A bespoke showcase for the extensive antiques collection of its builder, Casa del Herrero, near Santa Barbara, remains the finest exemplar of the Californian fashion for all things Spanish during the first decades of the twentieth century.
North facade and entrance of Casa del Herrero in Montecito, California, designed and built for George Steedman (1871–1940) by George Washington Smith (1876–1930), 1922–1925. Photographs are by Matt Walla, courtesy of Casa del Herrero.
When industrialist George Steedman embarked on an antiques buying trip to Spain in 1923, he was embracing California’s fascination with its long period of Spanish rule and initiating a creative process that resulted in one of the finest Spanish colonial revival houses in Santa Barbara. While in Spain, Steedman would acquire objects that, along with his travel sketches, dictated the design of his house over a span of three years. The creation of Casa del Herrero was a result of one of the closest collaborations of patron and architect in California, and one of the best documented. This rare partnership was commemorated in the house’s name, which translates to “House of the Smith,” a play on the name of the architect, George Washington Smith, and the hobby of the patron, an accomplished amateur metalsmith. The integration of Steedman’s collection into the design process was extraordinary, even in Santa Barbara, the epicenter of the romance with the Spanish colonial revival in the 1920s.
By the late nineteenth century interest in European historical revival styles, including Spanish Renaissance architecture, was a national phenomenon. The establishment of the Hispanic Society in New York in 1904 only reinforced the growing interest in a revival style that was deemed particularly appropriate in the Americas. But it was at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 that California’s Spanish colonial missions first emerged as models for a regional style that, with some embellishment, would endow the American West with European grandeur and romance. The California State Building, designed for the fair by San Francisco architect Arthur Page Brown, drew inspiration from several California missions, with one end of the massive structure a literal copy of the 1820 facade of Mission Santa Barbara.
The house’s entrance hall, with fifteenth-century Spanish choir stalls purchased in 1926 and a sculpture attributed to Alonso Berruguete (c. 1488–1561), purchased in 1927.
Steedman, a lifelong resident of St. Louis, decided to build a winter house in Montecito, a small settlement next to Santa Barbara, in 1922. Earlier that year, the city had formed the Plans and Planting Committee, a design review board that essentially mandated that all new buildings conform to the Spanish colonial revival style. The committee operated under the direction of the Community Arts Association, a body of civic leaders and wealthy property owners that has been described by historian Kevin Starr as a “shadow government of vigilante Hispanicizers.”
It was in this context that Steedman chose Smith, Montecito’s most popular architect of the period, to create a house in his signature Andalusian-influenced style. After some early architectural training at Harvard, Smith became a bond trader in a brief but lucrative career that allowed him to move to Europe in 1911 and study painting. When he discovered the beauty of Montecito on a social visit in 1915, he decided to buy land and design a house for himself. Having traveled in southern Spain, he was familiar with the rambling, austere appearance of provincial Spanish structures, and chose this style for his new house, completed in 1918. The house caused an immediate local sensation, and by 1922, when Steedman hired him, Smith had already designed and built eighteen houses for residents of Montecito and greater Santa Barbara.
Detail of the entrance hall, with a polychrome and gilt reliquary of Santa Barbara.
Casa del Herrero, however, by virtue of Steedman’s contributions over the prolonged design period, stands out from the rest in the richness of its detail, and remarkably survives with its original collections intact. After engaging Smith and exchanging drawings about the basics of the house in late 1922, Steedman halted the design process to allow for a study trip to Spain with his wife, Carrie, in the spring of 1923. The overwhelming influence on the house after this point was the guidance of art historians Arthur Byne and his wife, Mildred Stapely. Byne and Stapely had been curators and scholars affiliated with the Hispanic Society in New York, but by 1923 they had moved to Madrid to become dealers in Spanish decorative arts, most notably supplying works to William Randolph Hearst for San Simeon. In Madrid, under Byne and Stapely’s tutelage, the Steedmans purchased, in a single day, all the antique tables (except one) in Casa del Herrero today, along with chairs, chests, and cabinets, including the vargueño, or writing cabinet, in the living room. Traveling on to Seville, with the Bynes in tow, they acquired a large carved and polychrome coat of arms for the living-room chimney breast, a pair of six-foot-high Mudejar doors for the second floor, and a wrought-iron reja, or decorative grille, for an exterior window on the entrance facade. The Steedmans also procured an entire fifteenth-century painted wood ceiling that would determine the dimensions for the front hall. At the end of this buying spree, Steedman wrote to Smith on July 18, 1923, that there was “no hurry in having any conference on the house plans until the Spanish purchases arrive.”
This seventeenth-century Castilian vargueño, or writing cabinet, on a later stand, is made of walnut with bone or ivory inlay and gilding and was purchased in 1923.
Aside from requiring that Smith’s plans and elevations accommodate his purchases, Steedman actually directed some parts of the design himself. For example, in Toledo, Steedman had sketched some stairs that provided the model for the steps leading out of the living room; and, outside of Granada, he and Byne measured and drew an arcade that became the template for the outdoor wall of the “Spanish Garden” to the east of the house. Even after the Steedmans returned to America, Byne continued to buy for Casa del Herrero, writing to Smith on September 10, 1923: “I am sure you will like the tapestries bought in Paris for Mr. Steedman, particularly the mille-fleur which combined with the XV-century painted ceiling ought to create a really imposing entrance hall.” One wonders how Smith reacted to the constant reporting of large purchases and the ceaseless flow of sketches and photographs from Steedman, but when the house was nearly finished, the architect wrote to his client on May 29, 1925, that he believed the house to be “the most successful house in the Montecito valley. I mean this, and I have never said it before about any other house.”
At this time, with the combined efforts of George Washington Smith and architects James Osborne Craig, Mary McLaughlin Craig, Carleton Winslow, and Reginald Johnson, Santa Barbara was transforming from a typical western town into a Spanish colonial set piece.
Flower Bench, designed by Lutah Maria Riggs (1896–1984), 1931. Built into a former garage entrance, the bench is constructed of Tunisian tile and demonstrates a Mexican-inspired use of color characteristic of Riggs’s early work.
On June 29, 1925, a massive earthquake destroyed many nineteenth-century brick structures, greatly accelerating the civic movement to rebuild in the new style. George Steedman was alone in Santa Barbara that day, apparently staying at the Santa Barbara Club downtown, and undoubtedly was relieved to find that his new house was unscathed. He moved into the house immediately,
and eventually recorded the momentous day by adding a prominent inscription to the eighteenth-century armorial plaque that he had acquired in Madrid:
CASA DEL HERRERO IS BUILT ON OUTER
PUEBLO LANDS OF SANTA BARBARA BOUGHT
BY JOSE DE JESUS COTA FOR NINETY-TWO
CENTS AN ACRE IN 1868, TWENTY-TWO YEARS
AFTER GENERAL FREMONT CAPTURED THE
TOWN PRESIDIO. THIS HOUSE WAS FIRST
OCCUPIED ON THE MORNING OF THE GREAT
EARTH QUAKE, JUNE TWENTY NINTH 1925
The inscription, which includes the monograms of both Steedmans, gives telling evidence of the 1920s attitude toward cultural appropriation; Steedman had no qualms about altering an antique carving featuring a Cardinal’s coat of arms, and he was proud of the American military conquest of Mexican-held California in the 1840s. The international fashion for Spanish antiques, including architectural fragments, was so pervasive by then that in 1926 Spain enacted a patrimony law restricting the exportation of its antiquities. Nonetheless, Steedman continued to acquire furnishings for his house over the next five years, including choir stalls for the entrance hall, stone window surrounds for the south facade, “Arab” doors for the living room, and a dining table from the Pyrenees (where, in 1927, Arthur Byne reported his success “in bagging eight examples”). Between 1923 and 1928, Byne shipped more than 160 containers filled with antiquities to Steedman, whose only regret seemed to be that Casa del Herrero was too small in scale to accommodate some of the pieces he was offered, acquired by Byne from monasteries and other grand architectural settings. Indeed, Steedman had never intended the house to stage large entertainments; by purposefully creating small rooms, even limiting the number of dinner guests to eight, he underscored the very personal nature of his house and collections.
This view of the south elevation shows antique Catalan stone window surrounds purchased in 1927.
When the Steedmans made Montecito their permanent residence in 1930, George continued to enrich the details of the house, doubling down on the tile decoration that had begun with a purchase of seven hundred antique tiles in Spain in 1923. Because of the scarcity of these antique Spanish tiles, Byne had contracted a tile maker in Tunis to fill Steedman’s growing desire for the colorful
embellishments, sending more than seventeen thousand new tiles in a single shipment in 1929. At first, the tiles were meant for the main stair, entrance floors, fountains, gardens, and bathrooms, but soon Steedman decided that they were of practical use for the garage floor, an outdoor flower-cutting bench, and his own bedroom, where a hooded hearth employs both pictorial and geometric tiles. Altogether, the tilework adds a spectacular if idiosyncratic effect to the humble Andalusian farmhouse prototype.
Riggs designed the Book Tower, or library, in 1933. The bookcase on the right incorporates an antique door panel from a church in Étretat, Normandy, France, purchased in 1924.
One of the most successful additions that Steedman made to Casa del Herrero in this period was the library, or “Book Tower,” of 1933. For this project, Steedman engaged the exceptionally talented Lutah Maria Riggs, former partner of the recently deceased George Washington Smith. Of octagonal plan and intimate scale, Riggs’s book tower creates a delightful and unexpected Gothic sanctuary, even incorporating an antique French church panel acquired by Steedman in 1924.
In his retirement, Steedman devoted himself to silversmithing, wine making, garden design, and various metalsmithing efforts, contributing wrought-iron fixtures, aluminum garden furniture, and pewter wares to the ongoing decoration of his home. Amazingly, in its one hundredth year, the Casa del Herrero retains nearly all of the antiques from Spain as well as the antiques made by Steedman himself.
Casa del Herrero remained in the family until 1993, when George Steedman’s grandchildren formed the foundation that is today the steward of the house and gardens, open to the public. The Casa is included on the National Register of Historic Places, with National Historic Landmark status, due to the remarkable state of preservation of the house, its collections and archives, and its historic gardens by Ralph Stevens, Lockwood de Forest Jr., and Francis Underhill.
JEANNE SLOANE is a decorative arts historian and former deputy chairman of Christie’s. She currently consults in the fields of antique silver and architectural preservation.
