Santa Barbara’s Spanish Theme Reprised in Eastern Star Home
If you wonder why Mission Revival or Spanish Colonial architecture has become the most pervasive style of architecture on the Westside, look no further than the Eastern Star Home. It is an example of what makes this style so flexible, so elegant and so pervasive.
The building looks as if it belongs on its site. It seems to have come about as the result of centuries of thought and planning. Yet it was built as a retirement community in 1932 with the most modern methods. The Eastern Star Home shows you how architecture can endow a building with the romance of rightness.
The Eastern Star Home is in some ways an outpost of Santa Barbara. There, after an earthquake damaged most of the downtown in 1925, a coalition of architects, preservationists and activists consciously re-created a small California seaside resort into a Spanish wonderland. The centerpiece was the lavish courthouse, designed by San Francisco architect William Mooser after he had visited Spain on a fact-finding mission.
The fraternal order of the Eastern Star asked the same architect three years later to create a smaller version of that masterpiece, including a scaled-down version of its famous bell tower, for what was then the wilds of Brentwood.
The home sits atop a slight rise, with a long porch pinned to the site by the tower. The forms of the tower and porch flow into each other with the kind of fluidity of white walls that makes all good Spanish Colonial buildings appear to be seamless. Outdoor staircases to either side weave in and out of the fabric of the building, allowing light to catch the surfaces behind them. At the corners, the building dissolves into what looks like wooden porches (they are in reality made out of painted concrete) and a red tile roof flows over the top of every form.
You enter underneath the tower through a grand arch and find yourself in a collection of public spaces that are dark but grand. The hallway floors were once covered with rough red tiles, the ceilings are still vaulted and painted, and wood beams, Spanish tiles and wrought-iron chandeliers everywhere give the spaces an ornate appearance. On the other side of a small courtyard, where a polygonal tile fountain brings forth memories of the Alhambra, a giant gable houses a dining room fit for the Spanish grandees.
These days the inhabitants are not lords and ladies, but 56 elderly members of the Order of the Eastern Star. The order built an addition in 1955, but they wisely kept it completely to the rear of the original building. Though some renovations were inevitable and others, such as the carpet in the main hall, are lamentable, in general they have done an admirable job in maintaining this slightly brooding romance atop a Brentwood hill.
The Eastern Star Home is a private place, but it endows its inhabitants with the dignity that comes from beautifully composed and decorated spaces. You might recognize it as the rest home in the movie “Chinatown.” As is the case with so many of this city’s great buildings, it makes frequent supporting appearances on the screen.
What is more important, it has a presence on Sunset Boulevard that is the opposite of what we associate with Spanish Colonial buildings. Instead of turning its back to the street and offering only bougainvillea-covered walls to hint at the world inside, it opens itself up to inspection from a distance, displaying its architectural finery with a proud, and yet gently rambling disposition. It may be a private home, but this is public architecture at its best: It shelters and dignifies a real community inside, while presenting an elaborate fantasy to those of us on the outside.
Eastern Star Home: 11725 Sunset Blvd., Brentwood
Architect: William Mooser
