A Historic Nod to Designer of Upscale Rancho

Architect Lilian Rice wasn’t an innovator, but in the 1920s and 1930s, inspired by European city planning and Spanish Colonial architecture, she did a masterful job laying out the village of Rancho Santa Fe and designing several of its buildings.

Now, in honor of her work, eight Rancho Santa Fe buildings by Rice are headed for the National Register of Historic Places. Last Friday, the buildings were approved for the listing by the state Historical Resources Commission, a significant step that experts say makes the national listing a shoo-in.

When Rice died prematurely in 1938 at the age of 49 of untreated appendicitis, she left a legacy of carefully crafted buildings, both in Rancho Santa Fe and other San Diego County locations. The best of these were built from simple materials such as white stucco and tile roofs and were subtly adapted to their sites. Many used courtyards and shaded terraces to make the most of Southern California’s hospitable climate.

“We’re bringing her out of the shadows,” said Pat Cologne of Rancho Santa Fe, who chaired the effort to honor Rice. (Cologne is also a member of the state Historical Resources Commission.) “I believe, and so do very many people here, that Lilian Rice set the style that has lasted until today. She adapted her love for Spanish architecture, scaled it down, and it was perfect for the Ranch.”

The eight buildings submitted for National Register listing include two in the village and six houses nearby.

After the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park, which featured buildings in the Spanish Colonial style designed by Bertram Goodhue and others, Spanish architectural influences spread through San Diego. Although Rice designed within a range that included many of these influences, each of her best buildings was special in its own way, as evidenced by the eight submitted for National Register listing.

The commercial building at Paseo Delicias and Avenida de Acacias in the village--once the offices of the Rancho Santa Fe Land Improvement Co., which developed Rancho Santa Fe--is anchored by miniature towers that might have been inspired by California’s missions. It gives a romantic identity to this key downtown corner.

A few blocks down Paseo Delicias is a small row house, hidden behind a smooth stucco wall adorned by creeping vines. A pocket courtyard behind a door in the wall provides a swatch of nature for the residents, a buffer from the steady auto traffic that flows by just beyond the wall.

The six houses included on the list range from Rice’s own cottage near the Rancho Santa Fe Inn to larger estate homes.

Rice’s intimate stucco cottage reveals some of the influences she picked up while studying architecture at U.C. Berkeley. She graduated in 1910, at a time when Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan and other architects were combining natural materials such as wood, brick, stucco and stone in styles well suited to warm California weather and woodsy, San Francisco Bay Area sites.

One Rancho Santa Fe estate home by Rice mixes Mission, Craftsman and other influences. The house’s L-shaped layout around a garden dates back to the Mission-era ranchos of the 19th Century in San Diego County. Shuttered, deep-set windows, white stucco walls and a tile roof resemble traditional Mediterranean houses. A large living room with a rugged, beamed ceiling, carefully placed windows that frame garden views, and the casual, flowing floor plan were ideas being explored by a variety of California architects during Rice’s era.

While not a cutting edge architect like Irving Gill, with whom Rice worked briefly, Rice is important not only for her tasteful interpretations of Spanish Colonial and Craftsman ideas, but for her place in the chain of local architecture.

Rice was employed by San Diego architects Richard Requa and Herbert Jackson when they were hired by the Rancho Santa Fe Land Improvement Co. to do a master plan for Rancho Santa Fe and design several buildings with a Spanish Colonial flavor. Requa, the designer in the partnership, had worked with Gill for three years beginning in 1907 and later traveled extensively in the Mediterranean to experience the architecture first-hand.

Requa’s distinguished career included his role as director of architecture for the 1935 exposition in Balboa Park and several houses in Mission Hills and elsewhere. Requa was also part of the team of architects that designed the County Administration Center on Pacific Highway, one of San Diego’s finest buildings.

When the Rancho Santa Fe work came into the office, Requa and Jackson were busy with other projects. As Rice began working on the project, they saw how capable she was, and soon gave her full responsibility for the planning of the village and the design of several buildings. As the village developed, Rice stayed on to design several houses.

Rancho Santa Fe was among the state’s first planned communities, with the town center built according to Rice’s plan, instead of developing haphazardly.

The balanced array of downtown buildings flanking a central circulation spine--Paseo Delicias--is evidence of the formal European planning ideas Rice picked up from architect John Galen Howard and others on the faculty at Berkeley. She was ahead of her time in incorporating urban townhouses in the commercial district, an early version of today’s “mixed-use” development.

Although Rancho Santa Fe is small (6,200 acres, population 4,500) and Rice’s influence subtle, today’s architects and planners can learn from her work. Her simple, sensitive ways of marrying indoor and outdoor spaces are still valid.

Compare Rancho Santa Fe to Rancho Bernardo, for example, and you can see how well Rice applied the Spanish Colonial style to this compact village of one- and two-story buildings, and how silly and monotonous it looks when used for four- and five-story office buildings and rows and rows of identical houses in a community several times the size.

The national register application for Rice’s buildings came in a new “multiple property” category. Only three other groups of buildings in the state have qualified in this category, which allows several properties to qualify together using the same basic historical research.

Others who led the drive to place Rice’s buildings on the National Register were Rancho Santa Fe resident Phyllis Paul with assistance from University of San Diego history professor and architectural historian Dr. Ray Brandes, who did the historical research, and Keith Behner, the Rancho Santa Fe Assn.’s planner.

Now that the significance of Rice’s work in Rancho Santa Fe has been established, it will be a relatively simple matter to add more buildings to the national register listing after the initial eight are approved. According to Brandes, 25 more buildings by Rice in Rancho Santa Fe are candidates.

Although some Rancho Santa Fe owners of Lilian Rice buildings fear that the National Register listing of their properties will limit what they can do to them, the listing does not prevent owners from altering--or even tearing down--their buildings. But, with the increased awareness the listing brings of a building’s historical significance, there is a much greater likelihood of a community uproar if changes are proposed.