DESIGN : A Personal Touch : Whatever Wallace Neff Designed, It Ended Up Easily Recognizable as Being From His Hand

IN THE 1920s ,and on into the decades that followed, California boasted a remarkable number of architects who were able to imprint their personality onto each of the buildings they designed, regardless of the particular traditional or modern image they might have been called upon to employ. One of these facile California figures was Pasadena-Los Angeles architect Wallace Neff. Whether he was designing an Andalusian farmhouse, a Tuscan villa or a French Norman cottage, each ended up being easily recognizable as being from his hand. As was the case with a small coterie of California architects, Neff enjoyed throughout his career a high degree of national and regional success in his practice. Though the wide variety of images that he employed for his buildings was identical to that used by his contemporaries--both in California and throughout the United States--he had an uncanny ability to come forth with a highly individual series of interpretations.

In looking into the work of figures such as Neff, several questions inevitably come to mind. What was this ingredient of personality that he was able to impose on his buildings?

In a 1924 article on Neff, Harris Allen, editor of the Pacific Coast Architect, had recourse to such terms as “delightful” and “playful” in characterizing the architect’s approach to design. In his comments on the architect’s scheme for the Libbey Stables at Ojai (1923), Allen discussed how these buildings had “obtained the picture quality of the Old World to a surprising degree.” He concluded, “We are given a truly fascinating glimpse of the courtyard, with apparent artless, naive simplicity--how accidental looking--and, in reality, what subtle artistry.” Allen also commented that Neff ‘s designs are “a bit theatric at times; what stunning stage settings some of them would make.”

It has often been argued that all buildings are a stage set, but in this case “theatric” and “stage settings” have to do with the finished building’s cultivated lack of reality (and if one considers the place and time, the atmosphere of the silent films of Hollywood). A recurring element in the history of architecture has been the frequently played game between conveying a sense of the reality of the moment, or of the past, and the sense of a dreamlike quality of the improbable and unreal. In the 1920s and ‘30s, this architectural game was looked upon as an open sport by architects, who skillfully manipulated a wide variety of traditional images.

In Neff ‘s case, his childlike delight in cultivating the unreal was an asset in his work in that it was that quality that almost always establishes the charm and romance of his buildings. It was, on occasion, a defect in that it at times prevents his design from emerging as a “timeless” example of architectural high art. What Allen had mentioned as “apparently artless, naive . . . accidental looking” qualities of Neff ‘s buildings seems to emerge as an end, not as a possible means leading to something else.

In his approach to design, Neff seems first to have established a rational siting for his building, and an equally well-thought-out workable plan. And he then proceeded to establish a careful integration of the volumes of the building as an object in its specific environment. Having taken care of those matters, he then moved on to counter those objective steps with a chimerical atmosphere. His method of accomplishing that was in most instances to squish his buildings into the ground--the horizontal is overemphasized to the extent that it seems to have more to do with a building we might find in a children’s book illustrated by Maxfield Parrish than in any building we might normally be familiar with. He reinforces this quality of squishiness (akin to a fairy-tale cottage that appears as a plant that has organically sprouted from the ground) by crouched detailing of the fenestration. Finally, these elements--windows, doors, arches and loggias--are injected into the wall surfaces in a fashion that turns out to be anything but traditional. In Neff ‘s hands, few of these distortions are readily apparent when we experience his buildings, but subconsciously we are aware of them.

Neff ‘s flair for originality is present in all of his buildings--as he closely mirrored the rapid changes in architectural taste and imagery that have occurred within the five-plus decades of his architectural practice. In his first design, that for his mother in Santa Barbara (1919), he, like others at the time, continued on into the post-World War I years the atmosphere of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement. Only in the case of his mother’s house, this gambrel-roofed cottage is more explicitly medieval. As one would expect of a California practitioner, he quickly became an exponent of the Spanish Colonial and of the Mediterranean (Italian Tuscan) imagery. While he did indeed utilize the Andalusian image quite often, his Andalusian houses, such as the 1923-1925 Frances M. Thomson house in Beverly Hills, were a version of rural southern Spain that never existed. The Thomson house, like Eugene Viollet le Duc’s restoration of the medieval city of Carcassone, was an Andalusian farmhouse as it should have been.

Alongside his Spanish-Mediterranean designs were images based upon the English Tudor and the Cotswold cottage, and upon the French Norman farmhouse. These medieval English and French designs eventually replaced the Spanish-Mediterranean as Neff ‘s primary imagery of the 1930s and later. Many of these European medieval-inspired cottages eventually assumed an almost doll-house quality. That is particularly true in his 1948 John Haigh house in San Marino, and in his R. Brigham house of 1939 in Bel-Air.

If we think in terms of what occurred with the image of the American Colonial in the 1930s--smaller scale, selected, highly readable details, a feeling of the rural and of coziness--these medieval designs of Neff are reflective of similar urges. By the time we reach the late 1930s, Neff was also partaking of another national shift in architectural taste--that of the refined (with its implied similarity to the modern) American Federal and English Regency. Neff ‘s Henry F. Haldeman house of 1939 in Holmby Hills conveys his Regency feeling, only in this case the design is based upon Mediterranean and Bermudan examples.

In the years after World War II, Neff came out with his own version of the California Ranch House--playing the added game of being both traditional and modern. The best of these, such as the Roy Eaton house in Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara (1962), were highly successful as designs, primarily because the modern imagery was held in check by the traditional (in this case the Spanish). In his last designs of the 1970s, Neff returned to a more pronounced use of traditional images.

Writing in 1926 in Country Life, Henry Humphrey, Jr., noted (with, in part, Neff ‘s A. K. Bourne house in San Marino of 1925 in mind): “It has been said that there are no houses in Spain so Spanish as those that are built in America. We have developed an architecture which is the quintessence of the Andalusian type.” It was this quality of “quintessence” that Neff sought to imbue into each of his designs--whether the imagery was Spanish, Mediterranean, English or post-World War II modern.

From “Wallace Neff: Architect of California’s Golden Age.” Copyright 1987 by Wallace Neff, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Capra Press, Santa Barbara.