The Cadillac of Adobes Needs Help

San Diego County’s missions and several buildings in Old Town are generally credited as the inspiration for any “mission style” elements that appear in our 20th-Century buildings.

But Rancho Guajome, a crumbling yet still impressive compound of adobes in Oceanside, the earliest of which date from 1851, is a little-known piece of local history that deserves a more prominent place next to other buildings of its era.

“In Southern California for years, the Guajome ranch house has been called the Cadillac of adobes,” said Mary Ward, historian for San Diego County, which bought the 165-acre property from descendants of the original owners for $1 million in 1973.

State grants and county matching funds toward the badly needed restoration have only recently started to flow. County Parks Planner Valerie Morgan, who oversees Guajome Regional Park, said grant funds have been sought many times over the years, but with little success until recently.

After meeting state mandates for spending, the county has only a small fraction of its $1-billion budget left for discretionary use, according to Armando Buelna, staff assistant to Supervisor John McDonald, whose 5th District includes Guajome.

Also, the county recently pitched Guajome to 40 private foundations and corporations, but received only letters of interest--with no money enclosed--in response.

About 3 miles east of the San Luis Rey Mission on Mission Boulevard in Oceanside, North Santa Fe Road heads south. After passing through a series of tract developments, it snakes through more open terrain. There, in plain view, is the Guajome Rancho, tattered, but with a certain aged romance.

The story of the rancho centers on Cave Couts, an army officer who married Ysidora Bandini (of the prominent Bandini family for whom Casa Bandini in Old Town is named), and his son Cave Jr., later known as “the last of the Dons.” Abel Stearns, the wealthy husband of Ysidora’s sister, owned Guajome and made a wedding gift of the rancho to the senior Couts and his bride.

Couts built his new home with the help of about 300 Indians living near the mission, beginning in 1851. There were some hard feelings between the Indians and wealthy white men like Couts.

“In 1851, there was a terrible uprising led by Antonio Garra, a Luiseno Indian formerly of Mission San Luis Rey,” county historian Ward said. Couts didn’t always have the best of relations with the natives. Twice in 1855, he went up before a county grand jury on charges of beating Indians with a strip of rawhide. One eventually died from the beating, but Couts was acquitted.

The basic layout of the Guajome buildings--four wings of living quarters in a square around a courtyard-- was, with the other ranchos of its day, a model for the classic U- or L-shaped California ranch houses popularized in the 1940s and ‘50s by architect Cliff May. (According to Ward, architect May, now in his 80s, is a distant relative of the Estudillo family, one-time owners of the Casa Estudillo adobe in Old Town. So the rancho design concepts were practically in his blood.) At Guajome, the design provided security from Indian attacks, in addition to taking advantage of the warm climate.

A kitchen wing, added years after the original buildings were finished, and the chapel next to the main house have already been restored. The kitchen’s centerpiece is a huge, wood-burning iron range that Couts had shipped from San Francisco.

With its floor of large terra cotta tiles, thick walls and heavy beamed ceiling, the room is clearly a raw prototype for thousands of today’s Southwestern-flavored kitchens so popular in the Sun Belt.

The walls of Guajome are impressive: adobe bricks, 2 feet thick, covered with plaster. In some areas, bricks peek through the plaster, silent reminders of an era when buildings like this were made from the very earth on which they stood. (Actually, the raw clay for Guajome’s bricks may have been brought from another site.)

But the outdoor areas are what really make this 7,680-square-foot luxury home sing. The 22 rooms are linked by an outdoor covered corridor all around the central courtyard, where Couts had planted fruit trees and vines that crept up vertical roof supports and along the eaves. From the front entry, you can look straight through a large vestibule and double doors to the fountain in the center of the courtyard.

Followers of the work of Irving Gill will feel the architect’s roots here. Such Gill designs as the La Jolla Women’s Club, with its arched outdoor arcades, echo the dramatic front of Rancho Guajome, also marked by an arched arcade. The celebration at Guajome of earth, sun, sky and the views carried into the work of Gill, May and countless others.

To this follower of local architectural history, the fact that Guajome has not been restored sooner seems shocking, even more so in light of recent losses.

“Our adobes are really deteriorating,” Ward said. “There were a lot until the heavy rains of the ‘70s. As soon as the roofs go, they melt back to the soil. The ones with roofs maintained are still in fair condition.”

Luckily, Guajome’s clay roof tiles, originally from the nearby San Luis Rey Mission, were removed and stored under shelter by the side of the adobe some years ago. A temporary roof was installed to save the walls from water damage until restoration occurs.

This year, the county is hoping for $988,000 in state money toward the restoration, plus $400,000 from the recently passed Coastal Park Lands Conservancy Act. Last year, $150,000 came from the state, and the county pitched in $90,000.

In a county whose residents support a giant fantasy land theme park, a multimillion-dollar Soviet arts festival, countless shopping malls and hundreds of $300,000-and-up custom homes, you’d think an architectural relic as important as Guajome would have received the necessary attention long ago.

It’s at places like Guajome, designs that worked so much better nearly 150 years ago than many of our “contemporary” buildings do today, that architects and those who care about architecture can learn some important lessons.

DESIGN NOTES: Architect Ken Kellogg plans a tour of a new North County house, but with a twist. Student guides from the New School of Architecture will describe the spaces for the blind visitors. . . . San Diego Home/Garden’s new space in the former West Sea Company space on 4th Avenue near Market in the Gaslamp Quarter is being designed by architect Marc Tarasuck. . . . Recent good idea from the Navy: Extend the Linear Park to be built along Harbor Drive through their waterfront property. Not-so-recent development: the new Embassy Suites hotel on Market Street, blocking any such extension.