STRUCTURES : Edifice Complex : The ‘original’ Doheny Library at St. John’s Seminary is a prized Wallace Neff design that’s off the beaten track.

Edward L. Doheny is a name to be reckoned with around these parts, although the oil pioneer-magnate died in 1935. In the early part of this century, Doheny owned a sizable piece of Beverly Hills--a 400-acre ranch--and, at various times, four ranches in Ventura County.

In the late ‘30s, his widow, Estelle, wanted to create a monument to her husband’s memory. At the time, St. John’s Seminary was being readied for construction on a pristine 100-acre parcel in eastern Camarillo. The property had been bequeathed by Juan Camarillo.

Doheny agreed to satisfy a need for a library on the grounds. The resulting structure--the Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library--was created by noted Southern California architect Wallace Neff, who had also designed a Doheny ranch in Santa Paula Canyon in 1929.

The library remains one of Neff’s prized accomplishments, and a gem among the handful of polished jewels on the architectural landscape of Ventura County. While the library is open to the public, it’s off the beaten track in more ways than one. More’s the charm because of it.

Neff’s creation on the theology campus is not to be confused with the other Doheny library on the sprawling property. The Estelle Doheny Library was built in the mid-1960s as part of the separate college campus. It is in stark stylistic contrast with the library that Mrs. Doheny and Neff created.

Distinctions between the two libraries, and the timelessness of the older one, make for an implicit commentary on the unpredictable cycles in architectural taste.

Neff’s library is stately, grounded in the Spanish colonial idiom. But it also sports decorative flourishes--especially in the highly ornamental cast stone entryway facade, patterned after the baptistery of the Mexico City Cathedral.

By contrast, the ‘60s-era library, like the college itself, adopts a more looming, Modernist approach. The arrangement of volumes and forms is rational, stripped of excess ornament, broken down to towering vertical planes and rectangles. It makes perfect sense.

Neff’s creation is about much more than rationality.

Last year, as part of an elaborate refurbishing of the second floor, Santa Barbara artist James Fodor painted a mural of the California missions around the walls of the Western Room. Each mission is exactingly rendered, along with the Doheny library.

Put into context, you can see where Neff paid heed to the role model of the missions, but also extended the architectural language beyond the Spanish influence. Balancing bold geometrical solidity with stylish touches, Neff found a unique synthesis.

Arcaded loggias are at either side of the building, at the end of which sit busts of beatific Popes keeping an eye on things. These arcades act as a decorative frame to the heroic rectangular bulk of the structure.

Turquoise-painted wrought-iron grillwork over the windows and on a stairway behind the library seems almost garish by comparison to the generally restrained quality of the structure. The rampant use of turquoise in secular and commercial architecture in the last decade doesn’t help ease the queasy impression.

Inside, the library is organized around a central oval axis, crowned with a small skylight. Dark wood paneling and shelves announce the distinguished tone of the library, and signs reading “Please Do Not Reshelve Books” are in handwritten calligraphic script.

But toward the rear, you pass through a portal into the area of the library where functionalism takes command and decorum is left behind. Three short floors of metal book shelving, a computer room and an audio-visual room downstairs are organized compactly.

A quick scan of titles reveals such books as “Greatness and Decline of Rome,” “Theologiae Moralis Compendium,” “The Ear of God” and, lo and behold, “Our Bodies, Our Selves.”

This is the intellectual boiler room.

It’s another story on the second floor, where Estelle Doheny’s collection is kept. The air is rarefied, the mood hushed.

A stern 50-year-old document lays out the “Rules Governing the Care and Use of the Estelle Doheny collection of rare books, manuscripts and works of art. . . . 2. No visitor, no matter how well provided with credentials, may be allowed alone in the library to use material.” The visitor suddenly feels unworthy.

Here in the upstairs foyer, you find a display case with Bibles dating back to 1209. In the mysterious, “treasure room,” rich in dark wood, board meetings are held and shelves of volumes climb the wall into a balcony space overlooking the gallery.

In the Doheny Salon, a more relaxed arrangement of sofas suggests an air of leisure. Large portraits of the Dohenys, circa 1926, flank a massive fireplace. Mass is the key.

Upstairs, designer Sandy Gutormson and carpenter Richard Wedler were involved in a face lift completed last March in which Neff’s original molding and detail work were echoed in the rooms. “There was a lot of care and emotion that went into the project,” explained librarian Patricia Fessier. “We took it quite personally.”

The library fulfills several layers of functions. It memorializes the Doheny patriarch, serves as a house for Estelle Doheny’s collection of rare books and artworks, provides a valuable service for the seminary and was a concrete expression of Mrs. Doheny’s avowed Catholic faith.

It also serves as a kind of shrine to the patronage that spawned it. Above the front door, nestled within the rococo scrollwork and the pilasters of the entrance, stands a statue of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal.

On top of that, there is the Doheny coat of arms--Estelle Doheny was named as a Papal Countess. We learn that Edward Doheny was “descendant of the dark-haired conn,” an Irish elite class who were journal keepers, record keepers, historians and genealogists.

Set apart from the complex of seminary buildings, both physically and architecturally, the library seems to sit in proud solitude on the property. Equal parts functional edifice, symbolic temple of knowledge and architectural splendor, the building has an aura all its own.

What does all of this have to do with our everyday lives? Little to nothing, and therein lies the secret to its preciousness. A visit to the Doheny library is a trip to another world, just a short jaunt from downtown Camarillo.

At the risk of irreverence, visiting the seminary is not unlike visiting another Camarillo institution, the state hospital. As an outside observer with no official affiliation, one can enjoy the beauty and then go away.