Architects of the Foothills

In 2018 Mike Kobeissi handled the sale of the Crown Jewel Estate at 700 Berkshire Avenue, a house believed to be a Myron Hunt design for Senator Frank Putnam Flint, and this index gathers the architects whose houses gave the Southern California foothills their character.

The local record begins with photographs. A guide to the La Cañada Flintridge Historical Buildings Collection lists press photographs of homes in the Flintridge development of the 1920s and early 1930s, many of them designed by important California architects: Myron Hunt, Paul R. Williams, Wallace Neff, Ray Jay Kieffer and the firm of Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury.¹

The drawings survive in archives. The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara holds an Architecture and Design Collection, founded by the professor David Gebhard in 1963, of almost two million drawings on the design of southern California from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty first, with the work of George Washington Smith, Myron Hunt and Harold Chambers, R. M. Schindler and Cliff May among more than 275 collections.² Those archives feed new scholarship. Architectural Digest reported on a twelve volume series, Master Architects of Southern California 1920 to 1940, written to bring the residential architects of the years between the world wars back into view. Its authors worked in the Wallace Neff archive at UC Santa Barbara and described Neff as an architect who read the terrain so closely that his houses seemed to rise out of the hillside.³

Each architect or partnership has an entry of its own: Myron Hunt, Wallace Neff, Paul Revere Williams, Greene and Greene, Richard Neutra, Cliff May and George Washington Smith.