Mr. Smith Builds His Dream House
George Washington Smith’s picturesque homes continue to define Santa Barbara’s unmistakable style.
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Smith’s appeal stems from several factors, not least of which is the accidental nature of his career. Named for George Washington, on whose birthday he was born in the nation’s centennial year, when patriotic fervor ran high, Smith was raised in relative affluence by parents who, in keeping with upper-middle-class values of the day, steered him toward Harvard and his father’s profession as an engineer. But circumstances intervened: His parents’ financial difficulties forced him to abandon his studies and go to work, initially, in a Philadelphia architectural firm. Dissatisfied with the financial prospects before him, he quit the firm to become a bond trader, a position for which his quiet manner, gift for detail and deep intelligence suited him admirably. He acquired a modest fortune through his labors and, in 1912, retired from business to study painting in Europe. He had married Mary Greenough by this time, and the two of them traveled to France, Spain and Italy, where for the first time he encountered the highly stylized palaces, churches and rural farmhouses that would later inform his own designs. When war broke out in 1914, Smith and his wife returned to the United States, where his paintings appeared in exhibits in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco.; function voidFunc() { } voidFunc();)
The 1926 Ogilvy House ($17.9 million). (Click image to enlarge)While in California, friends invited the couple to Montecito, near Santa Barbara, and here they determined to settle for the duration of the war, after which they planned to return to Paris. Smith purchased some property and, in 1916, designed a combination studio and residence in the style of the Andalusian farmhouses he had so admired on his travels. The house proved far more popular with clients than his paintings, and he found himself besieged with requests to design similar homes. In his own words, Smith “put away the brushes” and did not have a “moment to take them up again.”
The Smith-Heberton house, as this first residence would be designated, provides the blueprint to Smith’s aesthetic and to its persistent allure for contemporary homebuyers (Mr. Jobs being, of course, an exception). Although the majority of Smith’s homes and public buildings were designed in the Mediterranean tradition, the mostly whitewashed structures retain an almost modern minimalism, an elegant austerity that imbues them with a sculptural grace that plays on the contrasting sunlight and blue shadows of the California climate. Smith incorporated the Santa Barbara setting—a Capri-like collision of mountains and sea—as a design element throughout his buildings, which beautifully blend interiors and exteriors through careful use of causeways, terraces and patios. In effect, Smith approached architecture as a painter—creating a fully realized and very picturesque landscape in which people could live.
“The thing about Smith’s work, in contrast to a lot of other Mediterranean or Spanish Colonial architecture, is that Smith had a wonderful sense of composition,” notes Appleton, whose grandparents commissioned the 1926 Bryce House in Hope Ranch, a sprawling and lyrical residence considered to be one of Smith’s masterpieces. “His design was very restrained, very poignant. The houses were deceptively simple. He really was quite successful in creating houses that weren’t at all self-conscious. Santa Barbara is historically not the kind of place that tolerates people who are too showy. It’s a very quiet place, not flamboyant at all. Smith was perfect for that. His designs are part of the imagery that people associate with Santa Barbara. And so they’ve developed a kind of cachet for a lot of people, much in the same way that a McKim, Mead and White house on Long Island would, or an Addison Mizner house in Palm Beach might.”
Unlike Mizner, who also achieved renown for his Mediterranean villas, few of Smith’s commissions incorporated rooms conceived for the purpose of impressing. Casa Bienvenida, one of only two Mizner homes on the West Coast, was built in 1929 for the Dieterich family, who asked Smith to design a small carriage house in which they could live while the enormous Spanish Gothic edifice was erected. That product of Smith’s drafting pencil is currently offered for sale at $5.83 million (see “Living with George Washington,” page 102), and its lines speak as eloquently to the visitor today as they did in 1928. “The carriage house has been beautifully renovated by a Hollywood family,” explains Kolb. “It’s only about 3,500 square feet, but it is just spectacular. You can understand how Smith came to architecture from the artistic side of his background, because even his large homes seem to have a very human sense of scale.”
