Visions of California sugarplums continue to dance in my head. In Santa Barbara’s thoroughly delightful Book Den (which claims to be the oldest secondhand bookstore in the state), I picked up Sam Hall Kaplan’s L.A. Lost and Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles, with photos by the great Julius Shulman. Kaplan, a fellow Easterner now settled in L.A., captures my feelings of pleasant surprise:
As you drive on the freeway, looming up across the darkening horizon is a mountain range, which seems to be located in the middle of the city. For what was supposed to be a city, by definition a man-made environment, L.A. looks very natural.
I believe that’s what’s held my attention throughout our trip to SoCal and since: the seamless integration of humanity and nature, especially in L.A. itself.
Other surprises follow: the broad, inviting beaches, a sprawling coastal plain, verdant foothills, tortuous canyons, rugged mountains dropping precipitously into seemingly endless valleys, all within the city limits and all under a pervasive sun.
And that’s the thing: all those geological bonbons fall ”within the city limits.” From a hilltop, the entire metropolis appears to have been sprinkled through the valleys like neatly cut feta cheese — there is no concrete jungle. Of course, the integration isn’t really seamless, or is too much so; Kaplan talks about the dangerous effects of hillside building on wildfires, for instance, and the topic of traffic is beyond my ability to address. But ultimately I’m glad I was late to the L.A. party, because I would not have appreciated all this had I seen it at a tenderer age.
There are some wonderful streetscapes, too, particularly in the Hollywood Hills, the upper reaches of Santa Barbara, and the older parts of Palm Springs, in all of which the Osterizer of architectural styles was plugged in for much of the twentieth century. “That’s very southern California,” said Robert Imber, Palm Springs’ architectural evangelist, in response to this observation. Design happened house by house, leaving Spanish Revivals cheek-by-jowl with Craftsman bungalows, mid-century moderns, English stone cottages, New England colonials, tiny, turreted castles, and ten other styles on every block. In most of the country this jumble would look awkward, even tacky. There, I swear, it was kind of fabulous.
The nineteenth-century Mission Santa Barbara is itself an amalgam, with a Greco-Roman facade (inspired by a neoclassical wave then sweeping Mexico), technicolor Chumash Indian painting on the walls of the nave,
and some deeply Spanish details, like this lantern and ceiling.
The 1929 Santa Barbara County Courthouse is even more of a hodgepodge, with Spanish Revival bones and Moorish, Castilian, Gothic, Baroque, and other Iberian flourishes. The interior is gorgeous, with murals by Cecil B. DeMille’s set designer and some resplendent Spanish ceiling and tile work. Even the signs for the various legal departments are painted Castilian-style; all that’s missing is the clink of cafe con leche cups and the smell of cigarette smoke. Having spent time in Spain, I recognized and admired most of the building’s details; the fact that they didn’t belong anywhere near one another seemed incidental. The courthouse is, like so much else in California, a fantastical creation that could only have occurred where it did.
I expected to fall in love with the Gamble House, the Greene brothers’ stunningly restored Arts and Crafts masterpiece in Pasadena. And I did love parts of it, particularly the stairwell — characteristically, the underside is fully finished –
– and the other showpieces of Burmese teak work in the public rooms (do click through if you’re unfamiliar with this house). Planning our trip around the Gamble’s once-a-month extended tour may have inadvertently diluted the effect, as the second floor is less spectacular than the first. The building is also unexpectedly dark inside. But the details were unforgettable; it’s no exaggeration to say that Charles and Henry Greene designed every inch of that house and its furniture, giving each room a different theme in either wood (they used twelve species) or motif. Much of the structure is exposed — “The idea was to build decoration, not decorate buildings,” said our guide — but every beam is veneered with the same type of wood used to decorate that room. I particularly enjoyed the rose motif on the dining room’s stained-glass windows, designed to echo the rosebush on the other side of that wall; and the decorative woodwork on the wall surrounding the sink pipes in the guest bedroom (no joke). The Greenes’ early achievement in integrating the indoors and outdoors was clear, and was expressed almost metaphorically by the fusion of Japanese elements with the shingled Arts and Crafts framework: again, a melange.
It was pure accident that we toured the Gamble House and the uber-modern Stahl House on the same day — and pure genius. Next up, the Moderns…
