Spanish Colonial Revival homes in California

Spanish Colonial Revival is the house most people picture when they picture California: white stucco, a low red tile roof, an arch over the door, iron at the windows, and a courtyard you find only once you are inside the gate. It is also the house most often sitting inside a Los Angeles historic district, which changes what it takes to sell one.

Debbie Pisaro has spent 24 years selling architecture across the state, and Spanish houses are the period homes she is asked about most. For the wider practice, start with the guide to the best historic and architectural real estate agent in Los Angeles, then read on.

What is a Spanish Colonial Revival home?

Spanish Colonial Revival is a style that borrowed from the missions and, more deeply, from the farmhouses and hill towns of Andalusia in southern Spain. The City's historic context statement describes it as a series of picturesquely arranged masses, meant to be seen in three dimensions, with expanses of undecorated wall, low-pitched red tile roofs, arched windows and the occasional tower. It dates the style in Los Angeles from 1912, when work began on the Southwest Museum, and notes that most examples were built before 1942.

Its national moment was the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, where Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Winslow showed a whole vocabulary of Spanish forms. By the early 1920s it had replaced Mission Revival, and the City calls it ubiquitous in 1920s Los Angeles. Its cousins, from Monterey Colonial to the later Hollywood Regency homes in Los Angeles, are laid out in Debbie's Los Angeles house styles guide.

How to spot a Spanish Colonial Revival home

Read the massing first. A Spanish house steps in and out: a wing pushed forward, a stair tower, a lower roof tucked against a higher one, never one flat face to the street. Then look for the low red tile roof, windows recessed into walls that look thicker than they are, wrought iron rejas over the windows and on the balconies, and an arch or two. Richard Requa's 1926 book on Spanish and Mediterranean detail called out enclosed outdoor space as essential, and the courtyard is often the best room in the house.

The quiet tell is in the gable ends. On the 1929 Octavius W. Morgan Residence at 181 South Alta Vista Boulevard in the Wilshire district, Historic-Cultural Monument No. 444, the City points to attic vents made of small clay pipes set in triangles and diamonds, and to recessed windows that give a wood-frame house the feeling of adobe. Morgan was a principal in Morgan, Walls and Clements, and the City uses his house as its example of a modest architect-designed Spanish home.

Where the style had to sit tight against its neighbors, it turned ornate. That variation, Churrigueresque, crowds carved ornament around a doorway, as at the Schlyen House in Los Feliz. A Mission Revival house is the opposite: plainer, older, with the drama in a shaped parapet on the roofline.

Where Spanish Colonial Revival runs in California

In Los Angeles the City finds the style citywide, particularly in the areas developed in the 1920s and 1930s, in everything from small one-story cottages built on speculation to large villas by noted architects. The earliest known example is the Southwest Museum at 234 Museum Drive in Mount Washington, Historic-Cultural Monument No. 283, built between 1912 and 1914 to designs by Sumner Hunt and Silas R. Burns.

The houses that come to market are the proof. Los Feliz alone carries five designated Spanish houses, mapped in the designated Spanish houses of Los Feliz, among them Paul R. Williams's 1927 Blackburn Residence on Cromwell Avenue. Out in the San Gabriel Valley there is La Casa Nueva in the City of Industry, and in Glendale, Lorelei, Peter Damm's 1929 Spanish Revival.

Then the style left the city limits and became the state's. Santa Barbara rebuilt in it after the 1925 earthquake to give the city a unified Spanish character, and George Washington Smith designed houses there and in Montecito, including Casa del Herrero. Lilian Jeannette Rice designed Rancho Santa Fe around it in the early 1920s, Ole Hanson founded San Clemente on it in 1928, and Ojai remade its downtown in 1917 with the arcade and bell tower that explain why Ojai looks Spanish.

Selling a Spanish home in an HPOZ

A Historic Preservation Overlay Zone is a Los Angeles district adopted by the City Planning Commission and City Council, with a board that reviews projects. According to the City's HPOZ FAQ, most types of exterior changes in an HPOZ require written approval from the Planning Department, and many projects that need no building permit still need that approval: painting, concrete work, most landscaping, even replacing a pane of glass in a window. The City's rule of thumb is that all exterior alterations require HPOZ approval.

That is what a seller has to get ahead of. Unpermitted work goes before the district's HPOZ Board, and if it does not comply with the Preservation Plan the owner can be asked to restore the original. On a Spanish house the usual suspects are replaced windows, a resurfaced driveway, a painted-over tile surround, or a courtyard wall that grew. Pull the permit history from the Department of Building and Safety's records and any HPOZ approvals before the house goes on the market, so the buyer's inspection confirms the house instead of opening a question.

The other side of the ledger is real. The same guidance says the Mills Act may reduce property taxes on Contributing properties in an HPOZ, and the review that protects your facade protects the street around it too. The West Adams districts are laid out in the West Adams HPOZ guide, and the city's first, Angelino Heights, in Angelino Heights HPOZ rules.

What a Spanish Colonial Revival home is worth

A Spanish house is priced on how much of the original survives: the tile roof, the plaster, the iron, the recessed windows, the courtyard and the tile inside. An automated estimate counts square feet and cannot see any of that, which is why Debbie prices these homes on character first. Coastline 840 breaks down the method in how to price an architectural home in Los Angeles.

For sellers, the move is to restore the character and modernize only the systems, and in an HPOZ to have the paperwork in hand. When you are ready for a real number, Debbie starts with a proper home valuation rather than a portal estimate.

Frequently asked questions