SETTING THE SCENE FOR ART & ARCHITECTURE

A rchitect Aubrey St. Clair designed some of the most important buildings in Laguna Beach, including the Water District building and City Hall. He also designed what is still the most distinctive building in South Laguna's little business district.

In 1939, South Laguna's "downtown" included a post office, service station, the Village Market and Anderson's restaurant, where 50 cents bought the best dinner on the menu. Original plans for the St. Clair building envisioned creating an upstairs office and street level spaces for a drugstore and barbershop.

St. Clair designed the building for Hazel and Arthur A. Marney, who lived in Buena Park. The Tudor-style building has similarities to the building now occupied by the English Garden and Sandpiper at Brooks Street and Coast Highway, also a St. Clair design. "I remember that the clients (Marneys) liked it so much they asked my father to use a similar design," recalled St. Clair's son, Gordon.

In no dimension did St. Clair "push the envelope" in South Laguna. He staggered the front setback, leaving generous paved spaces on the Coast Highway side. The four parallel roofs step down from south to north on the Coast Highway façade, creating a gentle transition from the two-story portion to the single-story section on the north. The stone-paved staircase encourages access to the upper office in the center of the building with a gracious balustraded entrance and a lovely archway at the upper landing. The most prominent feature of the building is its halftimbering, which was shaped by hand and treated with a preservative that has not required painting. The lower storefronts are distinguished with different facings, one angled brick and the other stone. The high-quality materials are continued onto the sidewalk, where all of the paving is Arizona flagstone. The interiors are graced with real plaster, trusswork, corbels, and tongue-and-groove ceilings. Each door is different; one even features leaded glass.

Perspective view from a 1939 South Coast News article announcing the building's completion, compared with a recent photograph. This complex three-story building was constructed using only three sheets of drawings. St. Clair and South Laguna builder Arthur C. Wilson must have worked closely together during construction and Wilson was apparently very skilled constructing the detailing based on what today would be considered preliminary drawings. As extraordinary as this building may seem today, its initial tenants provided fairly standard services to the local community.

St. Clair's clients, the Marneys, liked his Builder's Guild building so much they asked the architect to use it as a prototype for their project. One of the office tenants was dentist Floride Frost. In a 1987 letter sent to longtime South Laguna resident Harriet Wolf, Frost recalled having paid $40 a month rent. The other tenants were a beauty shop, a secondhand shop, and a barbershop, which occupied the southerly shop well into the 1960s.

"He (the barber) and his friends bet on the races all the time," said Frost, recalling one of the other tenants. "One time we went to Santa Anita with friends from Chicago, so I asked him for advice. I wasted $2 a couple of times and won $4 in (a) big deal."

Architect Aubrey St. Clair around 1935, when he moved Laguna Beach and started his own office. Dr. Frost had the opportunity to buy the building from the Marneys for $30,000 but declined. In 1957 the property was sold to Ruth Reed Tinsman and Clifford S. Tinsman. The building plaque was changed to the "Tinsman Building," which housed Tinsman's law practice until approximately 1982.

After the Tinsmans' deaths, their sons sold the property in 1987 to the Christoph family, and in 1993 ownership was transferred to a partnership consisting of my mother, Marjorie Christoph-Allen, and myself. The upper office has served as headquarters for my landscape architectural practice, and the two lower offices have had several different tenants. At present Jackie Gallagher does art consulting from the northerly space, and Irma La Dulce offers clothing creations in the southerly space.

Since the Tinsman sons wanted to keep the building plaque with their family name on it, a replica was made and the building was renamed the St. Clair Building after its architect and his artist father, who is credited with instigating the founding of Laguna Beach as an art colony.

REFURBISHMENT AND RESTORATION

When we purchased it, the building had been neglected for several years. Bus benches and newspaper racks cluttered the Coast Highway frontage. Overhead wires, utility poles and a refrigerator-like traffic signal control box added to the visual cacophony. Over a few years, all of these elements were removed, restoring the front view of the building to St. Clair's original vision.

The building was structurally sound, but woodwork and stucco needed repainting. When we stripped away the yellow-gold paint from the banister we found paint layers of a grayed blue-green. We replicated the original trim color and chose grayish beige for the stucco with a darker shade for the concrete foundation.

The parking lot needed resurfacing, and there was no landscaping to provide the setting for the building depicted in St. Clair's perspective rendering. We restriped the parking lot to allow for planting an Angophora (gum myrtle tree) that now helps shade the upper office and provides a backdrop for the building. Red trumpet vines clamber over the front hip roof and around the chimney, and Boston ivy entirely leafs over the lower foundation.

The St. Clair Building in 1987 prior to its restoration, landscaping and the removal of streetside clutter. Another plant eventually concealed an unsightly concrete block wall on the south, and we have the bonus of a continuous production of red flowers from the Malvaviscus arboreus (Turk's cap).

After a 20-year effort by the South Laguna Civic Association, the asphalted medians on Coast highway near the St. Clair building were planted with colorful succulents, enhancing the setting for the building and the neighborhood. I was landscape architect for this project.

The interior of the upper office also needed refurbishment. Someone had cut one of the beams in the ceiling truss system and then patched the beam back together with another piece of wood. The interior was painted a dark blue, and the window and door moldings had received a badly done faux wood-grain finish. The fireplace surround was mostly the faux wood-grain cabinetry with very little brick showing. It definitely did not match St. Clair's drawing showing a plastered chimney with sloping sides, with a beefy wood mantle supported by corbels that matched those on the rest of the building. A loft had been added but in a way that would not meet the scrutiny of the building department.

The chimney was replastered and a mantel installed to match St. Clair's original drawing. The exposed rafters and tongue and groove ceiling are characteristic of many St. Clair buildings. Referring to St. Clair's drawing, carpenter David Hanson built a new wood mantel, and we replastered the chimney portion. We stripped the moldings and finished them to match the original honey-colored, tongue and groove ceiling. Some of the windows were replaced; others were repaired. A kitchenette and closet were added. A shower was upgraded with plaster and tile, repeating in plaster the doorway shape on the office entrance. The loft was rebuilt with an alternate-tread fold-up stair that passed the city's inspection.

Removal of layers of paint revealed the original blue/green trim color. The building continues to give back every day a feeling of appropriateness and quality resulting from the thoughtfulness of its original design. It is on the city's historic registry, where it has received the highest rating.

Acknowledgements to Gordon and Beverly St. Clair and Jane Janz for providing documents and information for this article.

Copyright Ann Christoph 2007

Building co-owner Marjorie Christoph Allen, friend Bernice Tesch and Fred Lang appreciate the redone banisters in 1989. Landscape architect Lang and the author shared the upstairs office as their headquarters from 1988 until his death in 1996.