‘20s Spanish Style Needs No Revival : Red Tile Roofs, White Walls Endure as Southland Favorites

“It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof and a patio out to one side. . . .”

The opening paragraph of James M. Cain’s classic 1936 novel “Double Indemnity” uses the distinctive features of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture to set the scene for his drama of lust and murder.

And while “Double Indemnity” is fiction, Cain was right about the prevalence of the “Spanish house,” whose style was the most popular house design in Southern California before World War II and whose popularity endures.

Today, home builders and buyers from San Diego to Santa Barbara favor versions of the Spanish style’s red tile roofs and white stucco walls for residences of all sizes and prices, from the modest to the opulent.

“The Spanish style has became a cliche in house design,” said David Gebhard, a UC Santa Barbara architectural historian. “All too often nowadays the style is watered down into a few half-hearted gestures, vaguely Mediterranean in manner, often sloppily designed, that rob Revival architecture of much of its powerful and evocative character.”

That character was expressed in a remarkably mature architectural style when it burst upon the local scene in the 1920s.

“Suddenly there is it was, in full flood,” said Occidental College Prof. Robert Winter, “a vigorous architecture that best expressed the energy, hopefulness and surging cultural confidence of the young city of Los Angeles.”

Introduced by the upper-middle-class, the Revival style of house soon filtered through the social scale in a rapid cultural trickle-down. By the mid-1920s more modest examples were being built all over the Southland, down to small two-bedroom bungalows for the new working class that was powering the post-World War I prosperity.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, the avenues of Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Barbara, Palos Verdes, Long Beach and West Los Angeles were soon populated with rows of red-tiled roofs. Whole districts, such as Hollywood’s Whitley Heights--home to Rudolph Valentino and Jean Harlow--and Carthay Circle southeast of Beverly Hills, were created in the Spanish idiom.

(Cain’s “Double Indemnity” house was located in Glendale, but the house used in the 1944 Billy Wilder film is situated at 6301 Quebec St., in the Hollywood Hills.)

Several Simultaneous Factors

The rapid popularization of Revival design in the 1920s was due to the simultaneous occurrence of several factors:

--The impact of the 1915 Panama-California International Exposition in San Diego, designed by Bertram Goodhue in the Spanish style.

--A post-World War I housing boom led by a wave of cultured immigrants in search of a healthy climate and a romantic life style.

--A host of resettled East Coast architects who were inspired by the myth of California’s colonial history. Many of these new California designers were fresh from tours of the Spanish province of Andalusia, home of Gypsy flamenco, white-walled haciendas and Moorish palaces like the Alhambra in Granada.

--The influence of magazines, such as Architectural Digest that were particularly popular with women readers.

--The rise of a Hollywood movie colony in search of a style to express its new opulence.

“It was the era of Valentino and Ramon Navarro and ‘The Mark of Zorro,’ ” Gebhard explained.”The Spanish vogue was given cachet by the upper-middle-class Easterners who settled in Pasadena, San Marino, Montecito and Santa Barabara. So the upstart movie crowd felt reassured in its architectural taste.”

Mansions for Plutocracy

Revival houses, hotels and commercial buildings attracted the talents of Southern California’s most popular and gifted designers in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Montecito architect George Washington Smith, the master of the Spanish grand manner, built splendid mansions for the Southland real estate, press, transportation and oil plutocracy.

The 1926 Steedman house in Montecito, and the 1928 Prindle House on Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena’s Oak Knoll district are delightful designs, filled with delicious details in a powerful composition of architectural forms.

“Smith’s work was romantic, charming and historically evocative, and, at the same time, fully responsive to modern needs,” Francis Brady wrote in his 1962 thesis “The Spanish Revival in California Architecture.”

“It provided a framework for a warm and gracious way of life, comfortably rooted in regional tradition. And it made full use of a region’s natural gifts of climate and terrain.”

Many Famous Names

The host of Revival architects included many famous names, among them Goodhue, Wallace Neff, Reginald Johnson, Everett Phipps Babcock, Gordon Kaufmann, Roland Coate, Lutah Maria Riggs, Myron Hunt and Carleton Winslow.

Wallace Neff created hilltop haciendas in Beverly Hills for Hollywood lights such as director King Vidor. Stars like Dolores del Rio built Revival villas in the Hollywood Hills that gave them the airs of instant grandees.

These were the privileged clients, with money to spare and life styles to cultivate. But during the 1920s and ‘30s the Spanish style made its most popular impact in the multitude of middle-range residences that sprang up on many local streets.

A residence at 560 Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena is a fine example of a middle-range Revival house. Designed by Everett Phipps Babcock in 1926, the house is not as grand as Smith’s Prindle villa nor as simple as many smaller bungalows. But it boasts a purity of form that embodies the best in the Spanish style.

Wrought-Iron Railings

The house has the compact massing of red tile roofs and white stucco walls punctured by small windows and a simple arched front doorway that are the hallmarks of the Revival mode. Balconies with wrought-iron railings have typical french windows opening into the second-floor bedrooms.

The red-tile-floored hall leads down several steps into a long beamed living room. Arched doorways open off the hall to give access to the dining room and kitchen areas. The stairway’s risers are decorated with antiqued tiles made by Ernest Batchelder, a famous local potter.

This suburban Pasadena house, with its muscular massing and limited color palette--red roofs, white walls, black wrought iron--could be transported whole to a traditional southern Spanish town such as Ronda or Jerez de la Frontera.

However, the romantic Anglo passion for the Spanish style did not include any wide social acceptance of local Latinos.

‘Socially Disadvantaged’

“While the 1920s Anglos were falling head-over-heels in love with everything Spanish, the Chicano descendants of the original Californios who first established the style in the 18th and 19th centuries were often socially disadvantaged,” historian Winter said.

When the fashion for the Spanish-style began to fade from favor in the 1940s it was the victim of its own popularity.

By the late 1930s, Revival housing had become so prevalent in the Southland it was no longer chic. The upper-middle-class trend setters who had first embraced Spanish architecture abandoned it as “common.”

It was superseded by the modernist International style, which became the avant-garde architecture of the socially and technologically hopeful post-World War II era.

The local schools of architecture, particularly USC, switched from training students in a variety of traditional mannerisms toward a concentration on the “form follows function” aesthetic theory of the International Style as practiced by Viennese expatriates Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler.

Ranch Bungalows Preferred

A generation of design professionals, following the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier’s call to “eliminate all dead concepts,” looked down their noses at architectural history.

With the development of the 1950s suburban tracts, architects began to prefer the new California Ranch bungalow style, which seemed to best embody the relaxed and expansive feelings of the time.

In the 1980s, surfacing on the tide of a return to architectural tradition, Revival has staged a re-revival. Its persistent appeal has attracted a wide spectrum of designers, from architects who work within the mass market residential subdivision industry to those who plan large private villas.

The award-winning $1-million “Montecito” villas in the Westridge tract of Calabasas Park “capture the ambiance of the traditional Spanish house,” according to the builders.

Historic Hacienda

The city of Irvine is awash in pink stucco and red tiled roofs. The rapidly developing San Gabriel Valley is populated with new speculative housing tracts designed in some variation of the Revival style.

Prominent architects like Charles Moore have recently crafted villas that are pure Spanish. His 1988 Anawalt house in Point Dume is a historic hacienda poised on the edge of a seafront cliff.

Moore said that the Revival style is “a Southland archetype. It is the image of our transformed semi-desert, climatically Mediterranean landscape, the architecture of our innocence. It is our primal idea of home.

“When people conjure up the concept of ‘home’ they have to reach back into the past to find real images of domestic refuge. And if you’re reaching back, why meddle with the model?”

Historian Winter worries that, exceptions like Moore aside, contemporary Spanish Revival designers have lost their nerve.

‘Skills Have Declined’

“The idiom of the current re-revival is so much less assured than it was in the 1920s,”he said. “Also, the level of craftsmanship available in the 1920s no longer exists. Skills have declined and materials have cheapened.”

Drywall has replaced lath and plaster. The ornamental tilework we now import from Mexico cannot match the subtlety and color resonance of the ceramics imported from Spain or produced by local tilemasters like Ernest Batchelder.

And costs have skyrocketed. The cheap labor available in the 1920s has given way to high-priced artisans who demand, and sometimes deserve, a good wage.

Despite these negatives, and though Angelenos are considerably less innocent than they were half a century ago, they relish the essential simplicities of the Spanish style.

Spanish Colonial Revival architecture remains, as Moore has said, our primal image of “home.”