Foothill House Styles

Mike Kobeissi’s work covers buying, selling, remodeling and building, with guidance on design, renovation and staging, and this index sorts out the house styles that such work meets along the foothills, from the period revivals of the 1920s to the modern houses of the postwar years.

Mediterranean is the loosest word in the field. The Los Angeles Times called it a catch all label as vague as Victorian, and set Spanish Colonial Revival apart from Mission Revival, Italianate and Monterey Revival by the simplicity of its forms: low sloping roofs of red Roman tile, roughly finished white stucco walls, small windows behind wooden shutters or wrought iron grilles, arched front doors, and living rooms that open onto patios under pergolas.¹

The revivals had a cause. The president of the Glendale Historical Society told Crescenta Valley Weekly that growing prosperity after World War I let more people buy houses, that the ideal home was often modeled on historicist styles, and that the nearby film industry shaped many of them; the society’s tour that year showed six houses from 1926 to 1940, among them Spanish Colonial, Mediterranean and French Revivals and a Storybook house.² After the war the region turned modern. The Los Angeles Conservancy notes that the 1950s gave Southern California houses international fame, largely through the Case Study program of Arts and Architecture magazine, while Sunset magazine spread California design more widely. The decade’s most influential housing was the mass produced tract of ranch houses, one story under a gable roof with an unpretentious face and usually an attached garage, including prefabricated versions by Cliff May and Chris Choate.³

Read in order, the seven entries move from the revivals and the bungalow to the modern house: Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture, Mission Revival Architecture, The Craftsman Bungalow, The California Ranch House, The Case Study House Program, Mid Century Modern Houses and Eichler Homes.