At a 1921 Italian Renaissance villa in Los Angeles, CA, tinted window surrounds echo Tuscan precedents. All photos: Melba Levick
An oil tycoon commissioned gargoyles on gessoed corbels, Puebla-tile stair risers and stained-glass tableaus of family members and oil derricks for his two-story stair hall.
Set atop a 1920s ballroom pavilion on an estate built by a Union Carbide magnate, this pedimented new house by architect Jack Warner houses a collection of Roman antiquities.
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Coastal Revivals
California Mediterranean
by Marc Appleton and Melba Levick
Rizzoli, New York, NY; 2007
208 pp.; hardcover; 200 color photographs; $50
ISBN 978-0-8478-2915-6
Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn
California’s first generation of major architectural patrons, the Arts and Crafts lovers of the 1910s, favored unpainted native woods and hillside-hugging rooflines. But their stucco-craving successors in the 1920s longed for almost anything but an accurately regional look. “There was an overall desire to immerse oneself in some romantically conceived episode of the distant past or to be magically transported to some exotic, faraway place,” wrote the illustrious Los Angeles, CA-based historian David Gebhard in a 1989 study.
Marc Appleton, a Classicism-focused architect with offices in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, supplies that insightful Gebhard quote and an array of other expert opinions in California Mediterranean, a survey of Southern California houses. He focuses on 1920s buildings that could loosely be categorized as Mediterranean. That term, as applied in California, his introduction explains, encompasses everything from austere Mission bell towers to Aegean domes, Provençal slit windows, Renaissance balustrades and Hispano-Moresque azure-tiled pools. Among the homeowners’ varied renditions of Mediterranean plantings, Appleton notes, “the cypress, stone pine, olive, citrus, eucalyptus, and palm trees we have since come to associate with Southern California are all foreign species originally imported from Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world.”
Appleton devotes the bulk of the volume to 20 case studies, in or just outside Los Angeles, presented in no particular chronological or stylistic order (and including a few examples of recent construction and works in progress). In a few hundred words per project, he summarizes the original clients’ intents, the houses’ fates over the decades and the current owners’ expansions and furnishings. The existing buildings were mostly designed by little-known practitioners with low Google ratings, such as Lester G. Scherer, John P. Pederson and Soule, Hastings & Murphy. But the landscape-architect contingent includes the likes of the Olmsteds and Lockwood de Forest and the modern-day designers who have renovated the properties are luminaries like John Saladino, Sydney Baumgartner and Stefanos Polyzoides. (Appleton has apparently, graciously, not included any of his own prolific firm’s work.)
The sheer breadth of square footage of the selected projects is impressive. Appleton shows two cottages tucked into urban settings, balancing the book’s preponderance of hilltop mansions. His stylistic tastes span from demure and mainstream – vaulted living rooms with beige armchairs beside glossy black grand pianos – to ebullient and eccentric: 12th-century French marble blocks salvaged for a corridor portal and ziggurat-pattern Art Deco tiles adapted as chair rails. The stranger the house’s décor, the more likely the place is used as a house museum, in tribute to some past owner’s colorful life. No less than four of Appleton’s subjects are open to the public, including a tile-making family’s Malibu retreat with floral tiles around windows and doorways and an oil tycoon’s mansion where stained-glass scenes depict oil derricks.
Appleton’s descriptions of such attractions have a few frustrating pockets of shelter-magazine-ese: “The couple have fashioned a romantic French Eden” where “everything is comfortable and inviting,” he writes about a Montecito manor. Also, the text is sometimes uncoordinated with the images; you may long to see rooms and details that are mentioned but aren’t shown, such as an outdoor fireplace fashioned from pottery shards leftover after a Los Angeles earthquake and a 1935 library salvaged from a Paul Muni movie set.
But overall this book provides a rare combination of mouthwatering photographs, swipe-worthy design ideas and honest aesthetic evaluation. There are plenty of books out there about California residential architecture, though regrettably few about tradition-inspired buildings, and still fewer of those written by architects. Who else but a practitioner like Marc Appleton, sensitized to history and versed in its many potential reinterpretations, could tour a 1925 Andalusian farmhouse in Montecito, spot garden features based on Alhambra precedents and notice how the room axes cross neatly but each façade is different, creating an “interplay between symmetry in plan but asymmetry in elevation”? How very Hollywood that each wall of the house gets to wear its own costume. 
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