Cliff May

Contents

1. Invention and popularization
2. An adobe childhood
3. Ramona and the romance of the rancho
4. Courtyards and the outdoor room
5. Sunset and the plan book
6. Prefabrication and the tract
7. Custom houses and the late work
8. What the ranch formula cannot do

Selling, buying, remodeling, building: Mike Kobeissi’s work spans the four, with guidance on staging and design and renovation, while the California ranch house, as a building type, is hard to separate from the designer Cliff May.

Two claims about May are often run together. One is that he invented the ranch house. The other is that he made it the common form of the postwar Western suburb. The second is well documented. The first depends on what counts as invention.

Invention and popularization

The New York Times drew the line in 2012: May did not invent the ranch house, but no one promoted it with more influence.¹ Other writers go further. The Los Angeles Conservancy observes that many regard him as the inventor of its modern form, and Sunset, whose history is bound up with his, says that in the 1930s he created the modern version of the California ranch house.⁶⁴ The disagreement turns on the word modern. Low houses gathered around a courtyard reach back to Spain.³ His contribution was a version builders could repeat, at a time when developers depended on stock plans that were stiff and old fashioned.²

The Times piece marked an exhibition at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Carefree California, drawn from the May archive held by its Art, Design and Architecture Museum. The photographer Catherine Opie, commissioned to record two of his houses for it, remarked that May is less celebrated than Schindler or Neutra and ought not to be.¹

Figure

A practice by the numbers

ranch houses May designed in the 1940s and 1950s

1,000+

tract houses built in California from plans he licensed

Nearly 18,000

houses he designed for himself and his family

5

An adobe childhood

May came from San Diego. The Times gives his birth year as 1908 and Sunset as 1909, and neither credits him with any formal training in architecture.¹⁴ A 2008 SFGATE story about Daniel Gregory’s book on him says he spent his childhood outside San Diego in an adobe ranch house laid out in a U, and that he took an interest in William Wurster’s work while bending his own plans far more freely than Wurster’s grid allowed.² A second SFGATE piece connects his plan to the adobe of Spanish Mexican type in which his family had lived around 1900.³

Ramona and the romance of the rancho

Fiction helped make the rancho desirable. The architects David Weingarten and Lucia Howard, whose book SFGATE reviewed, credit Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1880s bestseller Ramona, set at Rancho Camulos in Ventura County, with popularizing the ranch house, and add that a 1910 film of the novel, shot on the same rancho by D. W. Griffith, kept the image alive.³ Years afterward May lodged in a San Diego adobe said to be where Ramona’s film wedding took place.³

Courtyards and the outdoor room

The houses were planned around open air. Sunset describes how the placement of glass and garden doors was meant to give every room a garden of its own, and how he helped carry the Spanish word patio, with the Mexican custom of eating and living outside, into everyday American speech.⁴ Plans bent into U and L forms around private courtyards, sliding doors could open an entire wall, and roofed verandas tied a sequence of rooms together.²

Claremont keeps an early custom example. Sunset’s 2025 visit to the city singles out the 1939 M. H. Cowen House, in a hacienda manner, with rough hewn woodwork, plaster in the spirit of adobe and courtyards that work as outdoor parts of the living room. Its owners restored it with the encouragement of Claremont Heritage, and the project took the California Preservation Foundation’s Design Award in 2025.⁵

Sunset and the plan book

Print carried the idea further than any client could. Sunset began publishing his designs for Western readers in 1936, House Beautiful took them to a national audience until his output crested late in the 1960s, and its editor Elizabeth Gordon held him up as more practical than Le Corbusier.² The 1946 book Western Ranch Houses, which he produced with Sunset, stated his principle that lot and house are a single design.² In 1951 he designed the magazine’s offices in Menlo Park, whose clay tile roofs overhang deeply and whose gardens were laid out by Thomas Church.²⁴

Figure

Two postwar builders compared

	Cliff May	Joseph Eichler
Roof	Gables	Flat roofs
System	Prefabricated panels	Post and beam
Plan	Meandering U and L shapes	Strictly rectilinear
Outdoor room	Courtyards	Atriums

Prefabrication and the tract

For builders May worked in factory made panels, a method that distinguished him from his contemporary Joseph Eichler, who built in post and beam.² The largest of his tracts was Lakewood Rancho Estates in Long Beach, finished in 1953 and 1954 with the architect Chris Choate: roughly 700 contemporary ranch houses, mostly L shaped, under shallow gables with clerestory windows and board and batten siding. Because the main parts arrived cut to size and the design followed a five foot grid, the Conservancy notes, four men needed only a day to stand up each house’s main frame.⁶ Across California, the Times counts more than a thousand houses of his design and close to 18,000 built under license from his plans.¹

Custom houses and the late work

His own house in Brentwood, the fifth he designed for his family, shows the custom line at its fullest. The UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum calls it the last stage of his custom ranch house, with high ceilings, broad expanses of glass, a combined living, dining and music room 53 feet long, and nine outdoor living areas. Gordon declined to run it in House Beautiful, finding it too large for her readers, and House and Garden published it as its first Hallmark House.⁷ He also designed the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa in 1966, and in his last years houses as far afield as Ireland and Australia.²

What the ranch formula cannot do

Admirers name the limits themselves. Gregory judged the system a poor business, because the panels at its heart were costly to keep on hand, and granted that such building encourages sprawl.² Builders working from plan books often borrowed designs, sometimes without permission, so a low house wrapped around a courtyard is no proof of his hand.² What the type does well, Weingarten and Howard argue, is grow: its rooms sit one deep, air crosses them, and wings are simple to add.³ For neighboring careers, see Richard Neutra and the period houses of George Washington Smith. Whether a particular ranch house is a May design, and how to alter it, should be checked against records and decided with the owner’s own professionals.