ON THE RECORD
Find the book at Tecolote Bookshop or the Honor Market
Nicholas Schou
Nicholas Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of several books, including Orange Sunshine and Kill the Messenger, his writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and other fine publications. If you have tips or stories about Montecito, please email him at newseditor@montecitojournal.net.
Santa Barbara’s Bible of Architecture
George Washington Smith’s iconic Casa del Herrero, 1925
W
Appleton, McCall, and Easton
alking into the lobby of the Montecito Club, one of the first things you notice is a coffee table decorated with a copy of the third printing of arguably the most important book ever written about our local domiciles, the straight-forwardly titled tome Santa Barbara Architecture. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I spotted the book on my way downstairs to eat lunch with Wayne McCall, the man whose brilliant black and white photographs grace the volume, which was first published in 1975; architect Bob Easton, who designed the last two printings of the book in 1980 and 1995; and architect Marc Appleton, whose Tailwater Press was responsible for publishing the most recent fourth printing of the book. Over a refreshing lunch of salad and fish tacos which included an impromptu handshake with club owner Ty Warner, the three men told me how they came together to preserve this veritable bible of Santa Barbara architecture. “I bought the first edition of the book back in 1975 and I always cherished it,” Appleton tells me. “I have always thought it was a classic book. It’s one of a kind – the only historical survey of architecture in Santa Barbara.” Easton agrees. “It’s especially valuable to architects and anybody interested in architecture not only because of its documentation of the history of Santa Barbara architecture, but also because it introduces people to George Washington Smith,” the landmark architect responsible for introducing the Spanish Colonial Revival style. Although McCall wasn’t initially wild about the idea of producing a fourth printing of the book, Appleton and Easton refused to give up, repeatedly taking the photographer out to lunch and pressuring him with praise until he gave in to the notion. “I was satisfied that it had a pretty good run,” McCall says. “Our first lunch ended on that note,” Appleton adds, laughing. “We had a second lunch where we tried to talk Wayne into it, and by the third lunch he was begrudgingly saying okay.” As it happened, the printing plates to the most recent edition were in China and in unknown condition, but after some suspense, it turned out they were in relatively fine shape. “So Tailwater, my publishing entity, committed to doing this,” Appleton continues. The original printing of the book was effectively financed by local realtors who figured the volume, which features many Montecito estates, would make a great gift for clients. For this most recent printing, Appleton tried the same marketing strategy. “In the space of one day I went around to eight or nine realtors with an old copy of the book and we presold about two hundred and fifty copies,” he says. “Our motto at Tailwater is we publish books that nobody else in their right mind will publish, but this one I really believed in, and so did Bob and Wayne was ultimately happy as well. We felt it shouldn’t leave the bookstores of Montecito and Santa Barbara. I felt that it should have a life, and I still do, •MJ and it has and still does.”
32 MONTECITO JOURNAL
The second Tremaine house by architects Warner & Gray, 1973
Thornton Ladd’s Bear House in Montecito, 1957
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
5 – 12 March 2020
