The style we call ‘Spanish’ draws from a world of influences

By Michael Good | HouseCalls

Mary was losing it. OK, past tense. She’d already lost it, in a fairly public way.

“I sent them all home!” she said of her contractors. “I told them, ‘I’m trying to restore this house. Trying to bring it back. And every time I walk in here, you’ve destroyed something else!’”

I’d been trying to help Mary (not her real name) with some color choices — stain and paint — trying being the operative word. The next morning, Mary texted me. She had regained her wits and made some decisions. There had already been some realignment of priorities, some scaling back of ambitions. A week ago she had decided to go with a simple knockdown texture for the walls, rather than try to recreate the more dramatic, original texture we had found under some molding. Now she was opting for just white paint, rather than trying to do something like the original ochre. And she was skipping the stain on the floor. It would only delay things.

And so it goes, and has gone, for the last 90 or so years, as homeowners, investors, landlords, house flippers and even true believers try to do the right thing — or at least the expedient thing — with their Spanish-style home. Repeat this process some 3,000 times and you have San Diego’s version of the Spanish Eclectic style, circa 2014: white painted walls, natural wood floors, semi-smooth knockdown plaster texture. Gone are the rich colors; vibrant textures; the art deco, Moorish, Spanish and Mexican bathroom and kitchen tile; the hammered hardware and iron lighting. Instead, safe, fallback measures have created a false impression of what Spanish-style houses originally looked like. We live in a multi-cultural, multi-colored society, but we’ve turned our classic Southern California houses into pale imitations of themselves. In our hands, Spanish style has become something it was never intended to be: boring.

The Spanish style as it developed in the streetcar suburbs of San Diego in the mid-1920s was, unlike Craftsman or Prairie, not really a pure architectural style. It was a copy of a copy of a copy.

In Southern California, the first Spanish houses were places of worship: The Catholic Friars arrived here in 1769. These multi-talented men were military, civic and religious leaders, as well as architects and designers. The soldiers who accompanied them were also multi-talented. They were carpenters and plasterers and decorators, as well as swordsmen. Most were from Andalusia. So the first missions and outbuildings had characteristics of the traditional Andalusian farmhouse, circa 1700.

There wasn’t a proscribed architectural style for the California missions (unlike in the Southwest), so the designers used their imagination — and design books that they brought with them from Spain. Without a lumber mill or modern carpentry tools, they used paint to represent wainscoting, baseboards and decorative trim. The mission outbuildings were constructed in a similar style, with courtyards and surrounding walls. The missions needed frequent maintenance, and with each remodel and repair, they, too, lost a little something. In the early 20th century when historians began restoring the missions, they removed crumbling white plaster walls to find brightly painted decoration underneath. Even the missions had been remuddled.

The Spanish dons (many of them retired soldiers) built Andalusian-style haciendas for themselves, usually in an L- or U-shaped design. John D. Spreckles bought one (Casa de Estudillo in Old Town) in 1906 with the intention of turning it into a tourist trap. Irving Gill’s protégé Hazel Waterman restored it in time for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and it became a tourist attraction called Ramona’s Marriage Place. Ramona hadn’t gotten married there — in the book, in real life or in the movies. But that didn’t stop future homeowners and homebuilders from visiting the house and getting ideas about creating their own romantic little haciendas. In the early thirties, Cliff May, a descendent of the Estudillo family, began building his version of the Estudillo house, which was based as much on Hazel Waterman’s version as the original.

Meanwhile, down Mexico way, a different sort of Spanish architecture was being constructed, based on Spain’s gothic cathedrals. Some of these buildings, such as the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, took centuries to complete (from 1573 to 1813). Bertram Goodhue, who designed the signature buildings of the 1915 exposition in Balboa Park, borrowed heavily from Mexico’s Cathedrals. The other expo architects largely ignored Goodhue’s lead, however. They built in a variety of styles: Moorish, Italianate, Pueblo, Greek, Roman, Mission.

The Panama-California buildings continued to influence builders and buyers long after the fair closed. They were widely photographed. Soldiers were stationed there, movies were shot there and builders in the 1920s couldn’t help but drive over the bridge and past the California Tower on their way to work in neighborhoods like Kensington, Mission Hills, North Park and Loma Portal.

In addition to being prolific plagiarists, early 20th century architects were well traveled. San Diego’s Frank Meade didn’t just “take the tour” — he went native, exploring North Africa in an open wooden cart in 1903. Meade lived and dressed like the locals. When he returned to San Diego, he shared his newfound sensibilities with both Irving Gill and Richard Requa (he was partners, consecutively, with each). The influence of North Africa can be seen in the buildings Meade and Gill designed together, as well as in Richard Requa’s designs for Kensington Heights (Requa himself went to Spain twice, photographing extensively).

Requa was scholarly and authoritative. He wrote a popular column for the San Diego Union on home design and interior decorating. Considering the eclecticism of the age, Requa came down squarely on the side of “less is more,” criticizing in his column builders who failed to reign in their exuberance. In a column dated Oct. 4, 1925, he recommended, “avoiding shams in constructing homes.” He ran photographs of what not to do, including one house that “has Moorish elements all over the front, and Spanish features too numerous to mention.” He wasn’t pleased, either, by the “window frames in olive and geegaws in tobacco brown.”

But Requa was just tilting at windmills. Eclecticism was what architecture was all about in the 1920s, combining various influences and ideas, random materials, colors and textures in an imaginative way and to a pleasing effect. Builders were trying to out-do each other without getting too far in front of the public or losing their shirts. As a song from the age — well, from four years later — puts it, builders believed that when it came to Spanish style, “anything goes”. (One of the colorful characters parodied in the Cole Porter song of the same name, Elsie de Wolfe, was an interior designer who in the 1920s introduced both faux finishing and the cocktail party.)

Sadly, for today’s Spanish Eclectic homeowners, many of those “anythings” — tile, textures, hardware and paint treatments — have indeed gone. With all the attention that will no doubt be lavished on the Spanish style next year during the 100-year anniversary of the Panama-California Exposition, it’s all the more reason for homeowners to try to recreate the original spirit of their Spanish-style house.

And all the more reason for us to applaud those few homeowners who go through the considerable effort — and stress — to bring their diverse, eclectic houses back to their original glory.

—Contact Michael Good at [email protected].