Discoveries
THERE is something sad about the stunning career of Southern California architect Wallace Neff -- like a faded photograph. Neff’s work is redolent of all that Southern California dreams are made of: the white stucco walls brimming with bougainvillea, the smooth, cool ironwork on doors and windows. Why sad? Because he never quite achieved the fame and glory he felt he deserved. Perhaps also because the Spanish Colonial style he became famous for, in both its grand and simple forms, seems so well-suited to a Southern California lifestyle of a sort that disappeared in the early 1930s.
Neff grew up on the 2,400-acre ranch in Altadena bought by his maternal grandfather, Andrew McNally, co-founder of the Chicago-based Rand McNally company, who turned it into a thriving olive and citrus colony, La Mirada. The family’s summers were spent in Long Beach or at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego. When Neff was 14, his parents took their six children to Europe for five years. On their return, Neff was accepted as an architecture student at MIT.
Neff began as a society architect, designing a house for his mother in Santa Barbara, followed by several modest houses in Pasadena and buildings for the Ojai Valley Country Club. His career took off after he designed the Bourne House, near the Huntington estate in San Marino. Enchanted Hill, the mansion built for screenwriter Frances Marion and her movie-actor husband Fred Thomson above Benedict Canyon, spread Neff’s reputation among the Hollywood elite. Pickfair, the house he renovated for Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in Beverly Hills, is perhaps his best-known (though probably not his finest) work.
Although most of these houses were built in the Spanish Colonial style, with unpaved courtyards and grand entrance halls, others, like the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden’s administration building on a 6,000-acre ranch in the Puente Hills owned by Susanna Bixby Bryant (built in adobe) or the 1946 Bubble House in Pasadena (built with rubberized nylon), were experiments. His landscaping was often done by such Southern California classicists as Florence Yoch and Ruth Shellhorn, using native, drought-resistant plants, terra-cotta pots and elaborate tiling. Neff designed houses for the Zanucks, the Goetzes, the Wurtzels and many other Hollywood families, but after the 1930s the Spanish Colonial style began to fall out of favor. “After a giddy decade of designing stately villas and informal haciendas,” writes Diane Kanner, “Neff faced a world that was suddenly suspicious of tradition; in its place a new ‘International’ style was emerging.” Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler were now the darlings of the film industry.
Toward the end of his life, Neff received numerous honors. “I never had any illusion that my work was anything other than ‘Californian’ in style,” he wrote in 1980, two years before his death. “I was in practice for such a long time that my early work began to be admired in a nostalgic sort of way.” It is unusual to find such good, clear writing in a picture book; too often the photos are offset by academic monographs and wooden captions. Kanner captures the spirit of Neff’s work and the changes in the culture and landscape he grew up in. She recognizes him as a society architect but does not dismiss him for it. His importance in our aesthetics is indisputable. “There is no epitaph on his grave,” she writes, “but his familiar line about building California houses for California people would have suited him nicely in its brevity.”
