San Diego home designs

Spanish Revival - An enchanting bouquet of flowery Spanish ingredients: textured walls, tiled roof and porch, arched doors and windows, balconies, walled patios and gardens, wrought-iron trim, the occasional turret. Originally built 1915-1940.

San Diego architect Richard Requa triggered a second wave after he visited Spain and copied Spanish and Mexican buildings and details for the 1935-36 exposition in Balboa Park.

It's something of a secret that a national housing craze virtually began in San Diego. Romantic, sparkling white Spanish Revival-style homes fringed in terra-cotta tile, wrought iron and bougainvillea first appeared in San Diego around 1915, then elsewhere in California, Florida and other states.

San Diegans and tourists alike became enamored of the florid Spanish style during the popular, well-publicized 1915-16 Panama-California Exposition, held in Balboa Park. The dreamy collection of confectionary and brilliantly tiled buildings and formal gardens recalled, however tenuously, the distant days of Spanish rule over Alta California.

It wasn't simply a reawakening to the region's embellished colonial history and ornamental building style that made casas and castillos so desirable here. These houses are perfectly suited to San Diego's mild climate, sun-drenched days and moonlit nights made for entertaining behind courtyard walls. In 1915, as now, San Diegans showed a taste for colorful, casual and comfortable living.

Today, tile-roofed Spanish Revival homes amid fluttering palm trees may be synonymous with San Diego, but not to the exclusion of other significant residential styles.

Typical Craftsman Style 

Architects and artists, builders and homeowners who understand and value these regional strengths have expressed them and continue to refine and update their architectural responses as they design individual homes and multifamily housing.

How local home style has evolved.

The Kumeyaay who came long before us, built huts of willow branches and leaves and Spanish missionaries arrived in 1769 with recipes for adobe bricks. After Mexican rule over California brought Mexican soldiers and their families to Old Town in the early 19th century, the adobe courtyard house reigned supreme.

Extended families worked and played in private, walled courtyards, which were preferable to their small, dark adobe rooms. Courtyards were sprigged with fountains and fruit trees, flowers and perhaps a horse corral.

The next wave of immigrants included entrepreneurs from back east, such as William Heath Davis, a real estate developer. He shipped wood-framed houses in pieces from Maine to San Francisco, then San Diego. One of his simple clapboard houses with gabled roofs, a style so at home in traditional New England towns but foreign to San Diego, has been restored and moved to the Gaslamp Quarter. It's now a museum bearing Davis' name.

An array of fashionable house styles continued to be imported and built in San Diego in the late 19th century and beyond. Architects, developers and wealthy new residents from San Francisco, Chicago and New York arrived with the taste and means to build lacy, multitiered Victorian mansions, or, a rarer antidote, low-slung Prairie Style homes with horizontal lines that telegraph rootedness in the earth.

Fine or restored Egyptian Revival dwellings and homes in the style of Art Deco, and its speed-driven sibling, Streamline Moderne, are still occupied.

Then there's the half-timbered English Tudor style that managed to wash up on Del Mar's shores. So-called Cape Cod cottages also arrived in transcontinental waves of Yankee nostalgia.

A more natural match for San Diego's coastline, mountains and desert are the airy, relaxing redwood houses and cabins designed by Sim Bruce Richards and other San Diego architects during the second half of the 20th century, before redwood became a precious commodity.

Today in San Diego, the array of available housing styles stretches from flimsy to fabulous, tacky to tech-driven, postmodern to post-and-beam. There's also a strong community of architects and designers here who are forging new expressions of San Diego's domestic substance and style.

Some are returning with respect and creativity to what's worked well in the past. In other words, something for every taste and lifestyle.

Contemporary