PLANNING THE HUNTINGTON HOUSE
by Sam Watters
In the fall of 1908, Los Angeles residents witnessed an astonishing sight. On the south-facing ridge of a vast ranch in the San Gabriel Valley, a majestic villa, larger than any house in the city, began to rise against the gray-pink San Gabriel Mountains. Its sunlit interiors would overlook a landscape of orange groves, oaks, and palm trees that exemplified, on the grandest scale, California’s fame as America’s Eden. Designed for railway and real estate magnate Henry E. Huntington (1850–1927) by Pasadena architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, the house was dubbed “Huntington’s Palace.”
Elmer Grey’s preliminary rendering of the south facade, 1908. The watercolor, more than six feet wide, was exhibited at the convention of the Architectural league of the Pacific Coast, held in Portland and San Francisco in 1909, and Los Angeles in October 1910.
Mr. Huntington’s decision to create an estate outside of downtown Los Angeles places him well in his time. The turn of the century was a period of prodigious suburban house building by wealthy Americans escaping the increased congestion of established city neighborhoods. Huntington’s railroad and business colleagues on both coasts were developing estates modeled on the country house properties of English aristocrats. Architecture journals, portfolios, and the popular magazine Country Life in America, read by Huntington and shared with his superintendent, William Hertrich (1880–1966), profiled all aspects of house planning and garden improvement. Articles were illustrated with photographs of hilltop manors surrounded by gently sloping lawns and established trees. Swing seats and rattan chairs on wide side porches overlooked fields cultivated by tenant farmers. Railroad lines and the automobile allowed the rich to commute to downtown offices and return at day’s end to the quiet luxury of country life. Huntington himself was no exception to this practice, as he traveled from San Marino to the city by private rail car or chauffeured limousine along Hunt-ington Drive, which he built in 1903 at the southern boundary of his ranch.
Huntington had spent eight years searching and planning for a Southern California home. At first he considered living downtown, purchasing in 1902 the Los Angeles estate of 19th-century horticulturist Ozro W. Childs. The property at Main and Eleventh streets was unique for its nine acres of landscaped gardens. The continued rise of real estate prices and his subsequent interest in a larger property likely guided Huntington’s ultimate decision to retain the downtown estate as an investment and not as a residence.
In January 1903, Huntington acquired the 500-acre San Marino ranch of James de Barth Shorb. By 1905 he had transplanted garden-specimen flowering trees and shrubs from the Childs place to the new property. He studied the plans of the Shorb residence, a clapboard, Second Empire house with a deep-sloping mansard roof, before deciding to raze the building and construct a new house on its site. Not yet acquainted with Myron Hunt, he turned to a trusted railway employee to draw up plans.
As a commercial and civil engineer, Edward S. Cobb (1858–1937) was an unlikely candidate for a residential commission. He was educated at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and developed his architectural skills through apprenticeship. He worked in Boston, Dallas, and San Francisco as a mechanical and hydraulic engineer before moving to Los Angeles in 1901. Here he worked for Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway, designing depots and service buildings, and was the engineer of the Los Angeles landmark funicular railway at Third Street, Angels Flight.
Huntington became well acquainted with Cobb when the engineer oversaw construction, begun in 1903, of the Pacific Electric Railway headquarters at Sixth and Main streets. In this building Huntington efficiently located both his offices and the Jonathan Club, a private men’s organization that he helped found and where he kept a suite of rooms. Huntington stayed at the club while on business from his New York office.
Cobb completed the railway building in March 1905. In June of that year he presented Huntington with drawings for a three-story manor in the Georgian Revival style derived from American and English 18th-century sources. The style had been embraced after the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia awakened an interest in America’s colonial history. Surviving drawings by Cobb incorporate ubiquitous elements of Georgian Revival houses—a two-story, columned entrance portico with a broad pediment, classical window details, and an extended side porch.
Pattern books and magazine photo essays were likely sources for Cobb’s Georgian design. A rendering of his plan’s south facade calls to mind the White House, much publicized after being renovated in 1902 by the Classical Revival architects McKim, Mead, and White. It is not surprising that Huntington, who institutionalized the canon of western Anglo-American culture in Los Angeles with his library and art collections, considered building a house that would have brought west the architecture of America’s founders.
Meticulous and concise, Huntington managed the details of his estate’s development. A pencil sketch in his own hand reveals that Huntington envisioned a 16,000-square-foot residence with rooms consistent in size with contemporary estate houses.
By late 1907 Huntington had turned to Myron Hunt (1868–1952) and Elmer Grey (1872–1963) to begin a new set of plans. Why he discontinued working with Cobb is not known, but Huntington likely came to understand the need for experienced architects to develop and oversee a sophisticated house project. Hunt and Grey were a logical choice, given that they had designed the financier’s 1906 Rancho Revival hacienda at his development Clifton-by-the-Sea (today Redondo Beach), and houses in Pasadena’s Oak Knoll area for his son and one of his daughters.
Huntington shared with the architects Cobb’s plans and his own sketches. Myron Hunt recalled in 1930 that Cobb’s work had been drawn from Huntington’s own ideas and “looked like a hotel plan.” This criticism aptly applied to the engineer’s design of a central hallway leading to a double staircase, a configuration found in downtown Los Angeles establishments, including the Jonathan Club housed in the Pacific Electric Railway building.
Hunt and Grey spent the winter and spring of 1908 developing their plans. In New York, Hunt consulted with their client, divorced in 1906, and the woman he was courting, the widow of his uncle Collis, Arabella Duval Huntington (1850–1924). A Francophile with a connoisseur’s appreciation of French 18th-century design, she guided the interior decoration of the house and the building’s dimensions. In a rare moment of candor years later, Huntington’s valet, Alphonzo Gomez, recounted Arabella’s role: “There was so much fighting between Mr. and Mrs. about the size of the rooms…she wanted to live in a big place…she was the one who pretty near designed the house with the architect…because she was afraid that Mr. Huntington would make a small place of it.” Arabella prevailed, though the interior decoration of Hunt and Grey’s 35,000-square-foot house combined elements of both her and Mr. Huntington’s French and English tastes. By building a palace commensurate in size with the houses of the very rich, Arabella and Henry Huntington identified themselves with America’s social elite.
To guide his client’s decisions, Myron Hunt accompanied Huntington in May 1908 on a day-long tour of Santa Barbara estates. The highlight of their visit was the 1906 Montecito residence of James Waldron Gillespie, called El Fureidis, meaning “Little Paradise” in Arabic. Designed by easterner Bertram G. Goodhue with Hunt and Grey as supervising architects, the 10,000-square-foot estate house, like the one Huntington would build in San Marino, was a symmetrical Mediterranean villa with a terra-cotta roof and white stucco walls. Its extensive gardens included a stairway that stepped down from the house to a terraced hillside.
Hunt and Grey persuaded Huntington to abandon Cobb’s design based on colonial traditions and to pursue plans derived from European classical architecture. The Beaux-Arts style they adopted had been introduced at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and embraced by America as it emerged as an international power. The style called for an eclectic synthesis of Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque elements in houses that were monumental and formal. The methodology for creating these buildings was taught at American universities and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Turn-of-the-century architecture critics observed that Beaux-Arts interpretations of white Italian Renaissance villas with shaded loggias and tile roofs were particularly appropriate to California because of the state’s temperate climate and Mediterranean heritage.
Though Hunt and Grey determined the overall approach to Huntington’s house plans, the financier held firm on the position of rooms and finishes. In February 1908, he wrote the architects after a meeting with Myron Hunt in New York: “The style of architecture proposed when your Mr. Hunt was here, I think will be satisfactory. There should be an entrance way and long hall and a stairway to the court in the rear, and be sure to have plenty of light in the hall. I want all the rooms white with the exception of the Library which I shall probably have in mahogany.” A comparison of Cobb’s first floor plan and Hunt and Grey’s final design establishes that the Pasadena architects were constrained by the engineer’s earlier work. Though they clarified Cobb’s room arrangement with a strong east-west hallway axis, the first-floor spaces remained as originally configured. A large library dominated the southeast corner, and a dining room and service wing remained on the west side. Surviving interim drawings establish that the architects struggled to finesse the transition be-tween the house and the prominent columned porch. Huntington insisted that the 1905 dimensions (40 by 60 feet) of the outdoor room be retained, with no change in width from the east wall of the house to the porch’s outer edge.
The simplicity of the engaged columns, carved stone details, and windows of the finished exterior showed the influence of John Russell Pope (1873–1937), a master of country estate architecture and later the architect of the Huntington mausoleum in San Marino. The house’s defining, low horizontal profile with a recessed, third-story servants’ quarters reflected Arabella’s French sensibility and the architects’ keen awareness of contemporary architectural thought. In 1906, the critic Herbert D. Croly, an advocate of Hunt and Grey’s work, wrote that California country houses should be “long in proportion to their height…because the live oaks in the vicinity are not big enough in scale to provide a proper background for a tallish building.” Croly urged that the Italian tradition of light exterior walls, white or gray, and brightly colored roofs looked best in the California light and provided the contrast needed to define a building that is “both conspicuous and…surrounded by trees.” Perhaps influenced by these ideas, Hunt and Grey finished the roof of Huntington’s house with terra-cotta tiles and plastered the unornamented walls in white stucco.
Beaux-Arts architecture programs like that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Myron Hunt studied, stressed a unified approach to house and landscape architecture. Hunt and Grey evolved a garden design that further associated the residence with the southern Mediterranean. As seen in a watercolor by Elmer Grey, the architects proposed a double stairway on the hillside below the south-facing terrace. For the north entrance, they conceived a two-level “patio” with a center fountain. Huntington himself described their plan as an “Italian” garden. Hunt and Grey’s ideas were not realized, and instead the American tradition of lawns and specimen trees guided the early development of the residential grounds.
Since his divorce, Huntington had led a peripatetic, businessman’s life, crisscrossing the continent by railway, staying in men’s clubs and relatives’ houses. After marrying Arabella in 1913, he wrote that at last he had a “home” and that his wife wished him “the best of everything which is something so entirely new to me.” By the time Henry and his new wife arrived for their first stay together in San Marino in January 1914, his collaboration with architects and Arabella had yielded the best in American residential design.
The evolution of Huntington’s house from a Georgian manor to Mediterranean-inspired villa paralleled Los Angeles’ emerging identity as a modern American city with a southern European past. Today the house remains an enduring symbol of Huntington’s prominence in Los Angeles history and a reflection of privileged life in America at the close of the Gilded Age.
Sam Watters is the author of Houses of Los Angeles, 1885–1935, in two volumes, recently published by Acanthus Press, New York. Volume 1 treats the Huntington house.
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