Kaufmann, Roland E. Coate, Joe Plunkett, Francis Underhill, Mott Marston, Garrett Van Pelt and others — responding to clients eager for Mediterranean-style romance. Europe had emerged after the war to end all wars as the place for the moneyed set to travel, and they returned with visions of stucco walls, tile roofs, carved beam ceilings and wrought iron balconies dancing in their heads, if not with the real thing in hand: carved doors and shutters, stately iron lamps and gates, and fantastic painted tiles.

"People came from the East Coast to California and this magical place where you put water on anything and it grew," says architect Marc Appleton, whose grandparents, Peter and Girlie Bryce, hired Smith to build an estate in Santa Barbara's Hope Ranch inspired in part by El Greco's home in Toledo. "My grandparents wanted to re-create this foreign romantic notion. They were so successful at it that when I was a little boy I thought this was my heritage. I looked around at all this furniture from Spain and thought it had been in the family for generations.

"It was made out of whole cloth by my grandparents. But the romance was so complete and convincing that you walked in and thought this was the old family homestead. But it was invented overnight in a strange place called California.

"People develop a kind of passion about it, and I understand that," the Santa Monica-based architect says of the Spanish Colonial Revival style. "It's endured a long time and has a classic, livable quality that has appealed for generations. People feel comfortable in it and it looks right for this area. It's a good fit."

In the end, nobody made it fit better than Smith. An article in Town and Country magazine in 1926 raved, "When Smith first went out to California that dazzling state had nothing to boast of architecturally except the old Mexican missions…. Smith had spent years … browsing about the highways of Italy, France and Spain. On his return, he told himself that patios and restraint and deep, cool courtyards could mate charmingly with a given climate. And everyone knows that California has been practically married to a climate for years. So that was that."

Quiet composition

Joan Kreiss and her husband had lived in Seattle and New York when work brought them to Santa Barbara in early 2001. They were in the market for an "old" house, it didn't necessarily matter what style, when they came upon a George Washington Smith in Montecito. As with any house that has been around for a while, previous owners had made changes. Kreiss guessed that the renovations she and her husband wanted would take time, time in which the family would not be able to live in their new home. But "we thought we should buy the house even if we can't live in it … so we could pitch a tent outside and look at the exterior. It's really a work of art," says Kreiss.

She is gazing at three iron balconies and an elegant plaster grille on a wall along one side of the house, placed in a way that's subtly asymmetrical, a Smith trademark. The result is surprisingly balanced even as it intrigues the eye with its imbalance.

Smith worked in many styles for his growing number of clients, designing Italian villas and French and English cottages, a Byzantine palace and even an American Colonial. But he always took the traditional form and made it his own. He excelled with the Spanish houses.

"The farm houses were lumpy masses with a few windows but he was taken with them, with the poetry of them in such a rugged setting in Spain," Appleton says of the landscapes that Smith saw while living in Europe and would visit again after moving to Santa Barbara. Smith's artistic eye transformed the thick stucco cubes with a window or balcony, chimney or grille positioned just so, or enhanced the romance with a tile bench or Moorish sleeping porch or swirling staircase, in which he added a window, you just knew, with the point of framing that one special view.

"What I like about Smith's work personally is that he had a compositional genius that was very subtle, that wasn't pushy, that wasn't flamboyant," says Appleton. "The best of it is very poignant and quietly composed. I like it because at the end of the day it's not self-consciously arty or flagrant but has a quiet grace."

In the case of the Kreiss house, a unique wall sweeps out from the front facade to hide a service entrance. "Everything he did must have been done with an eye toward aesthetics but that were also functional," says Kreiss. "That he curved the wall instead of making it angular gives the house a much more romantic feel."

As she and her husband restored their house to its original form, grateful for the Smith archives assembled by the late David Gebhard at UC Santa Barbara, Kreiss grew even more convinced of the infallibility of Smith's eye. "In every room there were things that didn't work, and in every case, we went back to the blueprints and found that something had been changed." In the room that became the children's bedroom, for example, the proportions seemed off. Looking at the original plan, they saw that a wall had been moved to enlarge the master bathroom. When they moved the wall back, the room "was perfect," she says.

A garden awakens

You can easily see why Smith's first house stood out. It's set right on the street, as it might have been in Europe, and the artful placement of balcony, round window, plaster grilles and even the wall-hugging succulents make even the most jaded viewer want to stop.

For his second house, in which he lived until his death in 1930, Smith went in another direction, fronting the house with a wide motor court. Smith was deeply interested in garden design, Patricia Gebhard notes in her recent book on the architect, and for his own property he made an elaborate watercourse in the manner of the Alhambra, an arbor with columns topped by Moorish tiles and numerous tile benches.

But by the time Anita and Gordon Roddick, founders of the Body Shop, bought the house, the garden looked more disheveled than Rip Van Winkle when he woke up from his sleep. It had also been amputated when the property was subdivided many years earlier.

The Roddicks brought in Santa Barbara landscape designer Alida Aldrich, and she immediately plunged into the archives. The fountain and part of the rill of the Moorish watercourse were restored with new tile, but Aldrich matched it so perfectly to Smith's sensibilities, it's as if she were channeling the architect. She added two new fountains that echo Smith, one a deliberate rip-off of a design at Smith's Casa del Herrero, while removing a gaudy decoration that had been placed inside one of his original fountains near the arbor. Low hedges in the Smith style were added to other parts of the garden.

In a barren side yard, Aldrich broke from 1920s convention with a sandstone-walled pond, accented with four tall arbutus with weeping, bell-like flowers. The arbutus is a chaparral creature but it looks as if it came straight from a Seville garden. "Why not use materials that we have now that he didn't have then?" the designer says. In that vein, she softened the stark walls with vines and espaliered Fuji apple trees. But when Gordon asked for a Zen garden, she became deaf. (Later she figured out where to put it: behind the guest house, for only Gordon to see.)

Recently, much interest and income has been devoted to Smith houses: Appleton was hired to restore his grandparents' former home; a grand residence in Holmby Hills (once owned by Rod Stewart) was returned to its original splendor; and billionaire newspaper owner Wendy McCaw spared no expense in bringing back a Smith house in Northern California. (The prolific Smith would design more than 100 projects in his 11-year practice, most in Montecito, but also in Pasadena and Northern California, and farther east in Colorado Springs and Ajo, Ariz.)

So it was a shock to Smith admirers to hear that one of his Northern California projects, a 14-bedroom Spanish Colonial mansion in Woodside, was to be demolished by owner Steve Jobs. Last month that move was blocked by a San Mateo judge, who said that Jobs had failed to prove that the only viable course was demolition. The computer magnate, who has not lived in the house for 10 years, has said he will appeal. Meanwhile, the house crumbles.

"I feel that we are stewards," says Kreiss of her house, which she opened to the public as part of a historic homes tour last year. "Anyone who lives in these homes should feel that way. We have an obligation to share with other people."

Kreiss found kindred spirits in Joan and Jack Amon, who have agreed to share their house, designed by Smith, for a tour of historic homes May 21, sponsored by Santa Barbara's Pearl Chase Society.

The house has the distinction of being the one that got away. Smith was out of his office when Mary Drummond came in, eager to build a George Washington Smith house, and promptly bought one of the designs an associate showed her. When Smith returned to the office, the associate announced the sale, upon which Smith exploded. Not only had he not approved it, but it was a house he had been thinking of building for himself. He fired the associate but allowed Drummond to keep the design, though he would have nothing to do with its construction.

At one point the house was owned by a couple with four children, a fact that delights Joan Amon. "The house has a special spirit about it because of who lived here; it feels like a home. Sometimes I'll see something," she says, pointing to a chipped tile on the staircase, "and wonder how that happened," in her mind seeing children at play.

A grand plan

Judging from the sea of tile roofs and stucco walls that rolls through Southern California, you would think that the Spanish Colonial Revival had been a resounding success. Certainly Santa Barbara looks more Spain than Spain, as the locals like to quip. Smith played an enormous role in that; after the 1925 earthquake devastated the city, he helped influence a master plan for its rebuilding in the Spanish style.

But tile and stucco do not necessarily a Spanish house make, nor does a McMansion groaning with ornaments borrowed from every country along the Mediterranean. "We learned very well how to do it very badly," says Appleton of some of the Spanish copycats. "We need to come back to houses like this to learn how to do it well," he says, pointing to the facade of Casa del Herrero, one of Smith's most celebrated homes.

Smith designed the house for George Steedman in 1922, and the building and its extraordinary Spanish gardens went from family ownership straight into a foundation that now offers tours to the public. Appleton is making a note of the contrast between the formality of the entry at the Montecito house and an odd "saddle bag" of a room jutting off to the side, and of how the windows are all different.

"With another architect," Appleton says, "it would be symmetrical, static and formal. This is informal."

It's obvious that Smith thought hard about what he was doing, "but it looks artless, as if some Andalusian farmer had done it." Inside, the rooms are just as the Steedmans decorated them, resplendent with carved doors and furniture and ironwork that they brought back from Europe.

"There's a lot of ego in this house," says Appleton, who surmises that Steedman was a challenging client — much as his grandparents had been — strong in their ideas.

"I'll be polite and call the discussions over the design a dialogue rather than an argument, but out of that dialogue you get the most interesting architecture," Appleton says.

That dialogue resonates today in the ornate tile work in the bathrooms and master bedroom. The latter has a large, dramatically tiled "kitchen hearth" fireplace that Appleton speculates Smith would have found inappropriate (Smith's fireplace designs were notably simple). But Steedman wanted it, and he got it.

Appleton acknowledges that many modern owners "wouldn't want to live in such dark rooms and would want more light and more connection to the garden," the thick walls a protection against heat before the invention of air conditioning. He acknowledges that the small kitchen and the cubbyhole-like servants' rooms are archaic.

"You can design a Spanish Colonial house without slavishly saying we have to have a chauffeur's kitchen when we don't even have a chauffeur." Still, "as architects we should do enough scholarship and research that we are knowledgeable about what the essential things are, and one of these is thick walls. But how many houses do you see with prefabricated windows in thin walls, where there's no depth to the windows or doors? This is where we fail as architects."

Appleton praises the craftsmanship of the buildings constructed in the 1920s by Smith and others, and notes that a decline in quality was imminent with the development of more machine-made materials. But "whatever criticism can be leveled today at the architectural quality of today's revivals … the Mediterranean idiom has survived where others have not," he writes in an introduction to "Mediterranean Domestic Architecture in the United States."

"Although originally an imagined tradition, perhaps it has in time become a real one, at least a vernacular if not an indigenous language, a dialect of the mother tongue."