I had dinner the other evening at the Santa Monica home of Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley. They’re the publishers (and everything else, nearly) of Angel City Press. I’m one of their authors. They’re one of the city’s great treasures.
Their home, Scott and Paddy told me, was built in 1933 – an extension of suburban development that parceled out blocks north of Montana Avenue. Despite the year (worst of the Great Depression), Los Angeles was doing better in 1933 than a lot of other places. The movies had found their audience again after the coming of sound. The Long Beach earthquake had paradoxically created jobs, particularly for the replacement of dangerously unsafe schools.
The house had been built at the end of the Spanish Colonial Revival period. It’s peak had been in the 1920s. By the early 1930s, the grandeur in the style had gone. It was being adapted for more modest houses. It would soon slide into a diminished afterlife as a tract house look – stucco, tile trim, a flat roof, and a cement figure of a sleeping Mexican on the porch.
But the best of the style – simplicity, imaginative rhythms of interior and exterior space – still lingers in houses like Scott and Paddy’s. They’ve made the inevitable adjustments to a older house. Remodeling and repurposing, but keeping the values that marked the style’s culmination.
As David Gebhard noted in 1967 in his article “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, “These designers produced buildings what were conceived of as sculptural volumes, closely attached to the land . . .”
The architects of the Spanish Colonial Revival managed a diversity of solutions to the problem of making a home in California. Human-scaled, in touch with the landscape, and narratively coherent, their designs showed how unforced historicism and modernity might be successfully joined.
Between its rise just before World War I and its devolution into mediocrity after 1935 – in less time than the careers of some its best practitioners – the Spanish Colonial Revival gave Los Angeles a distinctive architectural vocabulary, a habit of indoor and outdoor living, a playfulness that signaled something new about domesticity, and a body of well-wrought town plans, public places, and houses.
They were houses of white stucco and red tile . . . of deeply recessed doorways, windows, and portals . . . of field tiles and forged iron . . . of sunny gardens and shaded corners . . . of loggias and quiet arcades leading into the light. They were reserved (at least the best of them) but joyful houses that promised delight. They were houses for a Californian imagination.
The image on this page of Mission San Fernando Rey de España was taken by Flickr user iamhannah. It was used under Creative Commons license.
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I am caring for my family's 1927 Spanish Revival home these days. It isn't easy -- every repair is a restoration. But it's nice to see these homes finally getting the love they deserve from history. I would encourage everyone who has a house from this period to visit the real estate records archive in Norwalk. Amazing what you can learn from permit requests and deeds.