MAYNARD L. PARKER PICTURES THE RANCH HOUSE

by Daniel P. Gregory

The American public first glimpsed the romance, practicality, innovation, and easy indoor-outdoor flow of Cliff May’s ranch house designs through Maynard L. Parker’s glossy, evocative, and highly informative photographs of May’s own house at Riviera Ranch in Brentwood, Calif. Finished in 1939, this was the third house that May built for his family, and it launched the most successful stage in his career.

Picture window wall. Modern walls of glass open whole sections of May’s house to the patio. Parker uses the sleekest expanse of glass as an elegant frame or even a sort of movie screen to heighten the view of the living room, while making us aware that it’s visually connected to the patio. 

Parker (1900–1976) is most identified with the designs of May (1908–1989), who is widely acknowledged to be the father of the suburban ranch house. An accomplished Los Angeles–based photographer, Parker specialized in shooting contemporary houses and gardens for such magazines as Architectural Digest, Home (an early title for the Los Angeles Times Magazine), House Beautiful, and Sunset. Like his better-known contemporaries Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand—whose recent photo books have fanned public interest in Southern California’s midcentury modernism—Parker recorded the work of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. He also shot the gardens of San Francisco’s most famous midcentury-modern landscape architect, Thomas Church.

It’s easy to see why Parker and May made such an effective team. May’s houses were novel in the way they combined history with modernity, and Parker captured that duality perfectly, as these three images demonstrate. They’re stylish. The furniture is carefully edited and arranged. The photos are also technically proficient, with lighting artfully balanced. At the same time they celebrate and idealize a way of life in which house and garden are interchangeable. Magazines like Sunset, which brought May to a regional audience, and House Beautiful, which introduced May to the nation at large, published them enthusiastically during the 1940s and 1950s. Superb promotional tools, Parker’s photographs fed the enormous pent-up demand—following World War II—for new house-building ideas.

In 1995 The Huntington acquired the images shown here and approximately 65,000 others (mostly negatives and transparencies), the photographer’s entire lifework. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow The Huntington to make the archive accessible to scholars and the public in 2009.

Daniel P. Gregory is a senior editor for the Home section of Sunset magazine. He holds a doctorate in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley. His book Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House will be published by Rizzoli in spring 2008. The book relies extensively on photographs from The Huntington’s collection.

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