JANUARY 2006 »  book review

California’s Traditionalists

Wallace Neff and the Grand Houses of the

Golden State
by Diane Kanner
Monacelli Press, New York, NY; 2005
248 pp.; hardcover; 100 color and 150 b&w illus.; $50
ISBN 1-58093-164-3

George Washington Smith: Architect of the Spanish Colonial Revival
by Patricia Gebhard
Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, UT; 2005
192 pp.; hardcover; 150 color and 39 b&w illus.; $39.95
ISBN 1-58685-510-7

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

"Picture book Spanish," sniffed the modernist critic Esther McCoy in 1953, writing off early-20th-century houses in southern California. Richard Neutra snobbishly summed up the prevailing regional trend as "Mexican ranchos," while gloomy novelist Nathanael West proposed in 1939 that in the battle against residential architectural eclecticism, "only dynamite would be of any use."

Two new monographs, the first major studies of their subjects, cast more flattering light on California’s traditionalist architects Wallace Neff (1895-1982) and George Washington Smith (1876-1930). Both were surprisingly foresighted, and clothed progressive ideas in vintage-looking skins. Both books are frustratingly flawed, but admirable attempts to honor the underappreciated.

Neff, a California-born and MIT-trained heir to the Rand McNally publishing fortune, devoted his 55-year career to historical architectural styles. His tastes spanned from Classical and Regency to rustic Norman, Mission Revival and even Tyrolean. Freelance journalist Diane Kanner has been researching him for 22 years, interviewing family members, friends, colleagues and clients, and tracking down archive fragments. Neff was patrician and impractical, usually in debt and not much interested in the fate of his office files. He spent his days at hilltop job sites collaborating with eminent landscape architects (Thomas Church, Florence Yoch) for A-list Hollywood clients including Cary Grant, Claudette Colbert, Mary Pickford and most of the Marx brothers.

Among Neff’s signature design elements are towering and sometimes faux chimneys, winding exterior stairs, faux-hewn vigas, wrought-iron rejas (grilles) and gunite simulated adobe. He gave the nouveaux riches a comforting illusion of old money, and didn’t theorize about his work – "effect was what he hoped to achieve," Kanner writes. Neff sometimes verged on excess, calling for 24k gilding and piling balustrade upon balustrade, but more often restrained himself to proto-postmodern austere gables. (It’s as if he foresaw Vanna Venturi’s 1964 house designed by her son Robert.) Neff also dabbled in affordable cottage housing, and around 1940 he devised hemispherical quick-build huts made of gunite sprayed over inflated fabric bubbles. The patented design, called the Airform, was eventually built in some 15 countries. Neff’s best works, raved an architecture magazine editor in 1926, had an "almost barbaric trimness."

In Kanner’s two-decade quest, she dug up so much data that she occasionally has trouble sifting out the unimportant. The chronology proceeds so slowly that Neff doesn’t open his office until page 71. We learn how Neff’s sister and mother wore their hair, and where Mary Pickford lived in a rooming house before she made hit silent films. The book also suffers from a lack of contemporary or vintage images of buildings. In their stead appear construction-site snapshots and puzzling excerpts from clients’ family albums. Kanner’s refreshing frankness about Neff’s foibles, however, goes a long way toward redeeming the volume’s lapses. He had a weakness for gold-digging starlets, he hyper-focused on details like benzoin alkaline woodwork stains and he tended to self-aggrandize and muddy the biographical record. No one has yet proven his late-in-life claim, for instance, that he’d briefly apprenticed after World War I to one of his idols, George Washington Smith.

The late and great historian of southern California architecture, David Gebhard, started studying Smith in the 1960s and had a monograph in progress when he died in 1996. Gebhard’s widow Patricia has taken up where he left off, documenting Smith’s comet-like career. A Pennsylvania-born, Harvard-educated stockbroker turned Fauve-esque landscape painter, Smith settled in Santa Barbara in 1917. Within a year or so he was thriving as an architect. He’d built himself an Andalusian-inspired house, where he had intended to concentrate on painting. But he found that prospective patrons were more eager "to have a white-washed house like mine," he recalled in an interview shortly before his death of heart failure in 1930. His practice, especially thanks to a head draftsperson named Lutah Maria Riggs, produced some 300 works in half a dozen states during its short lifespan. The firm laced Spanish Colonial Revival with Tuscan, Provençal, Norman, Tudor, Lombardian, Gothic and a little Streamline Moderne, and even built a mosaic-inlaid mansion that Gebhard calls "possibly the only example of Byzantine residential architecture in existence."

The houses’ footprints were usually U’s, L’s, H’s or T’s, lined in corbelled balconies and loggias. Loopy, deep scallops crown perimeter walls. French doors with fanlights lead to patios, fountains, terraced gardens and bright-colored tiled benches. More tile fills staircase risers and frame windows, doors, fireplaces and sinks.

Smith’s widow Mary worked with Riggs to preserve his paperwork, so Gebhard has been able to reproduce a generous supply of floor plans and presentation renderings. Her prose has an unfortunate tendency to repeat: Smith’s clients sought "to escape into a picturesque and romantic world" as well as "romantic, picturesque settings in which to escape." And Gebhard’s project descriptions can be as flat as "[A]n arched entry leads from the hall to the dining room." She provides a thorough catalog of works, sadly without consistently noting which ones survive. However, she has secured recent photographs for dozens of structures, with detail shots revealing doorknob patinas and geometric beam carvings. The exterior photographs aren’t always easy to decipher, because palms, flowering vines and fruit trees have overrun the façades. The houses look as ancient and rooted as Smith would have recommended. 

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