Love, California Style

A new book is an ode to the state’s distinctive Spanish-inspired architecture.

San Juan Capistrano Mission wooed Diane Keaton when she was a young girl. “I remember standing, late in the afternoon, in front of what looked like an endless row of arches, feeling an ache. It seemed to come from my heart,” she writes in the introduction of her new book, “California Romantica” (Rizzoli, 2007). Thus began a lifelong affinity for Spanish-style architecture in her native California. The Academy Award-winning actress, a longtime activist in L.A.’s architectural preservation community, buys and lovingly restores Spanish houses. She’s driven to change the real estate notion that “Old Spanish” equals demolition and to demonstrate how these charmed dwellings can be adapted to meet contemporary tastes. As the title suggests, the word romantic best characterizes the book. Lush, brooding photographs–emphasizing the spare elegance of the architecture–seduce the reader. While shadows dance on whitewashed stucco, deep arches, austere fireplaces, wood-beamed ceilings, iron sconces and glazed tile dazzle in otherwise unadorned spaces. Such luminaries as Wallace Neff, George Washington Smith and Lillian Rice are among the architects of the 20 featured homes. The houses range from the well-known–Casa del Herrero in Montecito, which is open to the public as a house museum–to the somewhat obscure, including Casa Romantica, an aptly named ocean-view house in San Clemente that was originally built in 1927 and today is a community center. “Spanish Colonial Revival” is something of a misnomer. The style, which flourished from about 1915 to 1931, incorporates not only Spanish influences, but borrows from colonial Mexico, the capitals of South America, rural Italy and southern France, and the medinas of Morocco and Tunisia. However much a mixture of styles, all the homes are emblematic of a romantic vision of exoticism that had–and still has–tremendous appeal among Californians who live in a climate evocative of those sunny parts of the world. “Everyone who has grown up in Southern California knows this architecture in his or her bones,” says D.J. Waldie, the acclaimed writer who wrote the text for “California Romantica.” “But in the hurly burly of everyday life, we often don’t really see these buildings,” he continued during a recent phone interview. “I wanted to slow down the process of looking, to imagine the reader and I were taking a slow gaze at the photos together.” The result is a series of poetic vignettes that work together as a whole to both tell the history of the Spanish Revival style and to make the ethereal appeal of the homes tangible through words. Waldie describes Ravenscroft, a 1922 George Washington Smith masterwork in Montecito, as a “house seeking a way home through abstraction.” He writes: “Ravenscroft asserts, with the authority of Modernism, that space alone can signify as much as surfaces can, that a room might be defined as a certain volume of interior light.” Indeed, as much as the book is a long meditation on the word romance, it also plays up the modernist undertone of these houses. “The best of these architects were moving toward a heightened degree of abstraction that makes them modern in my eyes,” says Waldie. Describing the 1925 Strauss home in Ojai (architect unknown), Waldie writes: “Houses in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style only seem to be backward looking to purists. To their architects and their first owners, houses like this one were located in the future, where Californians have always longed to be. The houses were romantic, but they also were anticipatory answers to a modern question: How should Californians live as if they belonged here as much as the oaks and the immemorial curve of sun-browned hills?” Villa Aurora, a romantic hillside house in Pacific Palisades featured in the book, embodied this backward/forward-looking duality. The 22-room villa, originally known as the Los Angeles Times Demonstration Home, was built in the prosperous 1920s as a model home showcasing all the latest technological conveniences. The house boasted a gas range, electric refrigerator and dishwasher, even a three-door garage with electric opener–all to lure Angelenos to buy real estate in what was then an isolated area. Later, the house became famous as a gathering place for German intellectuals and emigres fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” an award-winning book about growing up in Lakewood, a 1950s tract housing development where he still lives. “I’m identified with the most non-architectural houses where I live and then I’m asked to write about these astonishing examples of California architecture,” Waldie says of the irony. Yet, he saw his task as moving toward a way of thinking about California houses that might extend to everybody’s house. “Houses can be commodities or markers of a successful career. They also can be true shelters, places that hold all that is important and significant,” he says. This fundamental belief appears in Waldie’s introductory essay to “California Romantica.” It reads: “The world is hard to live in, it seems to me, and we need allies. Your house can be a hero, too. And how else could it ever be home, if you did not fall in love with it?”