Crescent Bay Drive
By Jon Stordahl and Hunter Fuentes
Many of us chose to live in Laguna because of its eclectic mix of homes. My husband Brad and I looked for a Laguna home for over 15 years. We had two criteria: it had to be a place we could reasonably afford and somewhere where we would be comfortable living. We saw many that met one of the two criteria but never both. That is until 2002 when we stumbled onto an open house on Crescent Bay Drive.
The house was built in 1933 for Harold and Florence Turney and completed in just a few months. It is a simple, single-wall Monterey Revival cottage built for two teachers during the Depression. The Monterey Revival style is characterized by single- or two-story plans with rectangular or L-shaped footprints. Extended, usually cantilevered, galleries with slender wood columns are a defining feature.
These wooden homes, once described as wooden tents, can be found all over Laguna Beach. Anya Grahn of the National Trust for Historic Preservation describes single-wall construction as “… vertically stacked wood plank interior walls covered by exterior horizontal wood siding.” When we found the house, it was in a state of benign neglect, but as they say, the bones were good. We had to put on a new roof, new plumbing, and replace 70-year-old knob and tube wiring.
We were able to repurpose the rear three feet of a six-foot-deep closet into a new shower for the guest bedroom. We also combined two downstairs bedrooms into a primary bedroom and walk-in closet. Over the past 20 years, we’ve done several remodeling projects to create an interior that meets our needs while leaving the exterior intact. Our most recent project was the refreshing of the main house and the addition of a 700-square-foot ADU.
We also began to do some research into the history of the house. The city building file noted that the house had been built by Smith Brothers Construction in late 1933. The second owners were a Hindu ashrama in La Crescenta. When we purchased the house there was a small, handmade gate with an Om sign carved into it. We returned the original gate to the ashrama and then had the symbol replicated in a new gate to honor this period in our home’s history. The house changed hands three times in the 1990s. One of these owners had commissioned an architect to design a brand-new home on the site. This would have necessitated the destruction of the existing house. Happily, that project never went anywhere. The biggest surprise came when we discovered a sketch of our house on the front page of a September 1933 edition of an early Laguna weekly newspaper, accompanied by text saying, “This handsome home will be erected by the Smith Construction company for Mr. and Mrs. Harold Turney.”
The next sentence stunned us. “Aubrey St. Clair is the architect.” St. Clair designed many notable structures all over town. That was the first indication that our house had any connection to St. Clair. We reached out to Clark Collins at the Heritage Committee. He encouraged us to consider applying for the Historic Register. Aware of the controversy from a few years ago when there was a concerted effort to mandate preservation (based on a 1981 historic inventory), we were tentative. We ultimately made our own decision to voluntarily seek placement on the Register in hopes of ensuring the long-term survival of the home we’ve cherished. In fact, we just received our historic plaque. We are now in the application process for a Mills Act contract. If we are successful, we should see a reduction in our property taxes that we can dedicate to the maintenance needs of our little wooden cottage.
The first moral of this tale would be that with a little imagination an old home can satisfy every modern expectation while never losing its charm. The second would be that many homes in town have interesting histories that can be uncovered with a little detective work. The third is that there are resources, such as the Heritage Committee, the Laguna Beach Historical Society, skilled contractors working in town, and permitting and tax incentives to encourage the preservation of the homes that make Laguna special.
Hunter Fuentes is a local resident and realtor with Compass in Laguna Beach, specializing in historic architecture. Jon Stordahl has lived in Laguna for over 20 years and is a retired history teacher.
