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The enduring romance of the Rancho: Mission Viejo, 1964 to 1967

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The enduring romance of the Rancho: Mission Viejo, 1964 to 1967

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THE ENDURING ROMANCE OF THE RANCHO:
MISSION VIEJO, 1964 TO 1967

BY

KRISTA NICHOLDS

______________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Krista Nicholds

ii
Acknowledgements

The seed was first planted in 2013 at the California Preservation Foundation conference in
Anaheim. In a session presentation, architectural historian Daniel Paul showed us buildings in
Orange County from the 1960s and 1970s that he later coined as being in the El Camino Real
style. These were architect-designed commercial buildings in places like Tustin and San Juan
Capistrano that were Modernist yet unmistakably recalling the Spanish Colonial Revival. A
couple of years later, I met my Preserve Orange County colleague, Alan Hess, for coffee at La
Paz Plaza in Mission Viejo. He pointed out to me how the architects had successfully represented
Early California in this mall from 1966.

But Mission Viejo wasn’t my first choice for a thesis topic. I had to take my own circuitous path
and for this reason I’m grateful to Trudi Sandmeier, Director of Graduate Programs in Heritage
Conservation at the School of Architecture, for her unwavering support and sense of humor
while I sorted it out. Trudi was a valuable mentor throughout my time in the MHC program.
Once I settled on the topic, my advisor Professor Ken Breisch helped me give it shape. I’m
grateful to Ken for encouraging a thesis on the suburban vernacular and for the enthusiasm he
showed for my topic over the long haul.

The two additional members of my thesis committee, both architectural historians, Katie Horak,
USC adjunct assistant professor, and Lauren Weiss Bricker, professor of architecture at Cal Poly
Pomona, spent their valuable time reading and providing useful commentary of my final draft.

Several librarians and archivists smoothed my research path. They included Krystal Tribbet of
the University of California Irvine Special Collections and Archives. Krystal brought the Jim
Sleeper and Raymond Watt papers to my attention as well as ephemera published for southern
Orange County in the 1960s and 1970s. Jeff Price, the local history librarian at the Mission Viejo
Library made photographs and documents available to me from the library’s extensive Mission
Viejo Company collection, and connected me to the city’s heritage committee and original
residents. Steve Oftelie of the Orange County Archives located an assortment of 1950s and
1960s county documents and studies and generously photocopied items for me.

iii
Sarah Thornton of the History and Museum Division at Camp Pendleton tirelessly tracked down
photographic data for me for nineteenth century photographs of the Rancho Santa Margarita y
Las Flores, and Julia Larson from the Architecture and Design Collection at the University of
California Santa Barbara made available the university’s collection of Cliff May photographs
from throughout his career. A high point in my research came with my discovery at the Getty
Research Institute that Julius Shulman had photographed Mission Viejo several times in the late
1960s and early 1970s.

I spoke to a number of people who had been associated with Mission Viejo during the years of
my study period, 1964 to 1967. In particular, I’d like to recognize residents Dorsey Lajoie and
Diana Weir. Dorsey worked in Deane Brothers’ office in the 1960s and was still living in her
Marquis model when she invited me into her home and loaned me her collection of Deane print
material. Also an original Deane Homes owner, Diana Weir took me on a tour of the first tracts
in Mission Viejo and gamely joined me as I knocked on doors to gain more information.

I benefited from my discussion with John Martin who may know more about tract house styles
and home-builders in Orange County from the 1960s to the present than anyone else. As a young
marketing executive working with Sanford Goodkin and Donald Bren, John’s research informed
the interior plans for the La Paz tract in Mission Viejo. Tony Moiso and his assistant, Emmy Lou
Vann, graciously welcomed me into the Rancho Mission Viejo headquarters in San Juan
Capistrano, itself a sprawling ranch style building reminiscent of Cliff May. Tony offered candid
insight into his family’s history and the community building he has overseen since Mission
Viejo, their first project.

My children have become teenagers since I began the graduate program. Harry and Bridget
witnessed my enthusiasm each time I got in the car to head to Los Angeles and always
understood. My husband, Jonathan Phillips, was and remains an enduring source of support,
humor and love. This thesis is dedicated to him.

iv
Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….. ii

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………... vi

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………... x

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………. 1

CHAPTER 1: RANCHO HISTORY: BEFORE MISSION VIEJO………………….......... 10
Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores: 1882 to 1942………………………………. 10
Regional Development and the End of the Rancho: 1942 to 1964………………… 19

CHAPTER 2: THE ENDURING ROMANCE OF THE RANCHO SANTA
MARGARITA....................................................................................................................... 29
The Rancho Santa Margarita Ranch House………………………………………... 29
The Las Flores Adobe……………………………………………………………… 33
The Magee Period at Las Flores…………………………………………………… 37

CHAPTER 3: CLIFF MAY’S RANCHO REVIVAL……………………………………... 41
Cliff May and the Ranch House…………………………………………………… 49
The Styled Ranch…………………………………………………………………... 53

CHAPTER 4: MISSION VIEJO AND THE MASTER PLANNED COMMUNITY…….. 55
Establishing the Mission Viejo Company………………………………………….. 55
The County’s Role…………………………………………………………………. 60
Mission Viejo’s Master Plan……………………………………………………….. 62
Planning Influences………………………………………………………………… 65

CHAPTER 5: THE ENDURING ROMANCE OF “EARLY CALIFORNIA” IN MISSION
VIEJO……………………………………………………………………………………… 74
The Mission’s Early Role…………………………………………………………...74
The La Paz Road Entrance…………………………………………………………. 78
Rancho Heritage in the Suburbs…………………………………………………… 82
Commercial and Institutional Architecture, 1964 to 1967…………………………. 89
Residential Architecture, 1964 to 1967……………………………………………. 96
Deane Homes………………………………………………………………………. 98
La Paz Homes……………………………………………………………………… 103
Marketing “Early California”……………………………………………………… 113

v

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….. 125

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………….. 135

vi
List of Figures

Figure I-1 Louis E. Plummer Auditorium………………………………………………….. 1
Figure I-2 Covered Arcade, Plummer Auditorium………………………………………… 2
Figure I-3 Pastoral California frescoe, Pio Pico…………………………………………….3
Figure I-4 Pastoral California frescoe, Bear Baiting………………………………………. 5
Figure 1-1 Trabuco Adobe…………………………………………………………………. 11
Figure 1-2 Four Generations of O’Neills…………………………………………………... 13
Figure 1-3 Pio de Jesus Pico………………………………………………………………...15
Figure 1-4 Rancho Santa Margarita Ranch House and vineyard…………………………... 16
Figure 1-5 Jerome O’Neill at the San Juan Capistrano Train Depot………………………. 17
Figure 1-6 Daisy Moore O’Neill with sister……………………………………………….. 18
Figure 1-7 Officials Inspect Map…………………………………………………………... 20
Figure 1-8 Orange County Officials at Disney Studios……………………………………. 22
Figure 1-9 Map of Orange County and Major Land Holdings in 1959……………………. 25
Figure 1-10 New Freeway, Interstate 5…………………………………………………….. 27
Figure 1-11 O’Neill Park Entrance………………………………………………………… 28
Figure 2-1 Casa Santa Margarita, ca. 1880………………………………………………… 30
Figure 2-2 Rancho Santa Margarita Ranch House exterior corridor………………………. 31
Figure 2-3 Marcos Forster and Guadalupe Forster with Children…………………………. 34
Figure 2-4 Las Flores Adobe………………………………………………………………. 35
Figure 2-5 Las Flores Adobe, courtyard view……………………………………………... 36
Figure 2-6 Las Flores Adobe, ca. 1870-1880……………………………………………….37
Figure 3-1 Ramona’s Marriage Place, Casa de Estudillo…………………………………...42

vii
Figure 3-2 Arthur Benton at Mission San Juan Capistrano………………………………... 46
Figure 3-3 John Arnholt Smith House, Illustration and Plan………………………………. 47
Figure 3-4 Alexander and Nancy Highland House………………………………………… 48
Figure 3-5 Advertisement for Cliff May Homes in Anaheim……………………………… 51
Figure 3-6 Cliff May Homes Low-Cost Housing………………………………………….. 52
Figure 4-1 Cliff May Homes “Quickness of Assembly”…………………………………... 56
Figure 4-2 Governor Ronald Reagan at Saddleback College……………………………….58
Figure 4-3 County of Orange City Boundaries…………………………………………….. 59
Figure 4-4 Orange County Planners and Trail Map……………………………………….. 61
Figure 4-5 1966 Diagram of First Mission Viejo Developments………………………….. 64
Figure 4-6 Aerial View of Mission Viejo in 1966…………………………………………. 66
Figure 4-7 Philip J. Reilly and Lake Mission Viejo……………………………………….. 67
Figure 4-8 William Pereira on the Cover of Time Magazine……………………………… 72
Figure 5-1 Tourist at Mission San Juan Capistrano………………………………………... 76
Figure 5-2 Juaneno Tribal Members at Swallows Day Parade…………………………….. 77
Figure 5-3 Close-Up of Newspaper Advertisement for La Paz Homes……………………. 79
Figure 5-4 La Paz Road Main Entrance……………………………………………………. 80
Figure 5-5 The Farm at Mission Viejo High School………………………………………. 83
Figure 5-6 The City of Mission Viejo Seal………………………………………………… 84
Figure 5-7 Steer Delivery, March 1975……………………………………………………. 85
Figure 5-8 Joe Tow, Alice Chandler and Tony Moiso, 1973……………………………… 87
Figure 5-9 Donald Bren and Chain of Title Presentation………………………………….. 89
Figure 5-10 Richard J. O’Neill and Daisy O’Neill at School Dedication Ceremony……… 91

viii
Figure 5-11 Mission Viejo High School…………………………………………………… 92
Figure 5-12 Mission Viejo Elementary School……………………………………………. 93
Figure 5-13 Mount of Olives Lutheran Church……………………………………………. 94
Figure 5-14 La Paz Plaza…………………………………………………………………... 95
Figure 5-15 Niguel Terrace Home…………………………………………………………. 97
Figure 5-16 Double-Page Spread of Garden Kitchen……………………………………… 99
Figure 5-17 Deane Homes, Emerald Plan…………………………………………………. 101
Figure 5-18 Deane Homes, Jubilee Plan…………………………………………………… 102
Figure 5-19 Deane Homes, Marquis Plan………………………………………………….. 103
Figure 5-20 The Moreland Residence……………………………………………………… 105
Figure 5-21 Tenaya Hall, John Muir College at UC San Diego…………………………… 106
Figure 5-22 Robert B. Pappenfort Residence……………………………………………… 107
Figure 5-23 Architectural Illustration of the Saddle Club…………………………………. 109
Figure 5-24 La Paz Homes, San Juan Plan………………………………………………… 110
Figure 5-25 La Paz Homes, San Martine Plan……………………………………………... 111
Figure 5-26 La Paz Homes San Verlarde Plan…………………………………………….. 112
Figure 5-27 Deane Homes Brochure………………………………………………………. 114
Figure 5-28 La Paz Homes Model Home, San Juan Plan………………………………….. 116
Figure 5-29 Eldorado Homes Model, Interior……………………………………………... 118
Figure 5-30 Mission Viejo Golf Course…………………………………………………… 119
Figure 5-31 La Paz Homes, Model Home, San Lorenzo Plan……………………………... 120
Figure 5-32 La Paz Homes Brochure Cover……………………………………………….. 121
Figure 5-33 Cliff May Homes Brochure Cover……………………………………………. 122

ix
Figure 5-34 “I’m a Squatter at Mission Viejo”…………………………………………….. 124
Figure C-1 A Cliff May Interior in Cliff May Homes Brochure…………………………... 126
Figure C-2 Model Home in Casta del Sol Subdivision…………………………………….. 131
Figure C-3 Sales Brochure for Casta del Sol………………………………………………. 132

x
Abstract

The Spanish Colonial Revival was famously adopted by architects and builders in Southern
California in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Second World War,
white stucco walls and red tile roofs had become commonplace throughout the region. However,
in the race to satisfy the housing demand in the post-war period, neither the materials nor the
motifs of the Spanish Colonial Revival were employed in any visible way in the mass building
that took place. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Spanish Colonial Revival influences in
residential and commercial development began to reappear. The new master planned community
of Mission Viejo was among the first to reflect a Spanish and Early California theme,
implemented by the Mission Viejo Company and Deane Brothers between 1964 and 1967.

Mission Viejo was made possible by the intersection of comprehensive regional development,
widely promoted ideas about master planning and the construction technology to carry them out,
and the availability of a large tract of land. The relative isolation of the new community in the
undeveloped countryside of southern Orange County in 1964 required a special presentation to
woo home buyers. Located on ranch land associated with Spanish mission, Mexican-California
and Anglo-American agrarian culture, the Mission Viejo Company successfully drew on this
rancho history to shape its residential, commercial and institutional building product.

The historicist revival that began in the late 1960s has not faded. Today, Spanish style
architecture remains popular in Southern California but it is also taken for granted or disparaged
for its homogeneity and association with a romanticized past. Yet its central role in regional
iconography makes it a worthy subject of architectural history and this thesis attempts to provide
a context for understanding it. Further study in the field is needed to identify other 1960s era
subdivisions and communities in order to understand the scope of the mid-century revival in
Southern California and the possibilities for heritage conservation.

1
Introduction

In the prosperous citrus belt of Orange County in 1919, the residents of Fullerton, California had
ambitions for their small city. The Chamber of Commerce passed a resolution that year
promoting the Spanish Colonial Revival as the city’s primary building style, and the city
government went along with the idea.
1
By 1930, the city hall, post office, public library and
junior college were all built in the Spanish style.

The finest architectural achievement of this period in Fullerton was the Louis Plummer
Auditorium (201 E. Chapman Avenue), designed by Carleton Winslow in the style he’d
established with Bertram Goodhue at the Panama-California Exposition of 1915-1917. The
auditorium, on Fullerton’s junior college and high school campus, was an artistic amalgam of
Spanish, Moorish, Renaissance and Classical details.(Figure I-1)

1
Debora Richey et al., “Pastoral California,” primary record prepared for the State of California, Department of
Parks and Recreation (unpublished, dated January 2020), 6.
Figure I-1 The Louis E. Plummer Auditorium, Chapman Avenue, Fullerton, California. Carleton
Winslow, architect, 1930. View north. Date of photograph unknown. Fullerton Heritage.

2
The building was completed in 1930 but it would be given a diverting epilogue in 1934. That
year, thanks to a federal make-work project, the Federal Works of Art Project, artist Charles
Kassler was commissioned to create a mural on the western elevation of the Plummer
building.(Figure I-2) Kassler had just completed a large fresco in the Children’s Court of the Los
Angeles Central Library called “Bison Hunt,” and the Fullerton mural would be followed later
by several murals at the United States Post Office in Beverly Hills where he painted themes
related to mail and the New Deal.
2

2
“Kassler to Paint Federal Murals,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1935.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/163273005?accountid=14749 The LA library fresco suffered water damaged and
was painted over in the 1960s. The murals at the Beverly Hills post office, now the Wallis Annenberg Center for the
Performing Arts, are still visible.
Figure I-2 Covered arcade on the western elevation of Plummer Auditorium,
Fullerton High School, Fullerton, California, Carleton Winslow, architect, 1930.
The fresco, Pastoral California, by Charles Kassler (1934), is on the wall to the
right. Photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1937. Fullerton Public Library.

3
Situated on the outdoor wall of an arcaded corridor, Kassler’s Fullerton mural is a lively, colorful
work entitled, “Pastoral California.” Technically a fresco- a combination of paint and plaster- it
measures fifteen feet high by eighty feet long and includes over one hundred figures. It is a
continuous tableau that depicts moments in the lives of Mexican Californians in the period from
1821 to 1846 when the mission lands were dispersed to hundreds of grantees and the rancho
system was established. Women are chatting while washing clothes and grinding corn; priests
hand out tortillas to the children gathered around them; and men on horseback play games
popular in the period. One of the vaqueros featured is Jose Antonio Yorba, a former Spanish
soldier and wealthy ranchero of the era for whom the city of Yorba Linda is named. At the north
end of the mural, a well-heeled audience is portrayed that includes prominent ranchero and
politician, Pio Pico, watching a singer perform whose name was Laura Moya. As background to
the Pico entourage, Mission San Juan Capistrano appears desolate. Native American men and
women are shown as servants, observing the action but not really a part of it.(Figure I-3)
Figure I-3 A section of Pastoral California, a frescoe by Charles Kassler, 1934. Situated on the west side
of the Plummer Auditorium, Fullerton High School, Fullerton, California. In this vignette, Pio Pico is
seen, center-left, watching the singer, Laura Moya, left. Photograph by author.

4
For the artist, Charles Kassler, Pastoral California complimented the Spanish style auditorium,
and the school district concurred when it approved his original drawings for the mural.
3
It was
well received by art critics and according to a Santa Ana newspaper one thousand people
attended the ceremony in November 1934 that was a dedication to a new gymnasium on campus
and the mural.
4
But in 1939 the trustees of the school board ordered the mural to be painted over.
An explanation for their decision was never provided but a local paper reported about the
announcement saying that the mural offended conventional taste.
5
The mural remained invisible
for over sixty years. Efforts began in the 1970s to raise awareness about its existence, and finally
in 1997 the Fullerton community came together to fully restore it.
6

The 1930s in California was a time of widespread poverty, labor disputes and heightened racial
tension and many thousands of ethnic Mexicans were forcibly removed from California and sent
to Mexico in successive expulsions.
7
The school board’s decision in 1939 should be viewed in
this context. It represented an erasure of Mexican culture and a literal “whitewashing” of
California history while the Spanish style auditorium stood, a glorification of the dominant
European-American culture that had taken over.
8

The mural depicts a series of quotidian activities associated with the agrarian life of the
Californios. Kassler may have taken the mural’s subject-matter and title from the work of Hubert
Howe Bancroft, whose book California Pastoral about the history of Spanish and Mexican
California was published in 1888. The mural is an example of social realism, a style often
adopted for murals in the New Deal era. The blood sport known as bear baiting, a spectator sport

3
Ibid., Pastoral California, 6.
4
Ibid., 5. The newspaper was the Santa Ana Daily Evening Register.
5
“High School Mural Doomed; Paint It Out, Trustees Order,” Fullerton News Tribune, August 30, 1939. Fullerton
Public Library Collection.
6
Mimi Ko Cruz, “The Renaissance of a Fullerton Mural,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1997.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/2100630294?accountid=14749.
7
“America’s Forgotten History of Mexican-American ‘Repatriation,’ an interview with Francisco Balderrama,” by
Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, September 10, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-
history-of-mexican-american-repatriation
8
For a history of this pattern of exclusion and erasure of Mexican-Californian culture in Southern California, see
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004.), and Phoebe Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern
American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.)

5
in early California, is displayed in the center of the mural where a grizzly bear sinks its claws
and teeth into the back of a bull. The prominent image feels like a foreshadowing of the
extinction of the California grizzly and of a way of life reliant on cattle and the land.(Figure I-4)
Pastoral California not only fits thematically into the Spanish Colonial Revival, it also signals the
end of this romantic revival in art and architecture which began in the 1880s.

Figure I-4 A section of Pastoral California, a fresco by Charles Kassler, 1934.
Situated on the west side of the Plummer Auditorium, Fullerton High School,
Fullerton, California. Photograph by author.

6
Helen Hunt Jackson set the precedent by recreating the fading beauty and archetypal characters
of the California rancho in her popular and widely circulated novel, Ramona, published in 1884.
9

The future was not as bright as the past on the Moreno ranch of the late 1800s where Jackson set
the story but it retained its Edenic character described throughout the novel, as in this typical
passage: “nothing was to be seen but verdure or bloom or fruit, at whatever time of year you sat
on the Senora’s south veranda.”
10
Jackson also eulogized the hundred year old Spanish
Franciscan missions which by the time she visited California, were in ruins. Architects
responded to the era with a reinterpretation of hispanic material culture and the ‘pastoral’ of
early California. For fifty years, builders and architects throughout Southern California borrowed
from vernacular and high-style buildings and landscapes from different centuries in Mexico and
the countries of the Mediterranean basin, especially Spain. They included the eighteenth and
nineteenth century missions and adobes of California, the villas and gardens of the Italian
renaissance, the elaborate Churrigueresque churches of the Spanish conquest in Mexico, and the
rustic farmhouses of the Spanish countryside.
11
From this wide variety of influences, a California
architecture was born and a building legacy of red tile roofs, white walls, arches, iron grilles and
gates, and courtyard gardens was established.

In the short span of time between when the mural was painted in 1934 and whitewashed in 1939,
the Spanish Colonial Revival was being eclipsed by other priorities in architecture. Modernism
was not concerned with establishing a sense of place or referencing historical precedent. When
the US entered the Second World War in 1941, the architecture and building industries were
realigned in support of the war effort, and in the 1950s they were directed to the rapid-fire
development of high-volume, standardized housing. By the late postwar period of the 1960s,
cultural and economic shifts reminiscent of those earlier in the century permitted a second
revival of hispanic imagery to emerge.

9
Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona, 1884. (New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2005).
10
Ibid, 17.
11
For this short summary of the Spanish Colonial Revival, I’ve relied on the following sources: David Gebhard,
“The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California (1895-1930),” in Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 26, no.2 (1967), 131-147; Lauren Weiss Bricker, The Mediterranean House in America. (New York:
Abrams, 2008); Karen Weitze, California’s Mission Revival. (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc. 1984);
Patricia Gebhard, George Washington Smith: Architect of the Spanish Colonial Revival. (Santa Barbara, CA:
University of California Santa Barbara, 2005); and Harold Kirker, California’s Architectural Frontier: Style and
Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library, 1960.)

7
As in the 1880s, a return to Spanish and Early California in the 1960s coincided with an
increased public awareness of the cultural value of historic places and the activation of a historic
preservation movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was an embrace of eclecticism
by the design and architecture professions. The same trend occurred in the 1960s, when
Modernism’s hold on the architecture profession loosened leading to a greater expressiveness
and flexibility with materials and volumes.
12
In the 1880s, clay roof tiles were being produced in
factories for the first time in Southern California which made them more widely available, and
the development of aggregate mines by the new cement industry in the late nineteenth century
gave architects the look of adobe but the plasticity and longevity of concrete.
13
Both periods also
witnessed suburban expansion on an unprecedented scale that absorbed an influx of newcomers,
most of whom were white, who rejected cities in order to acquire a piece of their own private
utopia.

The second Spanish revival drew on the motifs popularized in the previous period and integrated
the influences of Modernism and the Ranch style. When it first re-appears in the late 1960s in
Southern California, it was primarily a vernacular product and, much like the small white stucco
cottages built in the streetcar suburbs of the 1920s and 1930s, “…where a single row of tile
coping might stand in for a tile roof, and troweled patterns had to satisfy the desire for the adobe
look,” its hispanic details were meager.
14

The Spanish Colonial Revival of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century has been
thoroughly explored but with the exception of the book of essays published in 2017 by the
Riverside Art Museum in association with the exhibition of the same name, Myth and Mirage:
Inland Southern California, Birthplace of the Spanish Colonial Revival, this second Spanish

12
My review of the issues of Progressive Architecture from 1958 to 1965 revealed a kind of “chaos” of design in
the architecture profession at the time. Technological advancement was creating new building types (nuclear power
plants) and new combinations of materials and textures to be used in ever increasing volumes of space. Progressive
Architecture (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1958-1965), collection of the Architecture and Fine Arts
Library, School of Architecture, University of Southern California.
13
Anne E. Grimmer and Paul K. Williams, “The Preservation and Repair of Historic Clay Tile Roofs,” Preservation
Brief 30 (Washington D.C.: National Park Service, 1993); and Carolyn Schutten, “Voids of the Aggregate,” in Myth
and Mirage, ed. H. Vincent Moses and Catherine Whitmore (Riverside, CA: Riverside Art Museum, 2017), 111.
14
Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1994), 196.

8
Revival is not well understood. More common is Mike Davis’ dismissal of the phenomenon,
from the vantage point of 1998, he wrote:
For more than a century, this Mediterranean metaphor has been
sprinkled like a cheap perfume over hundreds of instant subdivisions,
creating a faux landscape celebrating a fictional history from which
original Indian and Mexican ancestors have been expunged.The nadir
of this specious historicism is probably southern Orange County, where
the endlessly regimented rows of identical red-tiled townhouses (an
affluent version of architectural Stalinism) are located on cul-de-sacs with
names like “Avenida Sevilla” or “Via Capri.
15

By 1998, the Spanish revival seemed to have run amok in Southern California, devolving into a
generic Mediterranean vernacular, offending no one and everyone. The thesis contends that the
“red tile tide” wasn’t arbitrary and is worthy of study. The origins of the modern Spanish Revival
are investigated by exploring the history of the Orange County city of Mission Viejo, and
specifically the first thousand acres of land developed from 1964 to 1967 by Donald Bren and
the Mission Viejo Company. It is here contended that Mission Viejo is one of the first
communities in Southern California to initiate a modern re-imagining of the Spanish-Mexican
rancho past.

Mission Viejo was developed from Mexican era ranchos, Trabuco, La Paz and Mission Viejo,
and had been part of the massive Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores which, from Pio Pico’s
ownership to the mid-twentieth century, straddled San Diego and Orange counties. The history
of land ownership and land use on these ranchos will be addressed in the first chapter of this
thesis, followed by a more detailed account in chapter two of the cultural and building heritage
concentrated on the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores. Here, we also locate the builder and
designer, Cliff May, whose formation as a boy took place in San Diego and on the Rancho Santa
Margarita.

May was a popular figure in the 1950s. The western ranch lifestyle he produced in his homes
from the 1930s to the 1960s was broadcast in two Sunset ranch books, several national
magazines and other sources, effectively re-establishing the nostalgia for the Mexican California

15
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1998), 12.

9
rancho for the modern period. As a spiritual and architectural precursor to Mission Viejo, the
evolution of May’s work and of the Ranch style suburban house is traced in chapter three.

Chapter four addresses the context of the postwar regional development of Southern California,
its impact on Orange County and its role as the catalyst that led the O’Neill family owners of the
Rancho Mission Viejo to form a development company, the Mission Viejo Company. As a
planned community, Mission Viejo is also considered in the context of the master planning ideas
that held currency locally and internationally in the 1960s.

In the beginning, the Mission Viejo Company set a thematic course for the development of the
new community. The scope of this effort is documented in the final chapter with descriptions of
the new building and landscape architecture. With the advantage of thousands of undeveloped
ranch land as backdrop, the company sought to attract families by telegraphing stability and
wholesomeness in a reconstruction of a pastoral landscape. More important than the
representation of Spanish forms in the architecture of Mission Viejo is this mythologizing of
Early California. In a sense, Mission Viejo builds on Cliff May’s legacy, refashioned for a mass
market.

10
Chapter One
Rancho History: Before Mission Viejo

The relevant history of Mission Viejo dates to the Mexican period in California, when the
missions were officially disbanded and their lands were redistributed by the Mexican
administration of Alta California after 1834. The land in what is today southern Orange County
and northern San Diego County was transferred from Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission
San Luis Rey de Francia. The ranch properties that were established in the mid-nineteenth
century in this part of Southern California set the stage for future land use patterns and are
intimately linked to the social history of the state.

Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores: 1882 to 1942
Marguerita Petra Maria de la Conception Moore was christened in 1879 in the Plaza Church at
the center of what had been the pueblo of Los Angeles. Daisy, as she was known throughout her
life, was a seventh generation Californian, descended through her maternal line from Francisco
Xavier Sepulveda, among the first settlers of Los Angeles who arrived sometime in 1781 from
Mexico. Daisy’s mother was Amenaida Rafaela Lan Franco and her father was Walter Scott
Moore, an early Los Angeles city counsellor and the city’s first fire chief. Daisy’s childhood
home was at the top of Temple Street on Bunker Hill, where the Music Center is now located.
16

Daisy’s life would continue to align with the development of Southern California when in 1915
she would marry into the family with one of the largest land holdings in the state.

In 1882, just three years before Daisy’s birth, the man who would become her father-in-law,
Richard O’Neill Sr. (1824-1910), travelled by train from northern to southern California to
inspect lands associated with great ranchos of the Mexican era: Rancho Trabuco, Rancho
Mission Viejo y La Paz, and Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores.(Figure 1-1) O’Neill was a

16
Alice O’Neill Moiso Avery (daughter of Daisy O’Neill), interview by Jim Sleeper, date unknown, transcript, Jim
Sleeper papers. MS-R173. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, CA. Some documents
associated with the O’Neill family indicate that Daisy Moore’s childhood home was located where Los Angeles City
Hall is now. Others have said that it was her Lan Franco grandparents’ home that was once in that location.

11
butcher by trade but had spent the preceding few years successfully operating a cattle ranch
called Chowchilla in Merced County, owned by a San Francisco associate.
17
Upon hearing that
these Southern California ranchos were for sale, O’Neill thought there could be an opportunity
for him to own his own land. He quickly concluded, however, that the size and scope of the
property would require resources he didn’t have.

17
Jim Sleeper, “Rancho Mission Viejo: Where History is Still Happening” (unpublished manuscript, no date), 2, Jim
Sleeper papers. MS-R173. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Librairies, Irvine, CA.

Figure 1-1 Trabuco Adobe, historically on Rancho Trabuco, built ca. 1810. Today the preserved adobe
ruin is located in O’Neill Regional Park, Orange County, 1967. Orange County Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=O%27neill%20park

12
Nothing ordained how Richard O’Neill’s fortunes would change. In 1830, as a young boy,
O’Neill emigrated with his family from County Cork, Ireland to New Brunswick, Canada, then
Boston. There he became an apprentice to his father, a butcher, but news of the gold rush
inspired young O’Neill to travel to California. Eventually, he established his own butchery, and a
small meat-packing operation in San Francisco.
18
O’Neill supplied a saloon called the “Auction
Lunch” and befriended one of the saloon’s owners, James Clair Flood.

It was this friendship that O’Neill was counting on while imagining his future on that visit to
Southern California in 1882. By this time, James Flood was looking for ways to invest his
money. As historian Jim Sleeper said, while O’Neill met with modest success in San Francisco,
his friend Flood’s “…fortunes soared astronomically. By clever stock manipulations he managed
to corner the Comstock Lode, America’s most famous silver mine.”
19
Now known as a “Silver
King,” Flood agreed to back O’Neill on the massive ranch purchase in Southern California and,
on a handshake, they agreed O’Neill would eventually own half of the land in exchange for his
labor.
20
Flood and his Nevada Bank bought the land, and twenty-five years later, in 1907- at age
80- Richard O’Neill became a fifty percent owner of the conglomerate of three ranchos that
became known simply as Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores.
21
(Figure 1-2)

The three ranchos encompassed 233,000 acres stretching from what is now Oceanside in
northern San Diego County to Lake Forest in Orange County, and included twenty miles of
coastline from San Clemente to Oceanside. For centuries this land had been inhabited by the first
peoples of the region, the Acjachemen (or Juaneno) and the Payomkawicum (Luiseno).
22
The
land appealed to the Spanish and Mexican settlers of the 18
th
century for the same reasons it had
the Native Americans. Rolling hills and canyons culminated on the eastern edge of the property

18
Jim Sleeper, “Where History is Still Happening,” 2.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 3.
21
Ibid.
22
Stephen R. Van Wormer and Susan D. Walter. “Historical Artifact Analysis from CA-ORA-1301H, Mission
Viejo, South Orange County, California, April 1993, Mission Viejo Library Collection. Archeological studies of the
area done prior to development by Mission Viejo Co. revealed twenty-nine middens from the pre-contact era and
substantial evidence of permanent settlement.

13
in steep slopes, then carried on gradually through hilly chapparal to a valley of grasslands, sage
scrub and the Pacific Ocean. The landscape was not only beautiful, it was fertile and contained
several large creeks that were sources of potable water.

These ranchos were associated with some of the most influential people of the Mexican and early
American periods. Brothers Pío Pico (1801- 1894) and Andrés Pico (1810-1876) assumed title to
the southern portion of Santa Margarita in 1841 and Las Flores in 1844.
23
The Picos extended
their cattle ranching activities there and amassed considerable wealth in the process. Pio Pico
began his political career in San Diego in 1826 as a member of the disputacion, an elected
assembly that advised the Governor. He was the last Governor of California during the Mexican
period, and a defender of the independence of California throughout his life. Though he rebelled

23
Carlos Manuel Salomon, Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2010), 68, 70.
Figure 1-2 Four generations of O’Neills, ca. 1903, from left to right: Richard O’Neill Jr., Richard O’Neill
Sr. with grandson, Jerome Baumgartner, Charles Hardy (ranch manager), and Jerome O’Neill. Camp
Pendleton History & Museum Archive, Jerome Baumgartner Collection.

14
against the American invasion and escaped to Mexico in 1846 for a short duration during the war
with the United States, when he returned he continued to be active in public affairs in Los
Angeles after statehood.
24
Pico entered the ranchero class in 1831 when he was granted title to
Rancho Jamul, southeast of the pueblo of San Diego.
25
(Figure 1-3) Following secularization in
1834 and the mass dispersal of land, the Picos amassed one of the largest holdings. They
successfully defended their title to the Rancho Santa Margarita in the hearings following the
1851 Land Act and held onto their ranch through the drought and floods of the late 1850s and
1860s. But by 1864, they were heavily indebted. That year, Pío Pico’s brother-in-law, Juan
Forster, assumed his debt in exchange for the deed to the Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores.
26

Forster was born “John Foster” in Liverpool, England in 1814. Like many young men from
Europe or the United States who wished to establish themselves in Mexican California, Forster
adopted Catholicism as his religion, learned to speak Spanish and became a Mexican citizen. He
also elevated his station through marriage to Pio Pico’s sister, Maria Ysadora Ygnacia Pico
(1808-1883).
27
They were married in 1837 at Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside. Politically
prominent by this time, Pio Pico facilitated several land transactions for his brother-in-law to the
extent that Forster became one of the largest foreign-born landowners in Southern California
before American annexation.
28
At the time he took over Pío Pico’s land in Southern California,
Forster already owned two of the ranchos just north of the Santa Margarita, Rancho Trabuco and
Rancho Mission Viejo. He also owned the original mission buildings at San Juan Capistrano
which he acquired with a partner in 1845 and where he and his family lived for twenty years.
29

24
Salomon, Pio Pico, 110.
25
Stephen R. Wee and Stephen D. Mikesell, “Las Flores Adobe,” nomination prepared for the National Register of
Historic Places (National Park Service, December 1991), 6.
26
In one of many legal disputes pursued by Pio Pico over land, Pico sued Juan Forster in court but lost in 1873.
Biographer Salomon said the historic record now proves that Forster defrauded Pico in the Rancho Santa Margarita
y Los Flores land sale transaction. Salomon, Pio Pico, 146-148.
27
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/114875753/maria_ysidora-ygnacia-forster
28
Pio Pico was also Juan Forster’s godfather when he was baptised in the Catholic Church. Wee and Mikesell, Las
Flores, 13.
29
Michael Edward Thurman, “A History of Rancho Santa Margarita Y Las Flores to 1882” (master’s thesis, USC,
August 1960), 46, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/1634511958?accountid=14749 Following the federal government’s decision to
return the missions to the Roman Catholic Church, Forster defended his right to the property at the US Land
Commission which decided against his claim in 1865.

15

Figure 1-3 Pio de Jesus Pico, grantee of the Rancho Santa Margarita Y Las Flores, 1844-
1862. Portrait by H. Frey from the Bowers Museum Collection, Santa Ana.

16
From San Juan Capistrano, the Forster family moved to the Santa Margarita where they lived and
operated the large ranch until 1882.(Figure 1-4)

Juan Forster was an enterprising rancher who aggressively sought commercial success.
30
In the
late 1870s he created a subdivision called Forster City on the Rancho Santa Margarita and struck
a plan to populate it with farmers from Holland.
31
Forster City took some shape as a real town
but eventually failed. Pressure from lenders meant that immediately after his death in 1882,
Forster’s family was forced to sell his remaining property, the Rancho Santa Margarita.
32

Following the transaction in 1882 that led to Flood’s ownership of the ranchos, Richard O’Neill
Sr. and his family moved from San Francisco to the ranch where O’Neill ran the operations, and
where his oldest son, Jerome O’Neill, assisted him.(Figure 1-5) During these years, most ranches
in the region raised sheep but the O’Neills were cattle ranchers. The trade and export in beef was

30
Wee and Mikesell, “Las Flores Adobe,” section 8, page 22-23.
31
Edgar W. Hebert, “Las Flores,” Journal of San Diego History, 7, no. 3, (1961):15,
https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/1961/july/lasflores/
32
Ibid.
Figure 1-4 Rancho Santa Margarita ranch house with vineyard in foreground, ca. 1887. The vineyard dates to the
mission period and was maintained by the Forsters but was removed by the O’Neills. Photograph by Herve
Friend. San Diego Historical Society.

17
made easier by the Santa Fe Railroad, which by 1888 ran through the length of the property. The
O’Neills occupied the ranch house, an old adobe, near Oceanside, located halfway between
missions San Luis Rey and San Juan Capistrano. Ranching operations were centered there and
by the time the O’Neill family had moved in the adobe was already nearly 60 years old. The
Forsters had lived in the adobe house and enlarged it.
33
Earlier, Pío Pico also made use

33
Richard Leste (docent, Camp Pendleton Historical Society), during tour of Santa Margarita Ranch House,
September 13, 2019.
Figure 1-5 Jerome O’Neill at the San Juan Capistrano train depot, date unknown. O’Neill had a condition
that impacted the use of his legs, but he was an expert horseman and under his ownership from 1910 to
1927, the profitability of the Rancho Santa Margarita grew significantly. San Juan Capistrano Historical
Society.

18
of the house, including as a hide-out during the Mexican war with the United States before
fleeing to Mexico.
34

In 1900, Daisy Moore visited the O’Neill ranch. She had met Richard O’Neill Sr.’s youngest
son, Richard O’Neill Jr., at a dance at a new hotel in Oceanside that year.(Figure 1-6) At the
time, Daisy wasn’t impressed by the adobe ranch house where Richard escorted her to a family

lunch.
35
For a city girl, it was too rustic and remote. Daisy’s rendezvous with the ranch would be
temporary anyway. She soon left for a lengthy stay in South Africa where her older sister had

34
W. D. Taylor, “Santa Margarita Ranch House,” nomination prepared for the National Register of Historic Places
(National Park Service, April 23, 1970), 3, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123860984#.XtbXyApTLkU.link
35
Alice O’Neill Moiso Avery (daughter of Daisy O’Neill), interview by Jim Sleeper, date unknown, transcript, Jim
Sleeper papers. MS-R173. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, CA.
Figure 1-6 Daisy Moore (left) and sister, Rowena Moore, date unknown. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

19
emigrated. But Richard O’Neill Jr. was a dedicated correspondent, and he wrote to her until her
return.

By the time Richard Jr. and Daisy were married in 1915, the Rancho Santa Margarita was co-
owned by Richard’s oldest brother, Jerome, who inherited the O’Neill portion from their father,
Richard Sr., upon his death in 1910. Jerome was in partnership with a second generation Flood,
James L. Flood, son of the Silver King. Like his father before him, Jerome managed the ranch
for the partnership and was a dedicated operator. Under his guidance the cattle business was
expanded and the operation was diversified to include a variety of crops.
36
Before his death in
1927, Jerome O’Neill placed his rancho assets in a trust with Citizen National Trust Savings
Bank acting as the trustee, and made two of his three siblings, Richard O’Neill Jr. and Mary
O’Neill Baumgartner, and their children the beneficiaries.

Regional Development and End of the Rancho: 1942 to 1964
When O’Neill and the second generation Flood owner died in the same year, the third generation
owners relied on outside managers to run the ranch throughout the 1930s.
37
Meanwhile, the
adjacent region was increasingly opening up to the outside world. At the gateway to the southern
portion of the ranch, the coastal city of San Clemente was being developed as a “Spanish Village
by the Sea” by Ole Hanson, and by 1929 the Pacific Coast Highway was paved to Dana Point.
Coastal development began to take off in Dana Point and Laguna Beach. Many of the vernacular
beach cottages that still populate Laguna Beach were built in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1934,
Interstate Highway 74 became the connection between Orange County and Riverside County.
What’s now known as the “Ortega Highway” was carved through the mountains of the Cleveland
National Forest on the eastern edge of the O’Neill ranchos, with a terminus in front of the
Mission San Juan Capistrano.(Figure 1-7)

36
Jim Sleeper, “Where History is Still Happening,” 4.

20

Two events in the early 1940s set the stage for the modern period of the O’Neill ranch, with what
historian Sleeper described as an “…epic division of the Santa Margarita…”
38
In 1940, the
families decided to split up the original 233,000 acres. The most southerly lands in San Diego
County were allocated to the Flood family and the area around San Onofre to a branch of the
O’Neill family, the Baumgartners.
39
The northern portion- in Orange County- which included all
of Rancho Trabuco and part of Rancho Mission Viejo y La Paz, was retained by Richard O’Neill
Jr.

38
Jim Sleeper, “Where History is Still Happening,” 4.
39
Alice and Richard O’Neill Sr. had four children: Alice, Jerome, Richard, and Mary. Mary became Mary O’Neill
Baumgartner upon marriage to John Jay Baumgartner.
Figure 1-7 Officials inspect a map of the proposed route for the Ortega Highway, near San Juan
Capistrano, 1930. Willard Smith Collection, Orange County Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=Willard%20Smith

21
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on the United States’ western flank brought the country into the
Second World War and dramatically altered the nature of the development of the Rancho Santa
Margarita y Las Flores. It also disrupted the parity struck between the families in the 1940 land
agreement. In 1942, the United States Department of the Navy expropriated almost 130,000
acres of the original O’Neill-Flood rancho in order to establish Marine Corps Base Camp Joseph
H. Pendleton. This was the part of the ranch that included all of its coastline, the original ranch
house adobe and the Las Flores adobe.
40
The parcel in Orange County that was allocated to the
Richard O’Neill Jr. family was unaffected. When Richard died in 1943, title to his land passed to
his widow, Daisy Moore O’Neill, and their two children, Alice and Richard Jerome. This arm of
the O’Neill family was left with 52,000 acres. Historically named Rancho Trabuco and Rancho
Mision Vieja y La Paz, the newly configured property was now known as Rancho Mission Viejo.

While the Second World War and the housing and manufacturing boom that followed consumed
much of the farm land and citrus groves in northern Orange County, in 1959 three quarters of
habitable land in the county was still undeveloped, and agriculture remained the primary source
of revenue for the major landowners, including the O’Neills.
41
But the status quo did not last.
The federal government’s investment in Southern California during the Second World War set
the stage for future growth, especially in manufacturing. Among the largest industrialized cities
in the United States only Detroit surpassed Los Angeles in industrial production by 1945. By the
mid-1960s, the suburbs of Los Angeles County were nearly fully developed.
42
Adjacent land in
the west in Ventura County and in the south in Orange County became natural sites for
development. The opening of Disneyland in Anaheim in 1955 attracted businesses and home
construction, acting as a special catalyst in Orange County.(Figure 1-8) Anaheim and the
neighboring city closest to Disneyland, Garden Grove, had by 1959 the highest concentration of

41
William S. Lund, “Orange County: Its Economic Growth, 1940-1980” (South Pasadena, CA: Southern California
Laboratories of Stanford Research Institute, 1959), 11, Orange County Archives.
42
Andrew Hope et al., “Tract Housing in California, 1945-1973: A Context for National Register Evaluation”
(Sacramento, CA: California Department of Transporation, 2011), 18,
https://planning.lacity.org/odocument/7b3709a9-42d8-44ad-ac78-0bcf7fd70312/TractHousinginCalifornia_1945-
1973.pdf

22
county residents at 31%.
43
In 1950, the county as a whole had a population of 220,000 people,
and by 1960 it had risen to 704,000.
44
Though population growth slowed down a decade later, it
was still dramatic. From 1960 to 1969, Orange County’s population increased by
92%.
45
According to a 1969 report published for the Philip Morris Company, which was
considering investing in the Mission Viejo Company at the time, Orange County was the fastest
growing county in the United States in the 1960s.
46

43
Formerly the most populated, the combined cities of Santa Ana and Orange had the second largest concentration
of people in 1959 at 21%. Lund, Orange County, 53.
44
Martin J. Schiesl, “Designing the Model Community: The Irvine Company and Suburban Development, 1950-
1988,” in Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War, eds Rob Kling,
Spencer Olin and Mark Poster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991): 57.
45
Arthur D. Little, Inc., “Mission Viejo Company: A Financial Diversification Opportunity,” report for Philip
Morris, Inc., August 1969, 28, Mission Viejo Library Collection.
46
Ibid.
Figure 1-8 Orange County officials at Disney Studios, December 1954. Walt Disney invited officials
from Orange County to his studios to discuss his plans for Disneyland and to pose for a few photos.
Inside the stagecoach are Orange County Supervisors Willard Smith (left) and Willis Warner (right).
Walt Disney stands with his hand on the break. Willard Smith Collection, Orange County Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=Willard%20Smith

23
The population growth that began during the Second World War and accelerated after 1945
placed much greater demands on County government services. The Orange County Board of
Supervisors reacted by commissioning the influential private research firm, Stanford Research
Institute (SRI), to conduct a study on the future of the county. Published in 1959, Orange
County: Its Economic Growth, 1940-1980, was reprinted four times up to 1963. The results of
the study were circulated widely in the press at the time, and landowners and developers in
Orange County paid close attention to its conclusions.
47
In 1953, it was SRI that had
recommended to Walt Disney that he select Anaheim as the ideal location for his new theme
park. Los Angeles Times journalist, Tom Cameron, who wrote a regular column about the
building industry called “Nailing It Down,” said of SRI in 1961:
They have analyzed and given a green or red light, depending on what
they found to be the facts and the assured future, to projects in many parts
of the country. Upon their approval has depended the investment of many
millions of dollars—or in the case of the red light, abandonment of an ill-
advised project.
48

For the Orange County study, SRI compiled economic and demographic data for the county for
1940 and 1959, and based on their findings and on the regional and national trends they
identified, they forecasted what the county would look like and what its needs would be by 1980.
For the largest landowners in Orange County, the study’s most important conclusions were that
during the period 1959 to 1980, the population would increase from 634,000 to 2,500,000; that
manufacturing employment would increase five-fold; and that up to 600,000 new homes would
have to be constructed by 1980.
49

In this period, the three largest landholdings were in the southern part of the county, and they
were the Irvine Ranch, the Moulton-Daguerre-Shumaker Ranch, and the O’Neill’s Rancho
Mission Viejo.(Figure 1-9) In 1894, the Irvine Company was established to manage the 93,000-
acre Irvine Ranch, situated in the middle of Orange County. In the late 1940s, the owners of the

47
Don Smith, “Vast County Strides Seen—2.5 Million 1980 Population,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1959,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167486111?accountid=14749
48
Tom Cameron, “Nailing It Down: Research Big Planning Aid,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1961,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167913091?accountid=14749
49
Lund, Orange County, 5.

24
Irvine Company began to subdivide and lease small tracts of land to merchant builders. These
first developments were closest to the coast, mostly in Newport Beach. The neighborhoods of
Irvine Cove, Cameo Shores and Westcliff were built there in the 1950s.
50
In 1960 the Irvine
Company donated one thousand acres to the University of California, where its Irvine campus
would open in 1965.

50
Diane Grinkevich Kane, “Westlake and Irvine, California: Paradigms for the 21
st
Century?” (PhD dissertation,
University of California Santa Barbara, June 1996), 219, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/304288690?accountid=14749

25

Laguna Niguel, a city southwest of today’s Mission Viejo and just inland from Dana Point,
originated from one third of what was known in the Mexican period as Rancho Niguel. From
1895 to 1954, the rancho was in the hands of the Moulton and Daguerre families. In 1954, the
Daguerre portion of 7,100 acres was sold to Eugene Shumaker who in turn sold it in 1958 to a
Figure 1-9 Map of Orange County and the major land holdings in 1959. The land mass in the middle,
labeled No. 1, is the Irvine Ranch; No. 5 is Rancho Mission Viejo; and Nos. 3 and 4 are the Moulton and
Daguerre-Shumaker ranches. Together they make up almost 170,000 acres out of 190,000 in the southern
region. William S. Lund, “Orange County: Its Economic Growth, 1940-1980” (South Pasadena, CA:
Southern California Laboratories of Stanford Research Institute, 1959), 27.

26
Boston real estate management firm, Cabot, Cabot and Forbes.
51
The following year they
established the Laguna Niguel Corporation and hired the Los Angeles-based, international firm
of Victor Gruen and Associates to design the master plan. By 1963 the El Niguel Golf Course,
the Monarch Bay homes, and the Niguel Terrace homes were nearly complete.
52

The O’Neills had been encouraged to consider alternatives to cattle ranching and tenant farming
for many years.
53
Trustees involved in the ownership of the property pressured the family during
the war years to sell the land to a third party.
54
In a moment that has become O’Neill family lore,
Daisy O’Neill asserted her position with the trustees and in a lawsuit against the bank that held
the trust, the Citizens National Trust Savings Bank, she successfully defended the family’s right
to control the land in the direction they sought.
55
Her son, Richard J. O’Neill, was stationed
overseas in the Navy at the time but had made his wishes clear to his mother in a letter home. He
believed the ranch should stay in the family.
56

Nevertheless, by 1962 the O’Neills were actively considering development on a portion of their
acreage, and outside forces were making the decision easier.
57
In 1960, the Santa Ana Freeway
(Interstate 5) was extended through southern Orange County to San Diego.(Figure 1-10) Also in
1960, several new management districts were established for the importation and distribution of
water resources to accommodate residential growth on the south county ranches.
58

51
Ted Wells, Laguna Niguel (Charleston, NC: Arcadia Publishing, 2018), 12.
52
Ibid., 42-79.
53
Arthur D. Little, Inc., “Financial Diversification,” 11. In the early 1960s, before the Mission Viejo Company was
created, the Harvey Aluminum Company offered to purchase the ranch for $30 million.
54
Anthony R. Moiso (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rancho Mission Viejo), in discussion with the author,
March 10, 2020. Mr. Moiso’s grandmother, Daisy O’Neill, told him that in 1944 she arrived at the ranch office to
find James Irvine II talking to the trust officer about buying their ranch.
55
Moiso, discussion, March 10, 2020.
56
Pat Brennan, “Along with ranching scion O’Neill, O.C. history passes away,” Orange County Register, April 9,
2009, https://www.ocregister.com/2009/04/09/along-with-ranching-scion-oneill-oc-history-passes-away/ In addition
to the first case, Tony Moiso said that the family had to sue the trust bank again in the 1950s for entering into a
purchase agreement with a third party without their consent. They won in court in San Diego. Anthony R. Moiso,
transcript O.H. 1149, oral history interview with Patricia R. Petring, California State University Fullerton, April 20,
1972.
57
“Historic Ranch Master Plan to be Prepared,” May 13, 1962, Los Angeles Times,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168110625?accountid=1474
58
Don Smith, “South County Awaits Boom: Freeway Opens Rural Area for Development,” Los Angeles Times,
November 26, 1961, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168007570?accountid=14749

27

An evolving tax regime would also be a driver of change for the O’Neills. As development
approached the borders of the ranch in the 1960s, the County of Orange raised taxes on open
land zoned for agriculture. Instead of taxing existing use, the new policy levied taxes based on
“best use,” which at the time was considered to be residential and commercial development.
Although eventually the California Land Conservation Act (known as the “Williamson Act”)
was passed in 1965 by the State of California permitting the creation of agricultural preserves,
the O’Neill family had already made up their mind.
59
In 1964, they formed the Mission Viejo

59
Jack Boettner, “2 Huge Preserves Approved in Split Vote by Supervisors,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1969,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
Figure 1-10 New freeway, Interstate 5, south Orange County, ca. 1960s. Orange County Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=5%20freeway

28
Company and though most of the 11,000 acres they would ultimately sell to the company were
earmarked for development, they continued to maintain land for ranching and agriculture on the
remaining acreage of their old rancho.(Figure 1-11)

com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/156077806?accountid=14749 The County of Orange didn’t adopt the Williamson
Act until 1969. Over 36,000 acres of the Rancho Mission Viejo received agricultural preserve status in January
1969. According to Jim Sleeper: “the O’Neills and Jim West spent several years lobbying Sacramento to pass the
Williamson Act.” “Rancho Mission Viejo: Vol XV 1944-1972: The Trust Years,” (unpublished manuscript), Jim
Sleeper papers. MS-R173. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, CA.

Figure 1-11 The O’Neills began to divest themselves of their land as early as 1948. Here, the original entrance to
O’Neill Park, ca. 1955. The first 270 acres for O’Neill Park were donated by the O’Neill family in 1948. They donated
more land for the park several years later. Officially opened to the public in 1950, it was the second county park in
Orange County, after Irvine Park. Orange County Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=O%27neill%20park

29
Chapter Two
The Enduring Romance of the Rancho Santa Margarita

For its occupants and visitors, the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores held an allure that was
maintained long after the ranches were broken up in 1942. The adobe houses and the natural
beauty of the landscape exerted their charms. As long as there was rain, anything could be grown
in this climate and soil, creating an atmosphere of abundance. The ranch was a place of hard
physical work but the work was balanced by time spent at leisure, at the ranch house. For the
O’Neills and others associated with the Rancho Santa Margarita, including the designer and
builder, Cliff May, it was the memory of this ranching way of life that would reverberate in
Southern California into the mid-twentieth century.

The Santa Margarita Ranch House
In 1957, the Los Angeles Times published a short series called “Ladies of Orange County
Ranchos” in which the reporters interviewed descendants of the major landowners of the
Mexican and early American period. Featured in one article, Marguerite “Daisy” O’Neill
reminisces about life on the Rancho Santa Margarita y Los Flores in the pre-war years, before
the sale to the government was final and the three historic ranchos were disbanded:
Of the three ranches I used to think Santa Margarita was the most beautiful, but
perhaps that was because of the old ranch house where we spent so much time. The
gardens always looked like an old-fashioned bouquet, and even the rafters of the
long corridors were entwined with geraniums. The house was filled with heavy
carved furniture that was brought around the Horn.
60

The ranch house that Daisy O’Neill describes was the main residence for the Santa Margarita
ranch, dating to the Pico era.(Figure 2-1) The ranch house is located approximately ten miles
from Interstate 5, between Oceanside and Fallbrook. The California Southern Railroad laid
tracks in a branch line adjacent to the house in 1882 which were operational until a flood
disabled them in 1993. During the Mission era, an estancia or agricultural outpost was

60
Mildred Yorba McArthur, “Early Mission Vieja Charm Still Remains,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1957,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/167225673?accountid=14749 Richard O’Neill Sr., Daisy’s father-in-law, travelled
around Cape Horn in the 1860s from the east coast of the US.

30
established on the site, belonging to the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia.
61
The mission
vineyards were planted at this site and the first adobe structure here was built for the purposes of
winemaking. A mission inventory from 1835 records a “dwelling house covered with tile, 16
yards long and 13 yards wide with a door…”
62
It is believed that the current chapel building on
the site is this adobe. Pio Pico began construction of the ranch house soon after he acquired the
Rancho Santa Margarita in 1841. The house was later adapted and enlarged by successive
owners, the Forsters and the O’Neills, who used it as a home and headquarters for ranching
operations.

The house is sited on a knoll above what was the Santa Margarita river, with a view northwest to
the valley below. It is a sprawling single-story house that forms a square shape around a

61
An estancia was not the same as an asistencia, which had a religious purpose in the mission system.
62
Taylor, “Santa Margarita Ranch House,” 3. The California Register of Historical Resources plaque on the
property says that a small building was listed in an 1841 inventory of Mission San Luis Rey.
Figure 2-1 Santa Margarita Ranch House, 1880, before the O’Neill-Flood party purchased the ranch. Los
Angeles, CA: Payne, Stanton & Co., Elite Gallery,
https://csl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CSL_INST/1evk8pj/alma990013859380205115

31
courtyard. A partial basement is visible on the southwest elevation and a wall of river rock
supports the foundation. In the classic manner of the early California ranch houses, the interior
rooms on all sides open to covered corridors that frame the central courtyard. Covered corridors
also run the length of two sides of the exterior of the house.(Figure 2-2) Red clay tiles make up
the side-gabled roof tops on each section of the house. Between the roof and the thick,
whitewashed adobe walls are wooden beams visible on the ceilings throughout the house and
corridors. In addition to the ranch house and the adobe chapel, the compound also includes a
single-story rectilinear dormitory built of adobe material in 1864. From 1947 to 2007, the Santa
Margarita ranch house was used as the residence of the commanding officer of Camp Pendleton.
In 1971, it was placed on the National Register for Historic Places, and today it’s a historic house
museum, open to the public.

Figure 2-2 Rancho Santa Margarita Ranch House (1864), Corridor facing southwest, ca. 1970. MCB Camp
Pendleton.

32
In 1872, in the period when Juan Forster and his family were occupying the ranch, the nineteenth
century journalist and traveler, Charles Nordhoff, visited the Rancho Santa Margarita and said of
the Forster home that “more of the old Spanish Californian life remains than at any other I have
visited. Spanish only is spoken in the family, and the old customs are kept up, not from any
desire to be different from others, but because they are family habits.”
63
Nordhoff was witness to
the twilight of Californio culture.

Much later, in 1912, another observer, Eleanor Gates, was passing through on assignment with
Sunset magazine. Between visits to the Mission San Luis Rey and the Mission San Juan
Capistrano, Gates stopped at the ranch house. She said she was greeted by “a son of Richard
O’Neill” who, she said “made us welcome for a look around, into the thick-walled rooms and the
delightful patio. Here is material for a painter- material that should be put down on lasting
canvas before the wear and tear of time necessitate too many changes.”
64
By the time of Gates’
visit, the Rancho Santa Margarita had passed to the second generation of O’Neill ranchers.
Industrialization and urbanization were in evidence in Los Angeles and San Diego Counties and
the ranch house, over seventy years old and standing out for its relative isolation and beauty, was
already the subject of myth-making.

In September 1942, as the Marine Corps was assuming control of the Santa Margarita ranch,
President Franklin Roosevelt presided over the formal dedication of Camp Pendleton and paid a
well-publicized visit to the ranch house.
65
The O’Neills had retreated to Orange County by this
time and Mabel Flood, the widow of Jerome O’Neill’s partner, James L. Flood, was the last
remaining steward of the house. She was moved to write to the President upon reading his
remarks in the newspaper. After detailing the earlier history of the house, she said:
When the Government recently took possession of this property from
our family…we were concerned lest the historic old Ranch House… should
lose its identity through being adapted to the uses of the Marines. Your
emphatic statement, as reported by the press, that “anyone who touches any

63
Charles Nordhoff, California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence. (1876): 240, quoted in Wee and Mikesell,
“Las Flores Adobe,” section 8, page 16.
64
Eleanor Gates, “Motoring Among the Missions: A Real Joy Ride Through Cathedral Towns of California,”
Sunset: Pacific Monthly 28, no. 3 (March 1912): 310, Architecture and Fine Arts Library, School of Architecture,
University of Southern California.
65
Taylor, “Santa Margarita Ranch House.”

33
part of the Ranch House will be court martialed,” assures us that it will be
preserved as a part of the heritage left to us by the California Pioneers.
66

The Las Flores Adobe
The other house situated on the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores that was also a cherished
homestead for a succession of occupants was the Las Flores adobe. The house is located in a
shallow valley, fourteen miles north of the Santa Margarita ranch house and a half mile from the
Pacific Ocean, between Oceanside and San Clemente. Ancient middens found on the site
revealed that Las Flores had been occupied for thousands of years, and at the point of contact
between Spanish-Mexican colonists and the first Californians, a small Native American village
existed there. Mission records indicate that the site was- like the location of the Santa Margarita
ranch house- an estancia of the Mission San Luis Rey. An adobe structure was built around 1823
and was believed to have been used by mission vaqueros as a rest stop and horse stable. For a
brief period following the secularization of the missions, Las Flores was one of only a handful of
Native American pueblos given official sanction by the Mexican government.
67

The remains of the old adobe are a few hundred yards from a large adobe compound, built in
1868. It was at this point that Las Flores began its history as a farmstead with most of the acreage
used for crop production. The house was built by Juan Forster for his son, Marcos Antonio
(1839-1904) and his son’s new wife, Guadalupe Avila. Guadalupe was the daughter of another
ranchero, Juan Avila, who owned the Rancho Niguel, adjacent to Juan Forster’s Orange County
holdings.(Figure 2-3) The Las Flores adobe is a complex of three buildings: a two-story house,
and two single story buildings that together form an elongated U-shape around a courtyard. The
two-story dwelling was designed in what we now call the Monterey style of architecture.(Figure
2-4) Built of traditional adobe bricks and covered in white lyme wash, a second floor is made
possible by the wood framing introduced in California in the 1830s. The other notable Monterey
feature is the covered veranda or balcony originally constructed on all four sides of the upper

66
Ibid., 18.
67
Jerry Schaefer, “Las Flores Estancia,” nomination prepared for the National Register of Historic Places (National
Park Service, February 1992), section 8, page 7, https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/6981180c-de60-40b9-bd6b-
726e4827ee11

34

floor, creating a covered corridor below.
68
Clad in wood shakes, the hipped and flared roof was
also a novelty when the style was first introduced in northern California in the 1830s.

68
Wee and Mikesell, “Las Flores Adobe,” section 7, page 8. Alterations made to the Monterey section in the early
twentieth century included closing in the balcony on the rear elevation.
Figure 2-3 Marcos Forster and Guadalupe Avila Forster with their children, date unknown. The Las
Flores adobe was built for them in 1868 and they lived there for 14 years. Los Angeles Public Library
Collection.

35

Attached to the Monterey style house at its rear elevation is a long, single story adobe, finished
with painted board-and-batten wood cladding. Like the two-story section, the roof is finished
with wood shingles. It is one room deep and six rooms long, with each room opening onto a
covered corridor. The corridor opens to a patio and garden.(Figure 2-5) Completing the U-shape
of the compound is a detached single story rectilinear building with a gabled roof, sometimes
Figure 2-4 Las Flores Adobe, Camp Pendleton, near Oceanside, CA.
Photographed by author, September 2019.

36

referred to as a carriage house. The two large rooms in this section have high ceilings and were
used for cooking and storage.

During the Forster period, Las Flores became known for its fandangos and rodeos.
69
In 1882,
following the death of Juan Forster and the sale of the Rancho Santa Margarita to James Flood
and Richard O’Neill Sr., Marcos and Guadalupe Forster left their home of sixteen years, and
moved to San Juan Capistrano. Changes in the social and cultural make-up of the region meant a
different family- with English as their primary language- would occupy the Las Flores adobe,
this time for eighty years.

69
Wee and Mikesell, “Las Flores Adobe,” section 8, page 21-22.
Figure 2-5 Las Flores adobe, view of courtyard, with view to single story adobe bunkhouse, September
2019. Photograph by author.

37
The Magee Period at Las Flores
In 1888, Richard O’Neill Sr. and Jerome O’Neill leased the Las Flores adobe and 1,500 acres
surrounding it to a brother and sister, Hugh Magee and Jennie “Jane” Magee.
70
(Figure 2-6) Hugh
and Jane were the oldest of ten children of Victoria de Pedrorena Magee and Lieutenant Henry
Magee. They grew up in the region, and in their twenties, with the approval of their widowed
father, they moved livestock and farm equipment from the Condor’s Nest, the family’s ranch
near Mount Palomar, to the Santa Margarita.
71

70
Wee and Mikesell, “Las Flores Adobe,” section 8, page 25.
71
William P. Magee v. Hugh Magee, et al., December 16, 1929, transcript of proceedings, Oceanside Historical
Society.
Figure 2-6 Las Flores Adobe, photograph taken ca. 1870-1880. The Magee family occupied the house from
1888 to 1968. California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California Libraries,
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15799coll65/id/7332/rec/19

38
When Hugh married and left Las Flores in 1913, Jane assumed the lease, continuing to live and
farm there until her death in 1949.
72
Cultivating lima beans, at the time a primary crop in coastal
Southern California, Jane Magee became known as the “bean queen of Santa Margarita.”
73
She
had a storied connection to Las Flores and the Santa Margarita ranch. In addition to running her
ranch, she was an exemplary host and respected matriarch to her large, extended family. In 1933,
the San Diego Union reported about Jane Magee’s annual family Christmas party referring to it
as a “hacienda Christmas” wherein, “games, horseback riding and reminiscing of other days at
the fireside form the program until 5:30 o’clock, when the great feast is spread with two or three
turkeys and trimmings such as only a rancho menu can provide. Spanish songs and Christmas
carols follow the burning plum pudding.”
74

Magee was also known for being generous to strangers. Jane Magee Stauss recalled how her
great aunt Jane would feed unknown visitors who came upon Las Flores, the only house in the
vicinity for several miles.
75
In 1938, sixty-five family members and friends, including Daisy and
Richard O’Neill and their family, gathered at Las Flores for a large buffet to celebrate Jane
Magee’s fifty years on the ranch.
76
Other observers characterized life at Las Flores in much the
same way that life at the Santa Margarita ranch house was described, recalling a pastoral setting
in a slower time. In 1938, a local newspaper said of Las Flores during the Magee era that “little
of the romance of the days of the dons has been lost. Though the broad modern highway passes
this restful “house by the side of the road,” as Aunt Jane’s nephews lovingly call it, peacocks
parade in the yard, and the sound of ringing anvils in the nearby blacksmith shop speak of days
which were leisurely.”
77

72
“Career of Miss Jennie Magee Comes to End: Requiem High Mass Celebrated In Saint Mary’s Church Today,”
from the newspaper clipping collection of the Oceanside Historical Society, publication name and date unknown.
73
Ibid.
74
San Diego Union, December 24, 1933, 4:2, quoted in Jim Sleeper papers, “Biographies: Jennie (Jane) Magee).”
75
Jane Magee Stauss (niece of Jane Magee), interview by Susan Gutierrez and Marje Howard Jones, August 3,
1996, interview transcript, Carlsbad Historical Society,
https://www.carlsbadhistoricalsociety.com/Carlsbad%20Historical%20Society_files/Oral%20histories/Jane%20Mag
ee%20Stauss.pdf
76
“Fifty Years of Hospitality Celebrated,” from the newspaper clipping collection of the Oceanside Historical
Society, publication name and date unknown.
77
Ibid.

39
Although the federal government established the Marine base upon possession in 1942, the
Magee tenant farmers were allowed to remain on the Las Flores portion of the historic rancho.
The arrangement allowed the Magees to continue to farm on the property and remain in the ranch
house until the last of Jane Magee’s generation died. When Jane was elderly, her youngest
brother, Louis Magee, took over the ranch operations. His widow, Ruth Wolfskill Magee, was
the last tenant at Las Flores. She died in 1968.
78

Magee ties to the Rancho Santa Margarita weren’t only to their homestead and farm at Los
Flores. The family was also close to the O’Neill ranch owners. The two families were
economically interdependent, and they were akin culturally. Both made their living from the
land, and as mostly Anglophone ranchers and farmers they stood apart from the Spanish-
speakers who worked for them. When Daisy O’Neill spoke to the Los Angeles Times in 1957 of
happy times at the Rancho Santa Margarita, she referenced by name two of Jane Magee’s
younger siblings, Louisa Magee and Bill Magee, saying they were “part of the family.”
79
A
lifelong friend of Daisy’s husband, Richard O’Neill Jr., it was Bill Magee (1879-1951) who
introduced Daisy Moore to Richard at the hotel fiesta in Oceanside in 1900.
80
Following
undergraduate studies at Santa Clara College and Stanford University, Bill was hired to work on
the Santa Margarita ranch in 1910 by Richard’s older brother, Jerome O’Neill. A talented athlete
and popular cattleman, Bill was a manager of the ranch operations for over twenty five years.
81

Jerome O’Neill Baumgartner lived with his O’Neill grandparents at the Santa Margarita ranch
house until he was six years old. His reminiscences expressed in an oral history interview were
published in 1989 by his son. He was raised by “Auntie Wee” at the ranch house and spent
several weeks each summer with his siblings at the Las Flores adobe with “Aunt Jane.”
82
Louisa

78
“Las Flores Operator: Death of Magee Ends Rancho Era,” publication unknown, January 6, 1964, collection of
Oceanside Historical Society; and “Services Set for Lifetime Area Resident,” Oceanside Blade Tribune, January 22,
1964, from “Magee Family History, Oceanside Historical Society,” by Kristi Hawthorne; and “Mrs. Ruth Magee,
Obituary,” San Diego Union, March 26, 1968, quoted from Jim Sleeper papers, “Biography: Mrs. Ruth Magee.”
79
Yorba McArthur, “Charm Still Remains,” 21.
80
Ibid.
81
Ed Ainsworth, “Beloved Rancher Bill Magee Dies,” Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, April 11, 1951,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/166235594?accountid=14749
82
Jerome W. Baumgartner, Rancho Santa Margarita Remembered: An Oral History (Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian
Press, 1989).

40
Magee was the Magee’s adopted sibling, the daughter of Henry Magee’s brother and a Native
American woman, both of whom died when Louisa was a child. Louisa was employed at the
Santa Margarita ranch house to care for Richard O’Neill Sr. and his wife, Alice O’Neill Sr.
Following their deaths, she managed the ranch household for Jerome O’Neill- who never
married- as well as the adjacent dormitory where the ranch employees lived.
83

Richard O’Neill Jr. was also friends with the youngest Magee sister, Beatrice Magee (1881-
1942). When Beatrice married Charles Clifford May in 1905 at the Mission San Luis Rey, their
best man was Richard O’Neill Jr.
84
Though successive owners, ranchers and visitors have drawn
attention to the Rancho Santa Margarita and its two historic ranch houses, for the purposes of
architectural history none have shined a brighter light on the ranch than Beatrice Magee’s son,
Cliff May.

83
Yorba McArthur, “Charm Still Remains,” 21.
84
“May-Magee,” Oceanside Blade, June 24, 1905, collection of the Oceanside Historical Society.

41
Chapter Three
Cliff May’s Rancho Revival

In the 1938 article praising Jane Magee and her fifty years at Las Flores, the author wrote that
“in the summer there never is a time that one or two of her young nephews is not working in the
fields to make money for college spending. It began with her young brothers and so it goes into
the third generation.”
85
As one of Jane Magee’s nephews, the designer and builder Cliff May
(1908-1989) spent his youth in the 1910s and 1920s in this family setting on the rustic landscape
of the Santa Margarita and in adulthood he continued to visit for family gatherings. On occasion
in interviews, May would mention his summers at Las Flores and the Santa Margarita ranch,
praising the old buildings and speculating on their influence on his own work. May scholars,
Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg, said that May knew adobe material intimately, setting him
apart from other designers. They maintained that “with part of his boyhood spent patching,
painting, and cleaning the fabric of the old adobe, cutting and hammering the boards of the
barns, May’s familiarity with the now disappearing rural vernacular of California’s hacienda era
was exceptional.”
86
May was one of its most prominent defenders when the Monterey adobe
house at Las Flores was threatened with demolition following the death of the last tenant, his
aunt, Ruth Magee.
87
He knew first-hand the beauty and vulnerability of the California ranch
before development would obscure the open lands and mountain and ocean vistas, and destroy
the vernacular ranch buildings.

May’s family was also associated with another great adobe house in Southern California. Though
no longer in his family’s possession by the time May was born in 1908, the Casa de Estudillo

85
“Fifty Years of Hospitality Celebrated,” from the newspaper clipping collection of the Oceanside Historical
Society, publication name and date unknown.
86
Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg, “Reconstituting the Ranch House,” in Carefree California: Cliff May and
the Romance of the Ranch House, ed. Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg (Santa Barbara, CA: Art, Architecture &
Design Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara and Rizzoli International Publications, 2012), 62. I think
it’s conjectural that May fixed and patched adobe. I wasn’t able to find direct evidence of this. May did say that he
helped his paternal grandmother repair their rental houses in San Diego, which were bungalows, likely not made of
adobe. See Cliff May, interview by Marlene L. Laskey, transcript section 38, Oral History Program, University of
California Los Angeles, 1984, https://archive.org/stream/californiaranchh00mayc/californiaranchh00mayc_djvu.txt
87
A group calling itself Amigos del Antano was established to advocate against the planned demolition of the Las
Flores adobe by the Marine Corps. It was lead by Ruth Wolfskill Magee’s niece, Betty Keller of Garden Grove, and
the members of the Advisory Board listed on the group’s letterhead included two Forster descendants, and Cliff
May. Letter dated March 11, 1969, Jim Sleeper papers.

42
(1827-1829) was built by Jose Maria Estudillo and his son, Jose Antonio Estudillo, May’s direct
descendants on his mother’s side. Jose Maria had been a Spanish soldier, eventually becoming
captain of the San Diego presidio in 1827. The house was sited on the southeast corner of the
plaza in the newly formed pueblo of San Diego, and still stands in “old town” today. The house
was large and commodious by the standards of the eighteenth century. It’s a single-story, U-
shaped adobe, with all rooms opening onto a central courtyard.
88

By the time May was born, the house was known as “Ramona’s Wedding Place,” named for
Helen Hunt Jackson’s heroine of her popular 1884 novel, Ramona. A restoration overseen by the
designer, Hazel Wood Waterman in 1909-1910, was the version of the house that Cliff May
would have known.(Figure 3-1) Waterman hired tradesmen who rebuilt the adobe on the original

88
Victor A. Walsh, “Una Casa del Pueblo—A Town House of Old San Diego,” Journal of San Diego History 50,
nos. 1 & 2 (2004): 7, https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v50-1/una_casa.pdf
Figure 3-1 “Ramona’s Marriage Place,” Casa de Estudillo, San Diego, Historic American Building Survey, 1937,
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ca0595.photos.015182p/

43
footprint using the traditional methods and materials, but for other features she took some
liberties. To some of the woodwork color pigments were applied, three fireplaces were added
and the courtyard was planted with an early twentieth century Mediterranean garden scheme.
Historian Victor Walsh explained that Waterman introduced an Arts and Crafts overlay on the
Casa de Estudillo of what he called “rusticated features.” He said, for example, that “lintels, sills
and frames were stained with blue dyes, and the shutters with a pepper tree green dye. All
interior woodwork was oil stained, and largely redwood instead of pine. Crossbeams, rafters, and
posts were cedar instead of pine timber.”
89
May said he visited the house often and that his
mother told him the characters of Ramona and of Father Salvierderra in Jackson’s book were
based on real people.
90

May grew up during the heyday of the Spanish Revival in Southern California when the Spanish
and Mexican past was romanticized in art and popular culture, and was a driver of regional
economic growth. Widespread promotion of a mythic Spanish past by the film, tourism and
building industries from the 1880s to the 1930s has been well documented by scholars.
91
In part
as a reaction to the more overt European forms of the Spanish Revival such as the Mediterranean
Revival with its classical details and monumental forms, by the early twentieth century,
architects in Southern California were incorporating vernacular building types and materials into
their residential and commercial designs. Inspired by extant ranch houses and barns on former
rancho properties, they sought to create an architecture that reflected the Spanish and Mexican
heritage of the region.

Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg documented the 1920s work of John Byers, Roland Coate,
Harold Roy Kelley, and Palmer Sabin as examples of Southern California architects who used
the vernacular adobe in their residential designs in the period before Cliff May was active.
92

89
Walsh, “Una Casa del Pueblo,” 8.
90
May, Laskey oral history interview, section 29. A story circulated in the Magee and O’Neill families that Louisa
Magee who was born in c. 1865 and was half Native American, was the real Ramona! May has said that when he
met Hazel Wood Waterman, she gave him the original blueprints for her restoration of Casa de Estudillo which are
contained in his papers at UCSB.
91
See Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith
Publishers, 2010); Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja; Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow (Los
Angeles, Balcony Press, 1994).
92
Gibbs and Olsberg, “Reconstituting the Ranch House,” 55-61.

44
They also cite the influence of Mission Inn architect, Arthur Benton, who advised Charles
Lummis and the Landmarks Club in the restoration of the Mission San Juan Capistrano and who
wrote widely about this work.
93
(Figure 3-2) For the Bixby family in 1925, Roland Coate
designed a home in South Pasadena that was directly influenced by the Cerritos and Lugo
adobes, both two-story ranch houses built in the Mexican period in a Monterey style. Gibbs and
Olsberg also describe Harold Roy Kelley’s small houses in the newly planned community of
Palos Verdes from 1929 to 1931. Their view is that the work of these architects and builders had
a determinative influence on the transition of the ranch house from rancho to tract house. Cliff
May, they argue, should be seen in this continuum.
94

Between 1932 and 1938, while the rest of the region was beginning to scale back revivalist
architecture, May introduced his first houses as deliberate representations of Early California
adobes. The houses were speculative ventures marketed by May as “haciendas” and
“rancherias,” and built in the Presidio Hills and Talmadge Park neighborhoods of San Diego.
95

They were mostly bungalows designed in a U- or L-shape. They had low-pitched roofs with
wide, sheltering eaves. The exterior walls were white with an uneven finish, made from stucco
on frame to look like adobe. A hollow masonry material was used to simulate the thickness of
adobe walls on the interior. The red tile roof of each of his early houses and the wooden details
such as window screens and heavy carved doors were confections of his hacienda type. The
houses weren’t large but they were spread out on the lot, much like the Las Flores and Santa
Margarita plans. Axiomatic in May’s early designs was the interior courtyard, hidden from the
street and a direct copy of the Early California house that integrated the patio and corridor as
living space.(Figure 3-3)

May took the main elements of the Spanish Colonial Revival that he would have observed in
neighborhoods in San Diego and elsewhere and gave them a hand-made appearance in his

93
Arthur Burnett Benton, “The Work of the Landmarks Club of Southern California,” Journal of the American
Institute of Architects 2 (1914): 469-481 USC interlibrary loan, accessed May 9, 2018.
94
Gibbs and Olsberg, “Reconstituting the Ranch House,” 55- 61. See also David Bricker, “Ranch Houses Are Not
All the Same,” http://www.sanlorenzoheritage.org/history/ranch%20style%20house.htm
95
Save Our Heritage Organization, “Cliff May’s First Houses, 1932-1936: Recreating an Ancient Mexican
Hacienda,” tour brochure, n.d., 1-68 http://www.sohosandiego.org/tourbooklets/CliffMayTourweb.pdf

45
houses, much like the effects employed by Hazel Wood Waterman at the Estudillo adobe. Of
May’s first house, the O’Leary House in San Diego in 1932, Mary A. van Balgooy said,
To make it look like an old California adobe, May intentionally laid the red roof
tiles haphazardly atop of each other, placed simple terra cotta pots on top of the
chimney, plastered exterior walls coarsely, put in rough-hewn wood lintels over
windows and doors inside and out, constructed crude wooden window grilles, and
paved floors irregularly with rustic terracotta tiles.
96

96
Mary A. van Balgooy, “Before LA: Cliff May’s Beginnings in San Diego,” Journal of San Diego History 57, no.
4 (Fall 2011), 261, https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/v57-4/v57-4vanbalgooy.pdf

46

Figure 3-2 Arthur Benton at Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano,
CA, ca. 1896. Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture
Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara. http://www.adc-
images.museum.ucsb.edu/index.php

47

While picturesque like other houses designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, May’s
houses painted a more informal picture of a rambling homestead. The Las Flores adobe plan was
an obvious source. In fact, after his first bungalows, the first -and among the only- two-story
Figure 3-3 U-shaped layout of the John Arnholt Smith House, designed by Cliff May in
1935-1936 in La Habra Heights, Los Angeles County. The courtyard is part of the
house. May is adapting the features of his San Diego hacienda to a much larger house
and lot. Cliff May papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design &
Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara. http://www.adc-
images.museum.ucsb.edu/index.php

48
houses he designed were Monterey style. The Highland House (1934) and the Tucker House
(1936) each had a two-story imitation adobe with a balcony facing a landscaped courtyard
flanked by single-story sections, and capped by red clay roofing tiles throughout.(Figure 3-4)

The use of board-and-batten as exterior cladding and a wood shingled roof first appeared in 1934
in his first commercial commission, the Sweetwater Woman’s Club, in what May called his
“rancheria” style. The rancheria houses had the same U- or L-shaped, single story layout as the
haciendas, and some mixed an uneven stucco finish with board-and-batten on the walls.
While the two Santa Margarita adobes provided inspiration, other western ranch houses may
have too. For example, May was probably aware of the well-publicized ranch house residence of
Figure 3-4 The Alexander and Nancy Highland House (1934), 2400 Presidio Drive, San Diego. Note the
two-story Monterey style house beyond the gate. Cliff May papers, Architecture and Design Collection.
Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara, sent via email by Julia
Larson, Reference Archivist, March 3, 2020.

49
Hollywood’s biggest star at the time, the cowboy-actor, Will Rogers. Rogers’ ranch compound in
what would become Pacific Palisades was built in 1927. As described by California State Parks,
the:
Will Rogers Western Ranch House is a large-scale example of a traditional
western ranch house with its sprawling plan, open balcony and patio and its
simple, rustic, interior and exterior finishes. The box construction and simple
board and batten cladding embodies a rough-and-ready construction technique
once frequently employed in the construction of western ranch houses.
97

Although Cliff May wasn’t formally trained in architecture he was a talented draftsman,
designer, and builder. But it was perhaps his visceral appreciation for the ranching way of life
witnessed in the twilight years of the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores that is most important
for the evolution and popularity of his work. As the editors wrote in the foreword to the 1958
edition of Western Ranch Houses, a collaboration between May and Sunset magazine, May
stands out for his “drive to perpetuate ideas in livability rather than form and façade. His passion
was not so much architecture as the way people wanted to live.”
98

Cliff May’s success in San Diego attracted the attention of wealthier investors and clients further
afield. In 1938, he moved his family to Los Angeles and ran his businesses from there until the
end of his career. By the 1950s, his residential designs reflected the broader influence of
Modernism, and had evolved in two directions. Though still using many of the same materials
and forms, his custom houses in Los Angeles and elsewhere were large estates. The sprawling,
horizontal orientation and easy indoor-outdoor transitions remained but were now integrated
with open plans, soaring ceilings, and glass curtain walls. May reduced and in some cases
abandoned the Spanish detailing of his earlier hacienda.

Cliff May and the Ranch House
From 1952 to 1955, Cliff May’s attention was focused on developing a creative response to the
housing shortage by simplifying his earlier designs to create a tract house that fit onto a standard
subdivision lot. With architect, Christian “Chris” Choate (1908-1981), May formed Cliff May

97
California Department of Parks and Recreation, “National Register: Will Rogers Western Ranch House,”
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23876
98
Editorial Staff, Western Ranch Houses (Menlo Park, CA, Lane Publishing Company, 1958; Santa Monica:
Hennessey & Ingalls, 1997), 7.

50
Homes in 1950 to develop a pre-made product at an affordable price. They produced a panel
system that was packaged and sold as a kit for quick assembly by contractors and home builders.
The kit contained everything that was needed to build a ranch house. There were several plan
options, but most were L-shaped and always oriented to the courtyard, described here by
Katherine Papineau:
Like May’s earlier hacienda and rancheria-style houses in San Diego, most
rooms opened onto an enclosed patio. Floor-to-ceiling glass panels afforded
unobstructed views of the backyard, which added a feeling of spaciousness and
emphasized the idea of informal indoor-outdoor living that was becoming so
popular in California.
99

Ross Cortese, who in the late 1950s developed the planned communities of Leisure World in
Orange County, bought 950 kits from Cliff May Homes in 1952 and assembled them on uniform
tract lots in the Long Beach community of Lakewood Rancho Estates.
100
Thousands of Cliff May
and Chris Choate pre-fabricated ranch houses popped up all over the United States, and
throughout California. Marketed as “Magazine Cover Homes” in Orange County, they were built
by developer George Holstein in small tracts in the cities of Anaheim, Garden Grove, Costa
Mesa, and Tustin.
101
(Figure 3-5) An estimated 18,000 houses were built for moderate-income
buyers using May’s and Choate’s plans, and it’s believed that thousands more were adapted from
their concepts by architects and builders around the world.
102

The ranch houses that emerged from the kits designed by Cliff May Homes were a modern
alternative to the Minimal Traditional housing that was replicated in most suburban tracts in the
immediate postwar period, yet their design was still traditional enough to attract government
mortgage financing.
103
(Figure 3-6) The mass production of ranch house kits even for the few
short years the company was in operation had an impact on the spread of the ranch house, built

99
Katherine Kaford Papineau, “The Carefree Californian: Cliff May Homes, 1952- 1958,” in Carefree California:
Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House (Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California,
Santa Barbara and Rizzoli International, 201), 183.
100
Ibid., 181.
101
Ibid., 185.
102
Burt A. Folkart, “Cliff May; Home Designer Perfected the Ranch Style,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1989,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/1153777245?accountid=14749

103
Bricker, “Ranch Houses Are Not All the Same.”

51

in subdivisions throughout the United States following the Second World War. However, it was
May’s career-long embrace of media partnerships that must be credited with popularizing the
California ranch house. From very early on in his career, his houses received outsized attention,
first in local newspapers and regional or niche shelter magazines. As early as 1933, the high-end
national design magazine, Architectural Digest, featured the house he designed and built for

Figure 3-5 Advertisement for new ranch houses designed and distributed by Cliff
May Homes and built by George Holstein in Anaheim. Independent Press-Telegram
(Long Beach, CA), November 20, 1955, page 42.

52

Captain and Mrs. William Lindstrom in San Diego.
104
And beginning in 1936, Sunset magazine,
a long-running popular magazine about western living, featured at least thirty-four May
projects.
105

In 1946, May collaborated with Lane Publishing, a division of Sunset magazine, on Western
Ranch Houses. The book was both a history of the ranch house and a practical planning guide for

104
May is quoted from the 1933 Architectural Digest issue in San Diego Union, February 11, 1934, II 3:1, Jim
Sleeper papers.
105
Monica Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2017), 41.
Figure 3-6 Cliff May Homes low-cost housing in Asuza, CA by George Johnson Construction Company, ca 1955.
Cliff May papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of
California, Santa Barbara, http://www.adc-images.museum.ucsb.edu/index.php

53
builders and homeowners. It sold more than 50,000 copies, according to Sunset magazine.
106
It
was so successful that it was re-issued within a year of being published, and it generated years of
new commissions for Cliff May.
107
Between 1945 and 1947, May was invited by Good
Housekeeping and House Beautiful, both mass-market magazines with nation-wide readership,
“to design a series of demonstration ranch houses with the…intention of influencing the course
of postwar home construction…May’s demonstration projects became the template for the
typical house of the postwar period.”
108
Other builders such as Fritz Burns and David Bohannon
working with architect Welton Becket in Los Angeles designed influential demonstration houses,
and other teams of builder-architects may have built more homes and been more financially
successful than May, but the unique marriage of his design and marketing ingenuity meant that
Cliff May had more impact on the spread of the ranch house in California, and possibly the US,
than any other.

The Styled Ranch
As Cliff May’s career reflects, the postwar Ranch style house evolved from historic vernacular
prototypes and maintained its essential form of low-pitched roof and horizontal orientation even
as it absorbed other traditions such as Modernism. It was also sometimes interpreted with
regional and historic details- as in the case of Cliff May in the 1930s and 1940s- in a “Styled
Ranch” type, Virginia Savage McAlester’s term for a “more complete and unified set of stylistic
details that spell out a distinct style.”
109
By the time Mission Viejo was being built in the late
1960s, the Styled Ranch was becoming more common. According to McAlester, the styles most
frequently applied to the ranch house were “Spanish, French, Tudor, Colonial Revival, and
Neoclassical.”
110
The rustic material and feeling that Cliff May embedded in his hacienda
designs were also entering popular suburban architecture at this time. Historians of vernacular
architecture, Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings said that the 1960s “ushered in a trend toward

106
“The Ranch House, Early California to Today,” Sunset Magazine, August 1988, 144, Santa Monica Library
collection.
107
Jocelyn Gibbs and Nicholas Olsberg, “Prototypes and Possibilities,” in Carefree California, 172.
108
John Mack Faragher, “Bungalow and Ranch House: The Architectural Backwash of California,” Western
Historical Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 169.
109
Virginia Savage McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 695. For an
overview of Ranch house origins and adaptations see Alan Hess, The Ranch House (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2004).
110
Ibid.

54
rusticity, an interest in natural materials, changes in textures, and brown tones both outside and
inside the house.”
111
Mission Viejo embraced these trends in the Ranch house style of the late
postwar period but not before conceiving of a master plan for the new community.

111
Herbert Gottfried and Jan Jennings, American Vernacular Buildings and Interiors, 1870-1960 (New York: WW
Norton & Company, 2009), 217.

55
Chapter Four
Mission Viejo and the Planned Community

The architectural evolution of the suburban home from a Minimal Traditional house to a Ranch
style tract home is characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half, the
Ranch style persists but the suburban home begins to change in material ways and is reproduced
on a much larger scale. It seems quaint now that Cliff May and Chris Choate had photographs
taken of each stage in the construction of their kit house in the early 1950s, placing a clock in the
foreground of the scene to demonstrate the quick passage of time between stages.(Figure 4-1) By
the time Mission Viejo got started, the manufacturing lessons learned during the Second World
War made conventional home building a fully industrialized process, and technology made the
next phase of suburban development- the master planned community- possible. But even in the
late 1950s, the O’Neill family wasn’t ready to abandon full-time ranching and neither the
physical infrastructure nor the administrative framework were available in Orange County to
enable large scale development of any of the historic ranch land that made up the southern half
of the county. Once the highway was built, however, everything shifted and the O’Neills reacted,
ready to move forward as community builders by 1963.

Establishing the Mission Viejo Company
Once it became evident that forces outside their ranch could not be stopped, the O’Neill family
owners of the Rancho Mission Viejo decided to closely manage the opportunity in front of them.
If they were going to allow development, they would be directly involved, overseeing an orderly
transition and maintaining some balance between building and open land.
112
In 1962, the family
engaged the services of Koebig & Koebig Inc., a Los Angeles-based engineering firm, to
conduct a feasibility study for a 4,000 acre development on their ranch.
113
The study delivered a
broad road-map to the O’Neills so that when they began discussions with a thirty-year old

112
Mission Viejo Company, “America’s Most Successful New Town,” corporate document, n.d., Mission Viejo
Library Collection.
113
“Historic Ranch Master Plan to be Prepared,” May 13, 1962, Los Angeles Times,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168110625?accountid=1474

56

contractor named Donald Bren in 1963, they were prepared to move forward. Bren would go on
to develop tracts in Valencia and Newport Beach, and take the Irvine Ranch to its endmost result
as the largest master planned community in the United States. But when he first met the O’Neill
family, his experience was limited. Bren founded his own company, the Bren Company, and
built his first house in Newport Beach in 1958. He was involved in construction projects under
the company name of Newport Construction Company in the early 1960s, but he had not been a
large-scale builder.
114

114
In 1961, Donald Bren completed a 68-unit, two-story apartment court on Rutland Road and Mariners Drive in
Newport Beach. His company, Newport Construction, was the co-owner, contractor and leasing agent. This was
probably his largest project before he began discussions with the O’Neills about developing their land. “$1.2 Million
Apartments Completed at Newport,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1961,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167898214?accountid=1474
Figure 4-1 Cliff May Homes, “Quickness of Assembly,” ca. 1956. Cliff May papers, Architecture and
Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa
Barbara http://www.adc-images.museum.ucsb.edu/index.php

57
It’s not known how the O’Neill family and Donald Bren became acquainted but Bren was very
well-connected in Southern California. His father, Milton Bren, was a movie producer and real
estate investor. His step-mother was Claire Trevor, the Hollywood actress. Bren’s mother,
Marion Jorgensen, was a philanthropic leader in Los Angeles, and was married to Earle
Jorgensen, founder and CEO of a major steel distribution company. The Jorgensens were
members of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s social set and so-called “kitchen cabinet,” as early as
the 1960s.
115
(Figure 4-2)

The O’Neills already knew builder John MacLeod, owner of the Macco Corporation and a
contemporary of Daisy O’Neill’s.
116
Several years before, MacLeod purchased a couple of
thousand acres of land in the upper eastern corner of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores from
the O’Neills, which eventually became part of the community of Coto de Caza. MacLeod made
an offer to the O’Neills to partner with them in Mission Viejo but it was Donald Bren who most
impressed the family. Tony Moiso, Daisy O’Neill’s grandson and the current Chief Executive
Officer of Rancho Mission Viejo, remembers meeting Bren for the first time at the family trust
office in Los Angeles in 1963. He said Bren was charming, and his proposal was financially
compelling. It included a joint venture with a strategic investor, the George A. Fuller Company-
one of the nation’s largest construction companies- and it included a cash offer. He also
conveyed to the family better than anyone else what the ranch could become. Of Bren, Moiso
said, “He showed us what we had.”
117

The O’Neill family eventually sold 11,000 acres to the Mission Viejo Company which they
formed with Donald Bren in January 1964.
118
The acreage bordered the eastern side of Interstate

115
Andrew Pollack, “Earle Jorgensen, Reagan Adviser, Dies at 101,” New York Times, August 13, 1999,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/431232199?accountid=14749
116
Anthony R. Moiso (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rancho Mission Viejo), in discussion with the
author, March 10, 2020.
117
Bren’s charm offensive may have helped: Tony Moiso describes Bren taking him and his wife water-skiing, and
introducing his brother to Miss Newport Beach. Moiso, March 10, 2020.
118
Many documents date the origins of the Mission Viejo Company to 1963 but Anthony Moiso said discussions
began in 1963 and the company was officially formed in 1964. Moiso March 10, 2020.

58

5 freeway between El Toro (now Lake Forest) on the north, and San Juan Capistrano on the
south, and was just under a fifth of the O’Neill’s holding at the time.(Figure 4-3) Representing
the O’Neill family on the company’s board was their lawyer, James West, and the third and
fourth generation O’Neills: Richard J. O’Neill, and his sister’s adult sons, Jerome Moiso and
Tony Moiso. Donald Bren would be president of the company until 1967. Others in the new
company with operational roles included Bren’s real estate lawyer and Santa Ana planning

Figure 4-2 Governor Ronald Reagan at the dedication ceremony for Saddleback College,
Mission Viejo, October 1968. The Reagans were close personal friends of Donald Bren’s
mother, Marion Jorgensen. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

59

commissioner, Philip Reilly, and James Toepfer, who had been Planning Director for the City of
Santa Ana.

This founding group would only be together for three years. When Bren was bought out by the

Figure 4-3 County of Orange city boundaries. Current boundary for Mission Viejo is outlined in black.
Lake Forest is north, in pale purple and San Juan Capistrano is south, in pale blue. The space in pale
yellow is unincorporated Orange County, which includes the Cleveland National Forest as well as the
communities of Ladera Ranch, Rancho Santa Margarita, Las Flores and Rancho Mission Viejo, all
developed by the O’Neills and their investors from the 1980s to 2010s http://data-
ocpw.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/32c59c9efe3f4745a8625e1afb225d07

60

O’Neill family trust in 1967, Philip Reilly became president of the company. In 1969, the Phillip
Morris Company became a major investor providing necessary liquidity to continue to the next
phases of development.
119
The O’Neill shareholders eventually sold their stake to Phillip Morris
in 1972, leaving Mission Viejo and moving on to other projects on their land.

The County’s Role
The Orange County planning department began to develop the tools for regional and master
planning in the late 1950s, just in time to absorb the growth anticipated for the southern part of
the county. Up to then, the department processed subdivision maps and zoning requests and was
unprepared to think strategically about the impacts of more people and more cars on the larger
region. For example, it wasn’t until 1959 that the department eliminated a loophole in the law
that allowed some subdividers to avoid minimum design standards such as adding sidewalks and
street lighting.
120
An increase in staff helped the department to expand its scope so that between
1955 and 1961, parks, highways and recreational trails were each addressed in county-wide
plans.
121
(Figure 4-4)

In 1963, the County’s Planning Director, Harry Bergh, was preparing officials for a zoning code
change that would enable Orange County to become one of the most planned counties in the
country. Contrasting the postwar evolution of the oldest cities at the northwestern end of the
county with the opportunity presented by the enormous, open land in the southern section, Bergh
said to the Board of Supervisors that “the growth of western Orange County was a piecemeal
process of one subdivision after another… It was not characterized by a preconceived master

119
“Board Chairman Buys 80% Interest in Mission Viejo,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155654434?accountid=14749
120
Don Smith, “’Bootleg’ Subdivisions Outlawed By New Ordinance,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1959,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167481722?accountid=14749
121
In 1953, the county planning department had approximately 12 employees and over 100 by 1973. Re. road and
highway plan, see Helen Johnson, “Master Plan Seen As Traffic Cure,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1955, p. OC2;
Re. plan for county park system, see Don Smith, “Programs Fall Behind: Land Cost Hinders Completion of Master
Park Plans in County,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1961, p. OC1; and re. plan for hiking and riding trails, see
“Staff to Stress Overall Planning: New Phase Starts as Processing of Subdivision Maps, Zone Changes Slows,” Los
Angeles Times, November 6, 1960, p. OC14.

61

plan of development, nor even a series of master plans, such as must be prepared to guide the
growth of large holdings.”
122
In 1964, a new category called “Planned Community District” was

122
Harry Bergh, “The diminishing county myth: a statement to the Orange County Board of Supervisors and the
Orange County Planning Commission,” April 1963, Special Collections and Archives, Langson Library, University
of California Irvine.
Figure 4-4 Orange County planners in front of recreational trails map, 1964. Orange County
Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=county%20planner
s

62
added to the county’s zoning code. Land proposed for a planned community had to have a single
owner, a high minimum acreage, and be subject to a unified plan. With these conditions met, the
developer was given latitude with site design and community planning. California State
University Los Angeles Professor of History, Martin Schiesl, summarized Orange County’s
planned community zoning in this way:
Land uses could be mixed on the same site. Cluster development on small lots
was also allowed in exchange for large amounts of open space in the community.
The developer, in return for this increased flexibility, was required to get approval
of a master plan for the entire area and subsequently submit detailed site plans for
each part of the holding to be developed.
123

By 1968 there were fifteen planned communities established in Orange County under this new
authority, and Mission Viejo would be one of the first.
124

Mission Viejo’s Master Plan
It is evident from planning documents and oral history interviews that from the outset the
founders of the Mission Viejo Company had ambitions to build a large-scale, self-sufficient
community. But in 1963 the company was seeking annexation to the City of San Juan
Capistrano, so their first development would evolve into a satellite community of this small city,
only recently incorporated in 1961. The company’s first master plan was submitted to San Juan
Capistrano in June 1964 but by September that year they withdrew their annexation proposal,
opening up the future to a grander vision.
125
Access to water may explain the change in plans. In
July 1964, just one month after the company submitted its first plan to the City of San Juan
Capistrano, the water district announced it would finance construction of water and sewer lines
for the community’s first 4,000 acres.
126
The County of Orange became the regulatory authority

123
Martin J. Schiesl, “Designing the Model Community: The Irvine Company and Suburban Development, 1950-
1988,” in Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II, ed. Rob Kling,
Spencer Olin, Mark Poster (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 62.
124
From an interview with Forest Dickason, Orange County Planning Director from 1964 to 1973, in Don Smith,
“Most Planned County Lacks Own Guidelines,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1968,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155878464?accountid=14749
125
“Proponents Drop Plan to Join City,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1964,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/154998281?accountid=14749
126
“Water, Sewer Bonds for Ranch Land OKd,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1964,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/154957534?accountid=14749

63
and in November 1965 the County’s Board of Supervisors adopted the company’s subsequent
iteration of their plan. The founders’ objective at the time was clearly and simply articulated. It
was to “provide for an orderly transition of the land from rural use to a self-contained
community, consisting of places to live, work, worship, learn, shop and play, for an eventual
population of 80,000 people.”
127

The transition to a self-contained community would begin with a mix of housing types and
densities, and as urbanization occurred the acreage allocated in the general plan to areas of
commercial, professional and industrial employment would be developed. In this early
document, the seventeen square miles made available by the O’Neills was envisioned to be
mostly residential at 66% of the land. The company founders insisted on including the amenities
that would make up a total environment, aware of the opportunity to differentiate Mission Viejo
from most of the postwar housing built in Orange County up to that point. The 1965 general plan
stated that the land for:
…commercial and civic development to meet the needs of new
residents… must be reserved now to ensure its availability in an
appropriate location. This particularly holds true for park and recreation
areas, the need for which too often seems to come as an afterthought-
after an area is built up and there is no more open space.
128

In the end, 71% of land was allocated to residential needs; 9% to schools; 8% to industrial and
commercial purposes; and 10% of the plan was to be used for open space, recreation and
agriculture.
129
(Figure 4-5)

Other early planning documents sought to distinguish Mission Viejo from the type of unvarying
tract housing and disparate residential and commercial development that had been permitted in
the region up to this point. Addressing the city officials in San Juan Capistrano in 1964, the
company stated that its goal was to “utilize the most contemporary techniques in land planning
and engineering and eliminate the excessive use of stereotype development patterns which have

127
Orange County Planning Department, “General Plan for Mission Viejo Ranch- Westerly Portion,” November
1965, 10, Orange County Archives.
128
Orange County Planning Department, “General Plan for Mission Viejo Ranch- Westerly Portion,” November
1965, 6, Orange County Archives.
129
Mission Viejo Company Planning Department, “Mission Viejo, California: A New Town,” December 1969, 2,
Mission Viejo Library Collection. The population forecasted by this document was 97,000.

64

occurred in many other areas of Southern California.”
130

Between 1966 and 1967, over 1,000 acres of barren grassland were developed and several
construction projects were completed, including: three housing developments, two elementary
schools, one middle school, a high school, a junior college, a church, an outdoor shopping plaza,
a professional office, a riding stable, and a golf course and clubhouse. Hundreds of trees were
planted, some were mature natives such as live oak and sycamore, transplanted from the northern
section of the old Rancho Trabuco.
131

La Paz Road was the main road in these early days. It was connected to the new freeway
interchange by a steel and concrete bridge built over railway tracks, the first large-scale

130
Mission Viejo Company, “General Plan of Development for the Northwesterly Eleven Thousand Acres of the
Mission Viejo Ranch,” June 9, 1964, 1.
131
“Landscape Plan in Effect Here,” Mission Viejo Reporter 1, no. 3 (June 1966), 2
https://catalog.cmvl.org/client/en_US/search/asset/45/0
Figure 4-5 A 1966 diagram showing the location of the first developments in Mission Viejo. Interstate 5 is the San
Diego Freeway at the top of the diagram, it runs north-south. La Paz Road is the middle road bisecting the diagram,
running east-west. Mission Viejo Reporter 1, no. 3 (June 1966), Mission Viejo Library Collection.

65
engineering project undertaken by the company.
132
From the bridge, a formal entrance heralded
the new community and the small, outdoor shopping mall, La Paz Plaza, was built on flat ground
just inside the entrance. Across La Paz Road, directly opposite the mall, the land dropped off into
a valley of eucalyptus trees, where the high school was built.
Just beyond this small commercial precinct, La Paz Road rose in elevation to the residential
streets where the La Paz and Deane Homes were in different stages of construction. Thousands
of yards of soil were dug up, moved and graded to create some flat surfaces but the new
neighborhoods were elevated and hilly.(Figure 4-6) These first housing developments offered
several different floor plans in one and two-story layouts, and a variety of exterior
configurations. They were single family homes in medium density neighborhoods. Lot sizes
were approximately 6,000 square feet. Other residential areas of Mission Viejo envisioned by the
original plans would be built in a much higher density of twenty dwellings per acre (or 2178
square feet). The lowest density planned for was 1 ½ houses per acre (or 29,185 square feet).
Schools and parks were situated within walking distance of the first houses. Marguerite O’Neill
Elementary School opened in 1967 behind La Paz Plaza, adjacent to Deane Homes.
133
The first
parks in Mission Viejo were the Marguerite O’Neill Park and Preciados Park, both built inside
the new neighborhoods, Deane Homes and La Paz Homes, respectively.
By 1971, with a population over 12,000 people, Mission Viejo contained six schools, a
community college, two churches, seven parks, a golf course, three recreation centers, a
shopping center, a fire station, a movie theatre and a public library.
134

Planning Influences
With the exception of the later additions of Saddleback College, begun in 1968, and Lake
Mission Viejo in 1976, the master planned community conceived in the first planning documents

132
“Bridge Opens Mission Viejo Main Entrance,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1965,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155265557?accountid=14749

133
“Marguerite O’Neill School First Elementary in Mission,” Tustin News, December 7, 1967,
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=TN19671207.1.9&srpos=1&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-
Marguerite+O%27Neill+school+first+elementary+in+mission-------1
134
Mission Viejo Company Environmental Systems, Report, April 1971, 61, Mission Viejo Library Collection.

66
of 1964 and 1965 became the blueprint for the future city of Mission Viejo.(Figure 4-7) The
initial engineering studies were conducted by Boyle Engineering in Santa Ana, while planning

was managed by company employee, James Toepfer. Toepfer had an undergraduate degree from
the University of Wisconsin in regional planning.
135
His first job after college was in the Orange
County planning department in Santa Ana. There, he worked for Planning Director, Harry Bergh,

135
James Toepfer (former planning executive, Mission Viejo Company), interview with Robert Breton, transcript,
2012, 1, Mission Viejo Library,
https://cityofmissionviejo.org/sites/default/files/Documents/FinalTranscript_Toepfer_James_January%2022%2C%2
02012.pdf
Figure 4-6 Aerial view of Mission Viejo in 1966, facing southeast. The La Paz Homes model court is in
the foreground, and the high school buildings are in the upper right. The changes in elevation are evident
by following La Paz Road, which runs through the image from right to left. Note the trees planted in the
center median. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

67

but quickly moved to the planning department of the City of Santa Ana. He was the city’s
planning director when he was recruited by the Mission Viejo Company in 1963.
136

136
Ibid.
Figure 4-7 Philip J. Reilly in front of plans for Lake Mission Viejo, 1976. Reilly
was Executive Vice President from 1964 to 1967 and President from 1967-1987
of the Mission Viejo Company. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

68
The company’s master plan delivered to the City of San Juan Capistrano in June 1964 credits the
Urban Land Institute, the International City Managers Association and the American Society of
Planning Officials for inspiring the principles upon which the plan was based.
137
Mission Viejo
reflected ideas about community planning in the mid-twentieth century that had been gaining
traction in the planning profession for many years but only began to be executed in the United
States in the 1960s and 1970s. Southern Orange County was one of many regions that was
witnessing suburban development of an unprecedented scale and type in the 1960s. Master
planning was being adopted on former ranch lands in other parts of California such as at Rancho
Bernardo in San Diego County and elsewhere in the US, most famously at Reston in Virginia,
and Columbia in Maryland. These “new towns” were designed as an antidote to the
uncoordinated incremental growth of the previous two decades when houses and roads were built
and bedroom communities were developed without much consideration for how or if they
integrated into the larger landscape of the region, or if they benefited people. Consequently,
Americans began to raise questions about the effects of the suburbs on families, communities,
and the environment. Urban historian, Ann Forsyth, writing about the origins of the master
planned communities of Irvine, Columbia, Maryland and Woodlands, Texas, summarized the
thinking in this way:
In the 1950s and 1960s, early post-World War II suburban expansion was
criticized for its ugliness, cultural conformity, social isolation, and environ-
mental problems…some real estate developers and parts of the planning and
design professions responded to these complaints. They proposed master-
planned new communities throughout the United States related to the new
town programs then active in Europe… these communities were planned to
be phased, coordinated, socially balanced, environmentally aware, and econo-
mically efficient.
138

The new town concept held the hope of improving suburban life and it also presented an
opportunity for selling a new real estate product.
139
American suppliers to the home-building
industry understood this and encouraged the development of planned communities in the US. In
September 1965, Mission Viejo Company president, Donald Bren, headed to Europe on a tour
sponsored by some of the largest of these manufacturers, including Pittsburgh Plate Glass

137
Mission Viejo Company, General Plan, 1964, 11.
138
Ann Forsyth, ReForming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 2.
139
Ibid.

69
Company, United States Plywood Corporation and Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corporation.
140

The “European Planned Community Tour” showcased communities in northern and western
Europe that were leaders in regional planning beginning in the 1950s. Traversing England,
Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Germany over fourteen days, Bren and others were
guided by the master architects and chief planners of towns designed using “garden city”
principles from the early twentieth-century inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-
morrow of 1902, such as in Welwyn near London, established in 1920, and new towns such as
Cumbernauld, established in 1956 outside of Glasgow, and Tapiola near Helsinki, begun in
1952.

In addition to Donald Bren, other home builders on the tour included Ben Deane of Deane
Brothers of Huntington Beach, the firm that would build the first housing tract in Mission Viejo,
and develop the adjacent Orange County city of Lake Forest; and the Chief Designer and Vice
President of the Irvine Company, Albert Trevino and Raymond Watson, respectively.Watson
would become President of the Irvine Company in 1973.
141
Architecture critic, Ada Louise
Huxtable, accompanied the tour and wrote about what she and the others saw in a series for the
New York Times. She said of her fellow travelers that they were “men responsible for an
impressive segment of the American landscape. They included representatives of enterprises like
the 93,000-acre Irvine Ranch development in California and a community for 125,000 to be
called Columbia, now in construction between Washington and Baltimore.”
142

Over the course of several articles, Huxtable described the housing variety, architecture and
regional planning concepts employed to create the new towns and satellite communities they
visited. She explained that the places they saw in Britain were literally new towns, built from
scratch and situated at a remove from existing urban centers, while in Sweden the approach was

140
“European Planned Community Tour, September 21-October 6, 1965,” brochure, Raymond Watson Papers,
University of California Irvine Special Collections. Other sponsors included Chrysler Corporation- Airtemp
Division, General Electric Company, Southern California Edison Company, and Title Insurance and Trust
Company.
141
Notable home builders on the tour included the executive vice president of the California Land Company which
was developing what would become the city of Valencia, and Lawrence Weinberg, the head of the Larwin Group
based in Beverly Hills, who would become one of the largest home builders in the US.
142
Ada Louise Huxtable, “Western Europe Is Found to Lead U.S. in Community Planning,” New York Times,
November 22, 1965, 39.

70
to build residential villages connected to Stockholm by a state-of-the-art transit system.
143
She
credited Britain for the large scale of its redevelopment and the Scandinavian countries “for the
environment created, in human and esthetic terms…”
144

The vision for Mission Viejo was more aligned with the British new town model of a self-
contained city, though unlike Irvine it never seriously encompassed significant commercial or
industrial employment within its borders. A company document from 1969 indicated that more
land would be dedicated to schools than to commercial or industrial activity.
145
It differed from
an urban design perspective too. Writing about the new town movement in the United States,
urban historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom said of Mission Viejo that it was typical of the
“conventional large-scale planned new towns of the 1950s and 1960s…”
146
Contrasting it with
Irvine, Bloom said that the Mission Viejo developers “did not adopt innovative planning
methods, nor did they take a comprehensive approach to redesigning the physical and
institutional landscape of suburbia.”
147

The planning methods used by the Mission Viejo Company may not have been innovative but it
is unclear how much more comprehensive the company could have been when they produced a
master plan for 11,000 acres in 1965. Bloom may have been referring to the absence of architects
from the lead planning team. Unlike Irvine or neighboring Laguna Niguel, community design
was not guided by architects in Mission Viejo. Laguna Niguel began with Victor Gruen and
Associates, and several well-regarded architects were involved in developing the first tract
housing there, in Monarch Bay and Niguel Terrace. In the case of Mission Viejo, architects and
landscape architects were contracted on a project basis but the original plans that unified the
1960s development were devised by planners and engineers.

143
Ada Louise Huxtable, “Sweden Avoids U.S. Suburban Sprawl by Close Control of Housing,” New York Times,
November 28, 1965, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/117066162?accountid=14749
144
Huxtable, “Western Europe is Found to Lead U.S.” Please see the bibliography for additional articles in
Huxtable’s series.
145
Mission Viejo Company Planning Department, “Mission Viejo, California: A New Town,” December 1969, 2.
146
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream
(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 66.
147
Ibid.

71
The master plan for which Irvine is significant would not begin to be substantially implemented
until the late 1960s. Ross Cortese, in the northern Orange County community of Rossmoor and
the Laguna Niguel Corporation had received approval from the county of the earliest versions of
their plans in 1956 and 1959, respectively, but Irvine would get the most publicity from the
beginning.
148
Following the successful plan for the new campus of the University of California
on the western side of the Irvine Ranch, William Pereira and Associates was hired to develop a
master plan for a city adjoining the university campus.
149
Professor Martin Schiesl wrote that it
was Pereira’s plan, rolled out in 1963, that “introduced into southern Orange County a new
version of the garden city, complete with shopping centers, greenbelts, and parks.”
150
The project
was given widespread attention at the time. In September 1963 William Pereira was featured on
the cover of Time Magazine, followed by an admiring account of the Los Angeles-based
architect.(Figure 4-8) The article cited the city building of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, India,
and Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa in Brasilia that began in the 1950s. It addressed Pereira’s
career and personal biography, but the central focus was on his commission to plan the 90,000-
acre Irvine Ranch. Entitled, “The Man with the Plan,” the article characterized Pereira as,
…neither conqueror nor commissar, but one of a new breed of artisans arising
in the world: the regional planner. The regional planner orchestrates vast areas
of wilderness with cities, villages, farms and forests to serve the needs of men.
As the planet teems with more and more humanity, his work… is becoming
more and more a pressing necessity.
151

A couple of years before the Time article was published, the Irvine Company began to hire its
own design and engineering staff. Educated with a graduate degree in architecture from
University of California Berkeley, Raymond Watson became an architect-planner for the Irvine
Company in 1960, eventually becoming president from 1973 to 1977. Watson was the principal
planner when the company transitioned from Pereira in 1965. He was responsible for the
subsequent layout of the Irvine Ranch and for transforming what he said were “Pereira’s broad

148
Andrew Hope et al., “Tract Housing in California,” 112.
149
Diane Grinkevich Kane, “Westlake and Irvine, California: Paradigms for the 21
st
Century.” PhD diss., University
of California Santa Barbara, 1996, 226-227 http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/304288690?accountid=14749. Kane said that the Southern Sector Plan was
completed in August 1963 by Pereira and his firm and approved in early 1964 by the Orange County Board of
Supervisors. The Final Report, Southern Sector General Plan was authored by other consultants and company staff
in May 1968 and subsequently accepted by the county.
150
Schiesl, “Model Community,” 60.
151
“The Land: the Man with the Plan,” TIME Magazine 82, no. 10 (September 6, 1963), 68,
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,870487-1,00.html

72

principles of a futuristic new town into a real life city.”
152
Under Watson’s guidance, Irvine’s
new town became a series of villages, each distinguished with their own landscape and
architecture and their own sense of place. With the first villages, such as East Bluff (1963; now

152
Raymond Watson, “1960: A New Era,” manuscript, Raymond L. Watson papers, MS-R120, Special Collections
and Archives. The UC Irvine Libraries. Irvine, CA.
Figure 4-8 Los Angeles-based architect, William Pereira, on the cover of Time
Magazine in 1963. The stylized map in the background is of the Irvine Ranch,
http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19630906,00.html

73
Newport Beach) and University Park (1965), the Irvine Company established the “signal
elements of Irvine… narrow greenbelts, attached but still expensive housing, extensive
recreational facilities, and a village concept.”
153

Though Donald Bren and Raymond Watson may have been acquainted beforehand, they were
both on the European Planned Community Tour in 1965 and Bren has said that Watson became
one of his lifelong mentors.
154
Bren became CEO of the Irvine Company in 1983, and Watson
joined the company’s board of directors as Vice Chairman in 1986.
155
At some point in the early
days of the Mission Viejo Company, Watson became a professional resource for the founding
group. Tony Moiso recounted how he and others from the company met with Watson from time
to time to discuss how best to manage builders and address technical planning challenges such as
sewers and water.
156

It is not known if what Donald Bren learned about the European planning experience informed
Mission Viejo in any way. By the time Bren returned to the US, the County of Orange had
approved Mission Viejo’s master plan.

153
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Suburban Alchemy: 1960s New Towns and the Transformation of the American Dream.
(Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 2001), 56.
154
Craig Reem, “Donald Bren,” OC Metro, March 6, 2003, 34, Mission Viejo Library Collection.
155
Raymond L. Watson Papers, Online Archive of California,
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt867nf5qj/admin/#ref267
156
Moiso, March 10, 2020.

74
Chapter Five
The Enduring Romance of “Early California” in Mission Viejo

The original master plans for the contemporaneous Orange County developments of Laguna
Niguel and Irvine were conceived by influential planners and architects. Less innovative perhaps
but no less ambitious, Mission Viejo was the product of builders and businesspeople, but in its
first phase as a new town of 1,000 acres it was propelled forward by a design vision that would
prove to be very different from how the Laguna Niguel Corporation or the Irvine Company
represented their new communities to the public. The vision for Mission Viejo was an integration
of local ranch history and a regional vernacular in the built environment. Donald Bren, Mission
Viejo Company president, engaged builders, architects, landscape architects and interior
designers from the outset to steer individual projects towards this vision. Early California
imagery combined with the standardization and economies of suburban tract construction and
modern materials and technology helped to create a vernacular landscape that represented one of
the first communities in Southern California to revive Spanish and Early California motifs since
the 1930s.
157

The Mission’s Early Role
In their official planning documents in 1964, the Mission Viejo Company’s stated objectives
suggested a thematic direction for the new community, which was “to develop an entire
community which would contribute to the established heritage and civic pride within the City of
San Juan Capistrano…To develop a significant theme throughout the Planned Community
exemplifying tradition and culture of San Juan Capistrano and the Ranch area…”
158
Although
the descriptive phrases used were never expanded upon in the documents, it is obvious that the
city’s “established heritage” and “tradition and culture” were references to its history as one of
California’s earliest European settlements and one of twenty-one Spanish mission sites

157
Rancho Bernardo, a master planned community in San Diego County planned by William Pereira’s former
partner, Charles Luckman, also promoted its architecture as Spanish and Early California beginning in 1963. There
were scattered tracts in the region such as Casas Capistrano in San Juan Capistrano that introduced Spanish stylings
in the same period. More common was to see Spanish influence in new homes in the 1970s, for example, Survey LA
recorded the Los Encinos neighborhood in Woodland Hills, identifying the 1976 tract as “Neo-Spanish Eclectic.”
158
Mission Viejo Company, “General Plan of Development for the Northwesterly Eleven Thousand Acres of the
Mission Viejo Ranch,” June 9, 1964, 1- 2, Orange County Archives.

75
established in the eighteenth century, and that the Mission Viejo Company was making the
commitment to somehow represent this history.

This commitment began with the new community’s name. The “old mission” is a direct
reference to Mission San Juan Capistrano, located just a few miles south of the future site of the
new town.(Figure 5-1) Although ultimately most of Mission Viejo was built on the historic
Rancho Trabuco, during the Spanish era portions of what would become Rancho Mission Viejo
belonged to the Mission San Juan Capistrano. There’s evidence that the current location of the
mission is not the original location, and that the original mission- la misión vieja- was sited in an
area on the present day rancho thus the name in the Mexican period of Rancho Mission Viejo.
159

Before the county assumed direct planning jurisdiction over Mission Viejo, it was the new city of
San Juan Capistrano that was the first official body to review the company’s plans with the
expectation that this new subdivision would become part of that city.

The Mission San Juan Capistrano has always provided an identity for the area, particularly for
city officials, business interests and residents after the city was incorporated in 1961.
160
One of
the first decisions made by the new city council was to establish an Architectural Board of
Review and a mission district to closely manage development and protect historic architecture in
the area of the mission.
161
In 1963, the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society was founded and
from the beginning the city’s Chamber of Commerce was an unrelenting booster of the mission-
and the rancho- past. A brochure produced by the chamber in 1966 described the nearby Rancho
Mission Viejo where “vaqueros carry on the every day and year around activities of raising high-
quality cattle for the Los Angeles market. Their lives are little changed from those of their

159
Don Meadows, “The Original Site of Mission San Juan Capistrano,” Southern California Quarterly 49, no. 3,
(September 1967), DOI: 10.2307/41171381
https://www-jstor-org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/41171381
160
The mission was always a point of interest for visitors. Locals began to restore the adobes on Los Rios Street and
the mission buildings in the early 1890s, after the Santa Fe railroad appeared and before Charles Lummis and the
Landmarks Club took an active interest. See Anne Margaret Petersen, “Adobe Days, Lost and Found.” PhD diss.,
University of California Santa Barbara, 2008, 108-109, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/304664388?accountid=14749
161
Minutes, Architectural Board of Review, City of San Juan Capistrano, 1961 to 1981. Pamela Hallan Gibson, Dos
Cientos Anos En San Juan Capistrano (Orange: The Paragon Agency Publishers, 2001), 131, 135.

76

ancestors who carried on the same work for the Andres and Pio Pico, and for Don Juan Forster
and other early land owners of the area.”
162

The famous swallows -and their annual return to Mission San Juan Capistrano- became
synonymous with the mission beginning in the 1930s and were celebrated in an annual
equestrian parade called the Fiesta de las Golondrinas that continues today.(Figure 5-2) Through
the decades, the swallows remained part of the iconography of the place. Text from the Chamber
of Commerce’s 1971 brochure describing heritage in harmony with the future and with economic

162
San Juan Capistrano Chamber of Commerce, “San Juan Capistrano: On the Pathway of the Padres,” 1966,
brochure, UC Irvine, Langson Library Special Collections and Archives.
Figure 5-1 Tourist posing with pigeons at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, ca. 1965. Orange County
Archives,
https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=30346812%40N07&view_all=1&text=mission%20San%20J
uan%20capistrano

77
progress is a typical example of the language of the times: “Amid the whirr of swallows’ wings,
the melodious sounds of mission bells remind the present of its heritage and add lustre to a
dynamic future.”
163
The same brochure includes a photograph of a spacecraft and an aerial view
of the massive North American Rockwell plant designed in a ziggurat shape by William Pereira
and Associates and opened in 1971 just a few miles away in Laguna Niguel. Unlike the early
twentieth century appeal to a bucolic past, this version of the Spanish Revival was not anti-
modern or anti-technology.

163
San Juan Capistrano Chamber of Commerce, “San Juan Capistrano: the birthplace of Orange County,” 1971,
brochure, UC Irvine, Langson Library Special Collections and Archives.

Figure 5-2 Juaneno Tribal Members at Swallows Day Parade, 1979. Women on horseback are San Juan
Capistrano residents, Teeter Marie Olivares Romero and Betty Valenzuela. Orange County Public Library
Collection, http://cdm16838.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16838coll1/id/4103

78
The La Paz Road Entrance
Beyond a general theme for the community, an aesthetic direction for the commercial and public
architecture in Mission Viejo was also cited, albeit meagerly, in the planning documents for the
development. In the section on specific land uses, the 1964 document urged the “utilization of an
early Californian or Spanish architectural theme in commercial, office and business office, public
and semi-public complexes whenever possible.”
164
By the time the company was appealing to
the County of Orange in their 1965 general plan, they were no longer aspiring to a “Spanish”
theme asserting instead that the overall plan is to include “unique design features, such as low
silhouette fire hydrants and mission bell street lights, in keeping with a basic over-all Early
California architectural theme.”
165
The words Spanish, Early California and rancho would end up
being used interchangeably to describe the design and architecture of early Mission Viejo in
marketing material and internal documents produced by the company in the late 1960s. The
company’s print advertising in the first years always referenced Early California in the copy and
often showed Spanish and/or rancho imagery, such as a woman dressed in the traditional
clothing of a vaquero, or a wrought iron gate on a rustic building.
166
(Figure 5-3)

It’s not clear if O’Neill family members articulated a desire for this design direction but we know
they went along with Donald Bren, and it seems he was the visual communicator. According to
James Toepfer, who managed planning for the young company, “Don was the catalyst who had
the dream.”
167
In the beginning Bren articulated a vision for the community that included all the
modern amenities but also conveyed the need for a strong sense of place. That ‘place’ was to
reflect the area’s mission and ranch histories, a reassuring vision for the O’Neills who were
cautious about how the development would evolve and intent on preserving the ranch heritage.
Around the time that the company announced the completion of the new entryway at La Paz

164
Mission Viejo Company, “General Plan of Development for the Northwesterly Eleven Thousand Acres of the
Mission Viejo Ranch,” June 9, 1964, 12.
165
Orange County Planning Department, “General Plan for Mission Viejo Ranch- Westerly Portion,” November
1965, 11, Orange County Archives.
166
“What’s it like to grow up in Mission Viejo?” display ad, Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1966,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155572189?accountid=14749; and “Mission Viejo: a brand new 200-year old idea,”
Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155459024?accountid=14749
167
Toepfer, interview with Robert Breton, 2015.

79

Road, Bren was quoted as saying, “what we are trying to do is to relate the early California ranch
atmosphere to the present through our landscaping and architecture.”
168

The entryway to the new community is illustrative of Bren’s intentions. Today, most of the
freeway interchanges between Mission Viejo and San Juan Capistrano have Spanish names: El
Toro, Alicia, Oso, Junipero Serra, Camino Capistrano, and even Crown Valley Parkway refers

168
“Project’s Landscape Echoes Old California,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1965, p. M34.
Figure 5-3 A close-up of a newspaper advertisement in 1966 for La Paz Homes, a woman in the
traditional Spanish clothing of a cowboy, high waisted pants, short jacket and wide hat. “These are
the three faces of the San Lorenzo,” Tustin News, September 22, 1966,
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=TN19660922&dliv=userclipping&cliparea=1.3%2C156%2C464%2C3
789%2C4084&factor=4&e=------196-en--20--41--txt-txIN-%22Mission+Viejo%22-------1

80
to the royal sponsors of the original Spanish colony. In 1964, La Paz would have been one of the
first interchanges to be named along the new freeway. “The peace” in Spanish, it was named for
the Rancho de la Paz which was one of the Rancho Mission Viejo’s names during the Mexican
period. The new road was designed as two lanes with a wide median. In the median, grass was
planted between circular planters where mature olive trees were installed. The planters
and the tall, curved masonry walls at the threshold to the new town were made of “Barcelona
brick,” a material like slump stone that was chosen to simulate adobe brick. James Toepfer said
that the color of the brick was very important to Donald Bren and that Bren was directly
involved in its selection.
169
(Figure 5-4)

169
Toepfer, interview with Robert Breton, 2015
Figure 5-4 La Paz Road, main entrance to the new community, ca. 1966. Landscape design by Linesch
and Reynolds. Mission Bell Luminaire, Barcelona brick circular planters filled with olive trees, and rustic
wood signage. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

81
To design the twenty-acre entryway, completed in October 1965, the company hired landscape
architects, Linesh and Reynolds, who were based in the Orange County city of Costa Mesa.
170

The choice of firm is notable. Joseph Linesch (1924- 1996) graduated in 1950 with a degree in
landscape architecture from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Early in his
career, he worked on the original plans for Disneyland with Morgan “Bill” Evans and landscape
architect, Ruth Shellhorn.
171
He was in partnership with Horace E. Reynolds from 1963 to 1971.
Around the time they were overseeing the installation of the La Paz entrance, they created the
landscape design for the oil drilling platforms off the coast of Long Beach. The platforms were
man-made islands visible from downtown Long Beach. The effort to obscure the metal towers
with a waterfall and tropical plantings would launch the firm and Linesch’s career, in particular.
Linesch became known for his “fantasy landscapes.”
172
His other projects included Busch
Gardens in Van Nuys and the plans for the berthing site of the Queen Mary in Long Beach in
1967.
173
Linesch and Reynolds’ work on the designed landscape of the La Paz entrance would
establish the theme for Mission Viejo.

The Spanish and early California theme was extended to the street lighting as well. Lamp posts
installed at the entrance, and eventually throughout the community, were designed with a metal
shade in the shape of a mission bell. The idea was consciously adopted from the mission bell
guideposts first installed in 1906 as a way-finder to mark the El Camino Real tourist route
throughout California.
174
The historic bells at the Mission San Juan Capistrano were also a
source of inspiration. The “Mission Bell Luminaire,” was designed and manufactured for the

170
Mission Viejo Company, Mission Viejo Reporter, 1, no. 1 (January 1966),
https://catalog.cmvl.org/client/en_US/search/asset/43/0
171
Finding Aid for the Joseph H. Linesch papers, 1949- ca. 1995, University of California Santa Barbara, Art,
Design and Architecture Museum, Architecture and Design Collection,
https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=c82f7mfj&developer=local&style=oac4&s=1&query=La+Paz&x=17&y=10&serv
let=view
172
A retrospective of Linesh’s work at THUMS (Texaco, Humble Union, Mobil and Shell) was held at the
University Art Museum at CSULB in 2006. “Landscaping Long Beach’s Oil Platforms,” artdaily, 2006,
https://artdaily.cc/news/17207/Landscaping-Long-Beach-s-Oil-Platforms#.XozPaS-ZNBw
173
“Long Beach Berth: Firm Plans Setting for the Queen Mary,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155728782?accountid=14749
174
Phoebe Kropp, California Vieja, 67.

82
company by General Electric Company and Southern California Edison Company in 1964.
175

The new street lighting became so popular regionally that the design was not only reproduced for
Mission Viejo but throughout south Orange County in later years, including in San Juan
Capistrano.

In full view of the new entrance was a small farming operation in a field just below La Paz Road
on the grounds of the new high school.(Figure 5-5) Seven acres were donated to the school
district by the Mission Viejo Company for the farm, and the O’Neill family donated eleven
calves to the school’s agricultural program. The company’s October 1966 newsletter reported
that “the seven acres have been planned by high school officials to accommodate growing of
citrus and avocado trees, deciduous fruit trees, row crops, flowers and pasture, and to raise cattle,
rabbits and other stock.”
176

Rancho Heritage in the Suburbs
In the beginning, the Mission Viejo Company actively promoted associations with ranching and
rancho heritage in the new community. Wooden split rail fencing was used throughout the new
development. Ranch history was integrated into the original logo for the Mission Viejo
Company. The “Rafter M” brand used on the ranch for marking cattle became the company’s,
and ultimately the city’s logo. (Figure 5-6) A Saddle Club was planned near the golf course, and
bridle trails were laid throughout the new community. In November 1967, when the Brown
family became the one thousandth family to move into the new town, the Mission Viejo
Company delivered them a one thousand pound steer, branded with the Rafter M, which the
company then had butchered for them. This practice continued at least into the mid-1970s.
(Figure 5-7)

Farming and ranching were shrinking vocations in Orange County, but the associations with the
ranch differentiated the development from its nearby competitors. Though their communities

175
“Mission Viejo Captures Mood of Old California,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1965,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155285871?accountid=14749
176
“High School Given Agricultural Site,” Mission Viejo Reporter 1, no. 7 (October 1966), 1,
https://catalog.cmvl.org/client/en_US/search/asset/49/0

83

Figure 5-5 The farm at the Mission Viejo High School today, view southwest. Photograph taken from La
Paz Road, Highway 5 is just beyond the trees in the middleground. Photograph by author.

84

Figure 5-6 The City of Mission Viejo seal, 1988. Note
the rafter M symbol on the left and the Mission
Luminaire. City of Mission Viejo,
https://cityofmissionviejo.org/news/covid-19-
information-and-status-city-facilities

85

also grew out of large ranch holdings that dated to the Mexican era, neither the Laguna Niguel
Corporation nor the Irvine Company used rancho motifs to promote their first developments or to
inspire the earliest architecture. Irvine’s advertising in the late 1960s briefly used the imagery of
the American Old West of cowboys and adventure, but this gave way to garden city motifs.
177

The O’Neills of Mission Viejo were not only active in the management of the development

177
Stephanie Jean Kolberg, “Marketing the Middle Landscape in Irvine, California: The Image of a Master-Planned
Community and the Pursuit of the Suburban Ideal, 1959-2005” (master’s thesis, California State University,
Fullerton, 2005), 48-55, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/305365361?accountid=14749 In 1965, the Irvine Company adopted a Spanish
horseman symbol. It’s not known where or how this was used. “The Irvine Ranch (A Chronological History),
Raymond Watson papers, July 19, 2004.
Figure 5-7 Steer delivery, March 1975. The Perrys (middle) were the 1000
th
family to buy in the
Barcelona tract. The Mission Viejo Company rewarded them with a 1000 lb steer. Mission Viejo Library
Collection.

86
company, they were also still directly engaged in the ranching business. Most of the remaining
open land of the historic Rancho Mission Viejo and Rancho Trabuco was retained for
agricultural purposes. The same year, Tony Moiso told the Los Angeles Times that his family’s
cattle operation was the largest in Orange County.
178
Though the pastures would shrink with
each successive decade and housing development, Rancho Mission Viejo is still a ranch and
farm today and the ranch’s two-hundred year old heritage is celebrated at events such as the
spring calf round-up, a public rodeo, and El Viaje de Portola- a retracing on horseback of Gaspar
de Portola’s path through Orange County.
179
(Figure 5-8)

For Donald Bren and the Mission Viejo Company, investing in the La Paz gateway to Mission
Viejo was a strategic decision. The closest large city to the community was Santa Ana and it was
a twelve-mile drive through what was mostly countryside. In 1964, feedback from builders who
were considering working with the company was that the location was too remote. And although
there were signs that southern Orange County would develop economically, in 1964 and 1965
the jobs were in the established northern cities of Anaheim, Santa Ana and Fullerton. To
overcome objections from potential business partners and homebuyers, the company had to
demonstrate they were making a long-term commitment, and that they were offering something
meaningful, while striking a balance between density and public space. In addition to the
designed entrance and also visible from the freeway, the high school was built just as the first
families were moving in in 1966, and the golf course opened soon after in 1967. John T. Martin,
Director of Marketing for the Mission Viejo Company from 1968 to 1971, explained the
significance of the entrance in an oral history interview in 2012. Martin said that “thirty to forty
percent of the decision to buy in Mission Viejo occurred as they drove over the bridge and saw
the entry. In other words, so they knew they were arriving at a place, so it wasn’t Jane Jacobs, I
think, saying, “there’s no ‘there’ there”… so you had a feeling of open space and [yet] you were

178
Robert M. Gettemy, “Roundup in the Hills: The Orange County Only the Cowboys Know,” Los Angeles Times,
August 18, 1969, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/156190118?accountid=14749
179
The roundups were often covered by the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s, see …. El Viaje de Portola is a group of
men on horseback who trace Gaspar de Portola’s trail through Orange County each year since 1964. See Chris
Jepsen, OC History Roundup, http://ochistorical.blogspot.com/2008/12/el-viaje-de-portola.html. The Rancho
Mission Viejo company is the lead organizer of an annual rodeo in San Juan Capistrano. Both the Portola ride and
the rodeo raise money for local charities, including the Mission San Juan Capistrano.

87

in suburbia.”
180

The company was very aware of its place-making role. Between 1966 and 1981, they produced a
monthly newsletter called the Mission Viejo Reporter that promoted the company but also
published community news, and they sponsored an Activities Committee in 1967 that still exists

180
John T. Martin, oral history interview with Robert Breton, April 21, 2012, Mission Viejo Library,
https://cityofmissionviejo.org/sites/default/files/Documents/FinalTranscript_Martin_John_April%2021%202012.pdf
Figure 5-8 From left to right, Joe Tow, the (Rancho) Mission Viejo ranch manager, Alice Chandler,
a cowgirl who worked on the ranch, and Tony Moiso, O’Neill descendent, former Vice President,
Mission Viejo Company, and today’s CEO of Rancho Mission Viejo Co. Photograph taken at the
Southern California Cattlemen’s Association event on the Mission Viejo ranch in 1973. Orange
County Public Libraries Collection,
http://cdm16838.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16838coll1/id/1670

88
today. Reinforcing the feeling of being from ‘somewhere,’ when the first residents assumed the
deeds to their new homes in 1966 they were given a certificate from the Mission Viejo Company
that listed the title history of their property reaching back to the American, Mexican, and French-
Basque owners of the land and ultimately to 1769 and the King of Spain.(Figure 5-9) The Title
Insurance and Trust Company formally issued the chain of title to the owners of the Mission
Viejo Company, who then included it in the welcome kit for new homeowners. The land’s
genealogy was printed on a textured beige paper with a stylized, old-fashioned typeface. Title
Insurance customized these documents with chain of title for several other new, planned
communities in Southern California including Laguna Niguel, Valencia, and Rancho Bernardo,
also begun in the 1960s.
181

181
“Replicas of Title to be Presented,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155749597?accountid=14749

89

Commercial and Institutional Architecture, 1964 to 1967
Beyond the La Paz entrance, the company’s aspirations for Early California and Spanish styling
were also being interpreted in public and commercial buildings. The company’s advertising copy
throughout the late 1960s consistently lists among the community’s key attributes, “Spanish red
tile roofs” on all public buildings.
182
As model homes were being built, institutional and
commercial structures at the core of the master plan were being conceived and built in parallel
and, indeed, each one used red clay tile as roofing material or ornamentation at the roof line.
While La Paz Plaza was a more faithful interpretation of the style, in the case of the first schools,
“Early California” was largely reduced to the roof material. Developed by the San Joaquin

182
“Mission Viejo: a brand new 200-year old idea,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1966,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155459024?accountid=14749
Figure 5-9 Presenting the Chain of Title in 1965 to Mission Viejo Co. Left to right: Briant H. Wells Jr.
President, Title Insurance and Trust Company; Donald Bren, and James E. West, Mission Viejo Company.
Mission Viejo Library Collection.

90
Elementary School District, the first schools built in Mission Viejo were the Marguerite M.
O’Neill Elementary School (opened in 1967), Mission Viejo Elementary School (opened in
1967), and Linda Vista Elementary School (opened in 1968).
183
(Figure 5-10) The Tustin Union
High School District opened the Mission Viejo High School in 1966. (Figure 5-11) The Mission
Viejo Elementary School was designed by the Los Angeles firm of Daniel Mann Johnson
Mendenhall. (Figure 5-12). The school’s roof is flat and red clay tile defines the building’s
Mansard-like parapet. The original paint color for the building was peach. The three other
schools were designed by Flewelling Moody also with Mansard roofs and utilitarian and
Modernist forms. Originally founded in 1928, after the Second World War the firm specialized
in school design in Southern California in response to the postwar population boom.
184
The
architects adorned the Mansard roof forms with red clay tiles and used a slumpstone on the
columns of the interior courtyards. The Mansard roof was revived in the 1960s in Hollywood
Regency homes and was an especially popular commercial application in the 1970s, as historicist
Spanish and French idioms were in vogue.
185

In addition to the schools, the first thousand acres also included the Mount of Olives Lutheran
Church. (Figure 5-13) The tall walls of the church exterior were finished in a smooth white
stucco. The Mission Viejo Company described the church as having an Early California design
that included a “wide esplanade, rough-hewed beams and heavy wood doors.”
186
The layout of
the church complex is reminiscent of the missions with the monumental church building at one
end, and a horizontal single story building with covered corridor at the other end.

183
Mission Viejo Reporter 1, no. 2, (April 1966), 3, https://catalog.cmvl.org/client/en_US/search/asset/44/0
184
www.flewelling-moody.com
185
“Mansard: 1960- 1985,” Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, State of Washington,
https://dahp.wa.gov/historic-preservation/historic-buildings/architectural-style-guide/mansard
186
“What’s it like to grow up in Mission Viejo?” display ad, Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1966,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155572189?accountid=14749

91

Figure 5-10 Richard J. O’Neill and his mother, Marguerite “Daisy” O’Neill in
1968 at the dedication ceremony for the school named after her, the first school in
Mission Viejo. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

92

Figure 5-11 Mission Viejo High School, opened in 1966. Red clay tiles on the vertical plane of the
Mansard roof. Architects, Flewelling Moody. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

93

Also built in this early phase and with a setting just inside the entry on La Paz Road was La Paz
Plaza. Built by the Mission Viejo Company and opened in 1967, it was the first mall in the
community. The 1964 plan made direct reference to La Paz Plaza, calling for an “architectural
treatment depicting a Spanish or early Californian theme.”
187
Still intact today, it is a well-
executed example of an Early California vernacular complex. It was designed by Pickard, Burke,

187
Mission Viejo Company, “General Plan of Development for the Northwesterly Eleven Thousand Acres of the
Mission Viejo Ranch,” June 9, 1964, 27, Orange County Archives.

Figure 5-12 Mission Viejo Elementary School by Daniel Mann Johnson Mendenhall, 1967. Photograph by
Julius Shulman, 1972. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)

94

Kober, Nicolais, Archuleta Architects, a firm noted for mall developments throughout Southern
California.(Figure 5-14) The plaza was conceived as a combination of office and retail space in
three buildings, one large and two smaller with a mix of one- and two-story elevations.
Courtyards and walkways connect the buildings in an intimate interface. Primary features were
red clay tile roofs overhanging exterior walls of textured stucco, red brick and darkly stained
board-and-batten. Decorative iron grilles were installed on the courtyard-facing windows and
balconettes. A corredor that followed the exterior contours of each building as well as wood and
brick pergolas in the courtyard provided sun cover for pedestrians. The plaza was widely
admired in the building press at the time. It was said to bring “an established feeling to a far-out
Figure 5-13 Mount of Olives Lutheran Church, the first church in Mission Viejo. Architect unknown.
Photograph taken in 1967 by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(2004.R.10).

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new community” and was viewed as a clever investment for the community builder who retained
revenue from the plaza long after the rest of the land was sold and built-out.
188

188
“The Village Shopping Center: New Opportunity for Developers,” House and Home: The Marketing and
Management Publication of the Housing Industry, October 1968, 74, Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Getty
Research Institute.
Figure 5-14 La Paz Plaza (1966) as seen in House & Home: The Marketing and
Management Publication of the Housing Industry,October 1968. Cover
photography by Julius Shulman, 1967. J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, (2004.R.10)

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Residential Architecture, 1964 to 1967
As enormous volumes of earth were moved, pasture yielded to pavement and Carretas,
Arracena, Alicante and Preciados were laid out as the new streets of the new neighborhoods.
189

In the first phase of the community from 1964 to 1967, four subdivisions were introduced to the
home-buying public. Two were built by outside parties, Deane Homes by Deane Brothers, and
Monterey Master Homes by the Harlan Lee-Byron Lasky Company.
190
La Paz Homes and
Eldorado Homes were built by the Mission Viejo Company, which would go on to be the
exclusive builder in Mission Viejo until cityhood in 1988. The subjects of this section on
residential architecture are the first two Mission Viejo tracts, Deane Homes and La Paz Homes,
offered for sale in 1965 and 1966, respectively.

For these homes the builders turned to historic motifs and to regional history. Unlike the Mission
Viejo Company’s documented aspirations for commercial and institutional architecture, there
were no written intentions found from this era that prescribed a Spanish or Early California
theme for housing. Nevertheless, the first single family housing tracts introduced materials,
decoration and forms that reflected the Spanish and rancho eras. Deane Brothers and the Mission
Viejo Company and their designers combined these historicist details with Ranch and multi-story
styles influenced by Modernism and found in production housing throughout the suburbs of
Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s. Bolstered by a thematic and coordinated marketing
approach taken by the Mission Viejo Company, the new community took off.

By way of contrast, during this same period other Orange County developers were selling more
modern styles to their prospective customers. The Laguna Niguel Corporation was offering a
Modernist suburban house in the first tracts in the Monarch Bay (now part of Dana Point) and
Niguel Terrace neighborhoods that included post-and-beam construction, flat or low shallow

189
Historian, Doris Walker, describes the story of early Mission Viejo resident, Marilyn Clement, who generated the
street names in the new town from Spanish and Latin American sources. See Doris I. Walker, Mission Viejo: The
Ageless Land From Prehistory to Present (City of Mission Viejo, 2005), 60-61.
190
The Monterey Master Homes by Harlan Laskey Co. had at least two elevations that were reminiscent of Spanish
Revival architecture. One was a two-story house with a tiled, hipped roof and symmetrical arrangement of windows
and door in the tradition of the Mediterranean Revival. The other was a two-story stucco-clad house with
asymmetrical arrangement of windows and door, and multi-gabled roof forms covered in red clay tile. The front
entrance was framed with a parabolic arch.

97
roofs, glass curtain walls and exposed materials of concrete, wood and brick.
191
(Figure 5-15)
Architects such as Thornton Ladd and John Kelsey, Robert Mosher and Roy Drew and staff
architects Ricardo Nicol, Knowlton Fernald and Kevin Roche were among those responsible for
the first housing and public projects.
192
The landscape architects employed by the company for
the model homes and common areas of the subdivisions included leading Modernist firm, Eckbo,
Dean & Williams. The Irvine Company’s single family and semi-detached homes in University
Park combined vertical and horizontal paneling of a rustic Cape Cod style with Modernist shed
roofs and sloping ceilings, and little ornamentation.
193

191
Well, Laguna Niguel.
192
Ibid.
193
Alan Hess, “Discovering Irvine,” Places Journal, October 2014, 5, https://placesjournal.org/article/discovering-
irvine/
Figure 5-15 Niguel Terrace home designed by Schwager & Ballew, 1961 for the Laguna Niguel Corporation.
Knowlton Fernald Collection. Courtesy of Teosson Wells.

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Deane Homes
In 1965-1966, Deane Brothers was the first of the builders to begin building model homes,
selling plans and building new homes in Mission Viejo. The company’s president, Ben Deane
(1913-2005), had been a builder since the late 1940s and in 1958 started Deane Brothers with his
brothers, Jim and Dudley.
194
When the company first started working in Mission Viejo, it was
based in Huntington Beach, and later relocated to Newport Beach. With capital from a merger
with Occidental Pretroleum in 1966, Deane Brothers would go on to develop El Toro into the
master planned community that would become the Orange County city of Lake Forest.
195
When
they started building in Mission Viejo, they were a merchant builder with some novel ideas and a
successful track record.

In the two years before launching “Deane Homes” in Mission Viejo, Deane Brothers had
introduced the same floor plans and elevations in the new planned community of Diamond Bar,
in eastern Los Angeles County, and in Huntington Beach in northwest Orange County. The
housing market in the mid-1960s was in a slump, but Deane’s Diamond Bar tract was out-selling
others in Diamond Bar and this likely attracted Donald Bren’s attention.
196
As a researcher with
market research firm, Sanford R. Goodkin Research Corporation, John Martin was observing
housing trends very closely in this period.
197
Eventually Martin joined the Mission Viejo
Company as a marketing executive in 1968, but while at Goodkin in 1964 the Mission Viejo
Company was a client. According to Martin, Deane Homes’ success was related to their “garden
kitchen.”
198
A Deane garden kitchen had sliding windows that opened from the ceiling to the
countertop allowing for an unencumbered pass-through to a counter on the patio side. Much was
made of the concept in the press. The Los Angeles Times said in 1964 that the Deane’s garden

194
“Ben Deane, 92, built some of O. C.’s first tract homes,” Orange County Register, October 13, 2005.
195
Dennis McLellan, “Ben C. Deane, 92; Developer’s ‘Artistic Eye’ Helped Define the California Style in
Residences,” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2005, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/2184580508?accountid=14749.
196
“Diamond Point Sells 332 Homes in Year,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155244817?accountid=14749
197
The Sanford R. Goodkin papers are archived at San Diego State University. They were not accessible at time of
writing due to building construction.
198
Martin interview with Robert Breton, 2015. The development in Diamond Bar was called Diamond Point.
Mission Viejo’s Deane development was initially promoted as Diamond Point also, but was changed to “Deane
Homes” early on. The tract in Huntington Beach was called Deane Homes and Pacific Sands.

99
kitchen “embraces interior-exterior living to a greater and more practical degree than anything
we’ve encountered.”
199
The Deane Brothers’ promotional brochure said the kitchen becomes part
of the garden “…when the sliding windows over the counter are opened…” The up-to-the-
minute window framing of gold anodized aluminum was part of the garden kitchen package.
(Figure 5-16) In Mission Viejo, all but one of the Deane Brothers’ six plans offered the garden
kitchen.

Deane Brothers is said to have copied the garden kitchen idea from a house they’d seen while
collecting competitive intelligence in Florida in 1963.
200
As for the house designs themselves, an
architect-of-record for the Deane Homes’ developments was not identified but Norman Bloom
was cited as the designer of the model homes.
201
Named for the cut or shape of a diamond,

199
Tom Cameron, “Tract Embodies Ideas from Nationwide Survey,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1964,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/168611174?accountid=14749.
200
Former Mission Viejo marketing executive, John Martin, said that the garden kitchen was copied by Deane
Brothers from a house by Haft Gaines Inc. in Fort Lauderdale. Martin, oral history interview transcript, 72.
201
“Diamond Point Sells 332 Homes in Year,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155244817?accountid=14749.

Figure 5-16 Double-page spread featuring the “Garden Kitchen” from Deane Brothers brochure, “Deane Homes
Mission Viejo: An Exclusive Residential Community by Deane Brothers,” ca. 1964. Collection of Mrs. Dorsey
Lajoie.

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Bloom’s six plans were called Emerald, Tiffany, Chanticlaire, Jubilee, Briolette, and Marquis.
Among the floor plans, three were single-story variations of the Ranch house style with
intersecting gabled roofs and open, overhanging eaves. Some models had recessed entrances,
while others had broad but narrow porches.The split-level design had six different elevations
each with one of three different roof designs: cross-gabled, combined hipped-and-gabled, or
combined hipped, gabled and mansard. The two two-story floor plans were quite different from
each other. One was a traditional, Colonial Revival house with front-gabled roof, and the other
was a reversed saltbox roof, with the long sloping side facing the street. All plans included an
attached two-car garage on the main elevation that was either built flush with the house or
projected beyond it, toward the street.

It wasn’t unusual for builders of Ranch tracts in previous eras to offer a couple of
interchangeable plans with a variety of exterior aesthetic treatments. Deane Brothers took the
practice a step further in Diamond Bar, Huntington Beach and eventually, Mission Viejo,
contriving twenty six different houses for the home buying public to choose from with the same
eclectic mix from development to development. For each of the six Deane floor plans, between
three and six exterior designs were offered that played with roof form, cladding, and
ornamentation. Differences in style were superficial but a broad array of references were used to
market them, from Cape Cod to New Orleans. Most of the designs, however, were labelled a
version of “Spanish”: Spanish Villa, Castillian, Castillian Spanish, Mediterranean, Adobe
Spanish, Mission and Spanish Ranch. The Spanish-esque exteriors had one or more of the
following features: stucco wall surfaces, porches at the main entrance, arches beneath porch
roofs, visually heavy carved doors, ornamental iron and decorative vents. A red clay tile roof was
standard with the Spanish Villa and Mission versions of the elevations.(Figure 5-17)

Associations with the rancho era were also suggested. One exterior for the Tiffany plan was
labelled Early California. It had a shake roof, wooden rafters protruding from the roof line, and
wood board-and-batten covering the garage and the garage doors. The Rustic Ranch of the
Chanticlaire plan also featured board-and-batten on the garage and on the two-story sections of
the house. The two-story Jubilee’s Spanish Ranch was a Monterey Revival: it had a shake roof,
stucco walls, stationary window shutters, and a cantilevered balcony that ran the full length of

101
the main elevation. (Figure 5-18) But it was the Marquis plan’s Spanish Villa that appeared to be
the most direct revival of Spanish style. The red tile roof and white stucco walls provided the
first suggestions. The recessed entrance to the house was accessed through a gated courtyard, and
the one-story plan wrapped around the courtyard in a u-shape. (Figure 5-19) However, unlike
earlier haciendas, the courtyard in the Marquis was not designed for fluid movement between
indoors and out: with the exception of the entrance door, it was surrounded by solid walls.
202

202
The Marquis model included the “garden bath” which was a ceramic-tiled tub that had a view to a private garden.
The garden was a small walled section off the courtyard.
Figure 5-17 Deane Homes, Mission Viejo, Emerald floor plan, Mediterranean elevation, built ca. 1965.
This popular model had four arches under the eaves across a narrow entry porch with a wood-beamed
ceiling. Photograph by author.

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Figure 5-18 Deane Homes, Mission Viejo, Jubilee plan, Spanish Ranch elevation, built ca. 1965. Revival of the
Monterey Revival, symmetrical plan with full-width balcony and stationary shutters. Photograph by author.

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La Paz Homes
La Paz Homes opened in 1967 and was the first tract to be built by the Mission Viejo Company.
Assigning this new development the same name as the special thematic entrance suggests
Donald Bren wished to buttress the Spanish and ranch associations following Deane Brothers’
eclectic product. John Martin was involved in the discussions between Bren and the architect, Ed
Malone, whom Bren hired for the task in 1965. According to John Martin, Ed Malone
“understood Early California and the adaptation of the mission influence and Spanish Colonial
Revival.”
203
However, Malone and his La Jolla-based firm, Naegle and Malone, would be
constrained in their approach. Bren wanted them to combine their exterior designs with the best-

203
Martin, interview, 9.
Figure 5-19 Deane Homes, Mission Viejo, Marquis floor plan, Spanish Villa elevation, built 1966. U-shaped
with courtyard, white stucco walls, red tile roof and decorative pipe vents in gable. Photograph by author.

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selling floor plans in the region.
204
The outcome for La Paz Homes was an interpretation of Early
California styles with popular interiors found in San Clemente, Cerritos, San Diego, La Palma,
Huntington Beach, La Mirada, and elsewhere.
205
Naegle and Malone also designed the models
for the company’s second tract, Eldorado Homes, and in the same period, they designed the
company’s Saddle Club.

In practice together from 1962 to 1965, Edward Clyde Malone (1930-) and Dale William Naegle
(1928-2011) were both graduates of the School of Architecture at the University of Southern
California (USC).
206
Naegle graduated in 1954 and Malone in 1958 during a period at USC when
the architecture school was closely associated with Modernism. Leading architects in Southern
California such as William Pereira, A. Quincy Jones and Calvin Straub were on the USC faculty
in the 1950s. Many faculty members and visiting professors in the two decades after the Second
World War were associated with the Case Study program, the project of Art and Architecture
magazine to promote Modernist principles in housing with features such as post-and-beam
construction, overhanging roofs, open floor plans, glass curtain walls and wood, steel, and
concrete in their natural state.

While enrolled in architecture school, Malone was awarded fellowships in the offices of Victor
Gruen and William Pereira, and he designed a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los
Angeles in 1957, the year before he graduated. The Donald and Ruby Moreland Residence
reflects the post-and-beam aesthetic popular at USC at the time.
207
(Figure 5-20) After moving to
San Diego he became affiliated with a variety of local firms with whom he worked on large-scale

204
Martin, interview, 8-9. The five “best” floor plans according to Martin’s research were tracts in La Mirada by
John Lusk; Bay Ho in San Diego by American Housing Guild; Shorecliffs by Pacesetter in San Clemente; Robert H
Grant Corp in La Palma; and Wm Lyon Homes in Huntington Beach.
205
John Martin, “Creative Imitation is Born: The La Paz Homes Story,” Martin & Associates, n.d., 7-11. While with
market research firm, Sanford Goodkin, John Martin conducted the research for Bren and the Mission Viejo
Company. One of the La Paz floor plans, the San Verlarde, was a copy of plans by Larwin Company for houses in
Orange, Ventura and Los Angeles counties.
206
City of San Diego Historical Resources Board, “Biographies of Established Masters, 2011,”
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/201109biographies.pdf
207
“Edward C. Malone’s Silver Lake Post & Beam,” Modern Living LA,
http://modernlivingla.com/2012/11/edward-c-malone’s-silver-lake-post-beam/ The house was identified by Survey
LA as being eligible for the California Register of Historical Resources.

105

buildings such as the El Cortez Convention Center (1957) and the County General Hospital
(1960-1963).
208
By 1960, his focus shifted to housing projects when he joined Talaveres
Development as project architect, the company that built the unincorporated city of Clairemont
in San Diego County beginning the 1950s.
209
Following the work with Dale Naegle for the
Mission Viejo Company, Malone partnered with Donald Bren on Valencia Homes in the newly
launched planned community of Valencia on the former Newhall Ranch, and later with his wife,
Barbara Malone, developed a small subdivision on land they owned adjacent to their avocado
farm, known as Hidden Valley Ranch, in Poway.
210

208
Ed Malone, Modern San Diego, https://www.modernsandiego.com/people/ed-malone
209
Ibid.
210
Andrea Moss, “Hidden Valley Ranch Subdivision Approved,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 19,
2003, https://www.courant.com/sdut-hidden-valley-ranch-subdivision-approved-2003nov19-story.html
Figure 5-20 The Moreland Residence, 2840 W. Angus Street, Los Angeles, by Edward C. Malone (1957).
Historic Places LA, http://www.historicplacesla.org/reports/6ee2a30d-e688-4692-82e5-86f3eeec2753

106
Dale Naegle also worked with housing developers throughout his career, mostly in San Diego
County. He designed the Windemere community near Mount Soledad in the 1970s, Lawrence
Welk Village in Escondido, and he was also involved with affordable housing projects such as
the Rancho California Apartments in Temecula. Naegle’s designs of individual buildings and
custom homes were significant enough to place him on the City of San Diego Historic Resources
Board list of master architects.
211
He was one of a few architects who collaborated with Robert
Mosher of Mosher and Drew on the new campus of John Muir College at the University of
California San Diego (1966-1970). Naegle was the architect-of-record for the low-rise Stewart
Commons (1969) and student residence towers, Tenaya Hall (1968), Tioga Hall (1968) and
Tuolumne Apartments (1970). Naegle’s exposed concrete, Brutalist buildings followed the
Mosher plan for the Muir campus which has been described as a strikingly coordinated example

211
City of San Diego Historical Resources Board, “Biographies of Established Masters, 2011,”
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/201109biographies.pdf

Figure 5-21 Tenaya Hall, John Muir College at UC San Diego, by Dale Naegle (1968) Photograph by
Robert Glasheen, 1971. Robert Glasheen Photograph Collection. MSS 154. Special Collections &
Archives, UC San Diego.

107
of Modernism in its “use throughout of board-formed concrete, block-like massing, modular
design vocabulary, and the exterior expression of structure…”
212
(Figure 5-21)

Among Dale Naegle’s most noteworthy custom homes are the Sam Bell Residence (1955-1965),
the Robert B. Pappenfort Residence (1962) and the Katherine and Mansfield Mills Residence
(1959), all located in La Jolla. The Bell residence is a beach house designed as a round concrete
structure mounted on a tower. In the Pappenfort and Mills cases, Naegle employed a post-and-
beam aesthetic with indoor-outdoor space planning, and placed an emphasis on the roof forms.
(Figure 5-22) With his “Storefront Homes” in La Jolla, Naegle was widely praised for promoting

212
“Muir College Campus- Architecture,” https://muir.ucsd.edu/about/muircampus.html
Figure 5-22 Robert B. Pappenfort Residence, 5931 Citadel Circle, La Jolla, CA, Dale Naegle and Associates
(1962). Photograph by Julius Shulman, 1962. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(2004.R.10)

108
the idea of affordable housing and mixed-use in a light commercial district. Naegle seemed to
view any building project worthy of good architecture. As if referring to his firm’s projects in
Mission Viejo, he was quoted as saying:
We were doing houses with integrity, privacy, and dignity between $20,000
and $30,000 for people trying to climb onto the equity ladder. We couldn’t make
houses all look like Richard Neutra’s work because they wouldn’t sell… Later,
San Diego architects would have to increase density to yield affordability. Our
creativity came from trying to get a better yield for the client. We’re still trying
passionately to do this today.
213

Indeed, neither the iconic Modernism of the Los Angeles-based architect, Richard Neutra, nor
the USC School would be reproduced in the La Paz Homes tract by Naegle and Malone for the
Mission Viejo Company. Interior renderings for the Saddle Club demonstrate Naegle and
Malone’s dexterity in marrying Early California with the post-and-beam aesthetic they were
trained to carry out.(Figure 5-23) Unfortunately, the company’s plans to build the Saddle Club in
the new community never materialized.

The influence of a chastened Modernism was nonetheless demonstrated in La Paz Homes. On
the interiors, all models had floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors facing the backyard patio from
one or more rooms. The suggestion of an open plan could be seen in the split-level and two-story
models that had double-height ceilings at the entrance, interior balconies, and sloped ceilings in
the living room. Some of the kitchens were open to the family room.

213
“Dale William Naegle,” Modern San Diego https://www.modernsandiego.com/people/dale-naegle

109

While the roof forms of the one-story La Paz houses followed a conventional Ranch or Styled
Ranch type, the influence of Modernism is discerned in the roof forms of the split-level and two-
story La Paz Homes. The two single-story models, the San Juan and the San Angelo, were Ranch
style houses with low-pitched, cross-gabled or cross-hipped roofs and wide, open eaves.(Figure
5-24) Some models were embellished slightly with the addition of exposed rafter tails, flared
eaves, or a gable-on-hip detail. The multi-level houses, however, reflected trends in roof design
that began after 1945 but became popular in subdivisions in Southern California in the late
1960s.
214
Each of the four elevations of the split-level San Lorenzo had two volumes, a two-story

214
Virginia Savage McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 629. In
McAlester’s worldview, the La Paz Homes multi-story houses were vernacular versions of what she labelled the
Contemporary Modern House, among which the houses built by Joseph Eichler are included.
Figure 5-23 Architectural illustration of the interior of the Saddle Club, by Naegle and Malone (1966),
commissioned by the Mission Viejo Company. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

110

portion projecting to the front and containing a two-car garage, and a one-story portion to the
side, containing the main entrance. Roofs were cross-gabled with some variation. Two of the San
Lorenzo models had a deep gabled wing and vertical support sheltering the entry walk. Both the
San Martine split-level and the two-story San Miguel possessed a broad, asymmetrical
“sweeping roof.” In the elevations for these plans, the gable sweeps down in one continuous
plane from the two-story section to the one-story section.(Figure 5-25) The exposed beams and
the pattern under the wide open eaves are reminiscent of Dale Naegle’s roof expression on the
Pappenfort Residence. The use of exterior wood paneling on the San Martine model “A” is also
similar to the Pappenfort house.

Figure 5-24 La Paz Homes San Juan floor plan, “A” model with exposed beams under the overhanging eaves, and at
the end of the gable above the garage. From the La Paz Homes brochure, ca. 1965, Mission Viejo Library Collection.

111

Like the San Miguel, the two-story San Velarde was also introduced in 1968 with three
distinctive roof treatments that included a combination Mansard and reverse salt box, and a
combination sweeping roof and side-gabled roof. The third treatment was notable for its two
side-gabled roofs at different pitches, as well as for its overtly Spanish detail on the
facade.(Figure 5-26) Unlike the Monterey Revival and Ranch hacienda found amongst the Deane
Homes’ models, none of the La Paz houses imitate the form of a Spanish Colonial Revival
house. However, prominent elements on some La Paz models are Spanish-esque. An arched
wing wall that leads to the front entrance of this San Velarde elevation is strongly reminiscent of
the Spanish Revival. Clad in stucco, the wall is detailed in brick and connected to the house by
wood beams that present like vigas. The vigas project on the main elevation from the wing wall
to the garage. Other unmistakable suggestions of the Spanish revival were found on the main
elevation of one of the one-story San Angelo models where three arches were placed below the
eaves of the wide (but shallow) entrance porch, and on several multi-level models designed with
balconies above the garage decorated with ornate iron railings.

Figure 5-25 La Paz Homes, San Martine floor plan, “A” model, with a front gable sweeping roof form and beams
projecting beyond the eaves. La Paz Homes brochure, ca. 1965, Mission Viejo Library Collection.

112

The iron railings, as well as iron window grilles and decorative vents in the roof gable were
among the decorative elements on the La Paz models that conveyed a Spanish appearance. The
ubiquitous stucco cladding was found throughout the La Paz elevations, and other wall cladding
such as board-and-batten and wood shakes conveyed a rustic feeling. A few of the one-story
models looked like western ranch houses. They had broad entry porches with sheltering eaves
supported by wood columns or decorated with wood rafter ends. Like Deane Homes, some La
Paz models sported heavy-looking wood doors with raised panels. All models were illustrated in
the La Paz promotional brochure as having a shake roof. Several houses in the La Paz tract have
a red clay tile roof today but it wasn’t known to be offered as an option in the late 1960s.
215

215
John Martin, email message to author, May 20, 2020.
Figure 5-26 La Paz Homes’ San Velarde plan, C model with rough stucco cladding, projecting vigas, arched wing wall,
carved wood double doors and clay tile roof combine with 1960s Modernist features such as split level layout, integrated
garage, and varied roof forms. Photograph by author, 2019.

113
Marketing “Early California”
The Deane Homes and La Paz Homes were very similar products. Both used a variety of roof
forms which varied the massing and diversified the streetscape, distinguishing them from
hundreds of earlier postwar neighborhoods. They shared common roof variations, materials and
ornamentation. Both Deane Brothers and Mission Viejo Company sold houses that combined
Ranch and Modernist forms with Spanish and Early California features, and Deane took the
aesthetic a step further by offering a red tile roof, and a Monterey and hacienda revival in two of
their plans. The company also planted an olive tree in the front yard of each of their earliest
houses in Mission Viejo.
216

Yet Deane Brothers didn’t market the Spanish style of their homes. The marketing of all their
developments at the time highlighted the garden kitchen, and their Mission Viejo presentation
was no different. The introductory copy in their glossy Mission Viejo brochure refers to the
“majestic entrance” and the “unspoiled setting” of the new planned community, but does not
make reference to the rancho heritage.
217
(Figure 5-27) A two-page spread inside the brochure
was dedicated to the garden kitchen. And when the garden kitchen wasn’t the focus of their
newspaper advertisements, the swim and racquet club or the “garden bath” were. In spite of the
novelty of the Spanish and Rancho motifs evident in their home designs, Deane Brothers didn’t
view these as factors for attracting people to their model homes. In their Pacific Sands
development in 1963-1964 in Huntington Beach, Deane Brothers built the same floor plans and
elevations that they built in Mission Viejo but it was the proximity to the beach and the new
“Cabana Club” that were the driving messages in their publicity.
218

216
Larry Mettler (Mission Viejo resident and original Deane Homes homeowner), in conversation with the author,
January 17, 2020.
217
“Deane Homes Mission Viejo: An Exclusive Residential Community by Deane Brothers,” brochure, n.d.,
collection of Mrs. Dorsey Lajoie.
218
“Development’s Cabana Club Proves Popular,” Los Angeles Times, December 30, 1962,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168239360?accountid=14749; “Tract to Get Own Cabana Club,” Los Angeles
Times, May 13, 1962, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168140176?accountid=14749

114

The marketing strategy for La Paz Homes was very different and was closely aligned with the
Mission Viejo Company’s marketing of the new town as a whole. From the styled entrance of La
Paz Village to newspaper advertising about the new community, and from the company’s print
material to the model homes court, the whole package was contrived to make a customer feel
like they were buying a piece of the ranch. Accomplished and widely respected professionals
Figure 5-27 Deane Homes brochure, “Deane Homes Mission Viejo: An Exclusive Residential Community by
Deane Brothers,” ca. 1964. This page shows wo elevations of The Jubilee- Plan 6, Spanish Villa (E) and
Spanish Ranch (F) offered in a Monterey Revival style. Collection of Mrs. Dorsey Lajoie.

115
such as architectural photographer Julius Shulman were engaged to convey a thoughtful, high
quality brand.

The La Paz model court apparently surpassed previous efforts made elsewhere to sell tract
homes. Builders who visited the model home complex recall it setting a new, higher standard.
Here, John Martin points to Donald Bren’s direct involvement:
… Bren assembled the best consultant team in the industry and orchestrated
the product design and the execution of the merchandising presentation. Ed
Atkins, who joined the Mission Viejo Company [in] 1966 to build the La Paz
models, remembered Bren walking the homes while under construction and,
with a critical eye, moving walls a few inches to improve visual dimension
and the merchandising appeal.
219

The five model homes were arranged in a semi-circle in a landscape of lush green lawn.
Naturalistic plantings surrounded the homes.(Figure 5-28) In addition to the architects Naegle
and Malone, Bren hired landscape architect, Courtland Paul (1927-2003), to execute the outdoor
setting of the model court. Paul and his partner, Arthur Beggs, had designed several model home
complexes in Southern California beginning in the 1950s, including one for Deane Homes in
Huntington Beach in 1964.
220
Paul was a prominent landscape architect who undertook many
large-scale projects in his career such as the rehabilitation in 1976 of Orange County’s first park,
Irvine Park.
221
He was a founding board member of the American Society of Landscape
Architects and was appointed to the California State Board of Landscape Architects for two four-
year terms in the 1960s.
222

219
John Martin, “Creative Imitation is Born: The La Paz Homes Story,” Martin & Associates, no date, 4.
220
“Varied Home Styles Offered at Project,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1959,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/167480090?accountid=14749; “Tight Space is a Challenge in Pool Designing,” Los
Angeles Times, December 25, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155610703?accountid=14749
221
“Irvine Park Improvement Work Will Be Planned,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1976,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/158029133?accountid=14749
222
“Even the Grass May be Greener,” Coronado Journal, June 4, 1970,
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=CJ19700604.2.6&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

116

Another collaborator in the model home complex was interior designer, Virginia Douglas, of
Virginia Douglas & Associates in Los Angeles. Douglas, said to be “one of the West’s leading
interior decorators,” also contributed to several model home projects in the 1960s.
223
The
historicist references and Styled Ranch features of the exterior elevations produced by the La Paz
architects contrasted with their unadorned interiors. Some decorative iron was used as banisters
and beamed ceilings were common but otherwise the interiors that Douglas had to work with

223
“Mrs. Virginia Douglas, Head of Firm, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1971,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/156807690?accountid=14749. Douglas decorated the model homes for Huntington
Harbor, a $200,000,000.00 development in Huntington Beach in the early 1960s, in Dorothy Townsend, “A Model’s
Touch Makes Club ‘Home,’” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1963, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-
proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168374598?accountid=1474
Figure 5-28 La Paz Homes model home, San Juan plan. Naegle and Malone architects (1966). Situated in
the model home court designed by landscape architect, Courtauld Paul. Photograph by Julius Shulman,
1967. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).

117
were plain boxes. Barbara Lenox of the Los Angeles Times said Douglas’ decorating schemes for
the La Paz and Eldorado tracts elevated the suburban tract home by combining fine antiques with
bright colors, and creating a heavily layered space.
224
The hispanic theme applied elsewhere
didn’t appear to make it into Douglas’ brief, nor did the minimalist aesthetic of Modernism.
Her selection of soft and hard furnishings for the La Paz model homes was eclectic and reflected
a preference for Anglo-American Colonial Revival, more than Spanish.(Figure 5-29)

Capturing the creative work of the model homes court was the Los Angeles-based architectural
photographer, Julius Shulman. Shulman was hired for the Mission Viejo Company by public
relations consultant Larry Manzo to photograph the La Paz models and probably the Mission
Viejo Golf Club and the La Paz Plaza. At least until 1972, Shulman returned to Mission Viejo
several times for the Los Angeles Times to shoot the interiors of the La Paz and Eldorado Homes
models, and on behalf of the architects-of-record of the community’s public schools and
Saddleback College.
225
His earlier work in Palm Springs and Los Angeles would become
synonymous with the iconography of the modern movement in California. Shulman put the same
magic to work in Mission Viejo. His 1967 images of the model home interiors in another early
Mission Viejo development, Eldorado Homes, accentuate the bright color scheme and reveal the
eclectic and traditional interior design of the times.
226
Shulman also photographed the new golf

224
Barbara Lenox, “Decorating in the Developments,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155792448?accountid=14749; and Barbara Lenox, “Distinctive Design for a
Development House,” Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155461887?accountid=14749
225
Larry Manzo Public Relations hired Shulman for the La Paz photographs. Photos of the Eldorado Homes
interiors were commissioned by Manzo or directly by the Los Angeles Times, where they appeared. The Los Angeles
Times homes writer and editor, Barbara Lenox- who wrote the Mission Viejo pieces- worked frequently with
Shulman according to the Getty. With respect to the photographs of DMJM’s Mission Viejo Elementary School,
Shulman’s records show Cesar Pelli as his contact for that project.
226
Monica Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home (New Haven,
Conn., Yale University Press, 2017), 55-58.

118

course at Mission Viejo. As in nearby Laguna Niguel, the golf course was one of the first public
amenities built in Mission Viejo and it played an important role in shaping an image of leisure,
natural beauty and space in these master planned communities. The staged setting of the men and
women socializing in the foreground and the great vista in the distance shows that Shulman
understood this.(Figure 5-30)
Figure 5-29 Eldorado Homes model, Mission Viejo Company. Interior by Virginia
Douglas. Photograph by Julius Shulman, 1967. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).

119

Shulman’s photographs of the La Paz San Lorenzo model included close-ups of the Spanish
details: iron window grilles, clay pots and textured white stucco walls. The image of the house at
a distance was probably the most effective since it conveyed the picturesque home in a park-like
setting.(Figure 5-31) The photography was used to great effect in industry magazines and
newspaper articles and advertising, and in the company-produced, Mission Viejo Reporter. In the

Figure 5-30 Mission Viejo golf course. Julius Shulman, 1967. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).

120

La Paz Homes promotional brochure there was no color photography and the elevations for each
house were hand-drawn. Printed on a beige background, the illustrations were combined with
language that evoked a rancho lifestyle of the past.(Figure 5-32) The brochure cover was printed
dark brown and was designed to resemble two heavy carved wood doors, symbols of Spanish
architecture but also of stability and hospitality. Opening at the center, the brochure’s
introductory copy moves quickly to sales jargon, and to the rancho past:
The casual, elegant way of life that was early California can be yours
now in a La Paz Home in Mission Viejo. In a La Paz Home, you are
surrounded by early California heritage. Your homesite was once part
of the 53,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo, dating back to the King of
Spain… Mission Viejo itself is a unique blend of Spanish and
Figure 5-31 La Paz Homes model home, San Lorenzo plan. Naegle and Malone architects (1966).
Photograph by Julius Shulman, 1967. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(2004.R.10).

121
contemporary architecture. Public buildings all have Spanish red tile roofs.
The lampposts remind you of the El Camino Real…
227

The picture of rustic elegance conveyed in the La Paz Homes brochure is remarkably similar to
the brochure designed for Cliff May Homes in 1961.(Figure 5-33) Promoting the bespoke design
and building of his “modern ranch houses,” the brochure shares the same subdued color scheme
and language as the La Paz brochure. The brochure begins with the words, “life was carefree in
the romantic days of early California.” The sketched illustration of the front door on the cover is

227
La Paz Homes brochure, Mission Viejo Company, ca. 1965, Mission Viejo Library Collection.
Figure 5-32 La Paz Homes brochure, ca. 1965, outside front cover portraying heavy carved wood
doors. The brochure opens at the center. Mission Viejo Library Collection. Photograph by author.

122

combined on the inside with Maynard Parker’s black and white photographs of the interiors of
the large, sprawling ranch houses in May’s portfolio at mid-century.

In the first two years of home sales, houses in the Deane and La Paz subdivisions sold for
$21,000.00 to $30,000,00, and they proved to be very popular. Over 700 homes in the two tracts
were sold by the end of the first year, a remarkable result given the slow-down in the housing
market in 1966.
228
That year, a nation-wide credit crunch caused a dramatic drop in building
permits issued in six Southern California counties, including Orange County, disrupting the

228
Tom Cameron, “Mission Viejo Sells 700 Homes in Year of Building Slowdown,” Los Angeles Times, December
25, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155608244?accountid=14749
Figure 5-33 Cliff May Homes: California Ranch House Originals, outside front cover of brochure, 1961.
University of California Santa Barbara Architecture and Design Omeka.

123
conspicuous growth in the two decades since the Second World War.
229
Nonetheless, these early
Mission Viejo neighborhoods attracted unrelenting interest and sales from the buying public and,
in particular, from families from older, inland cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
Newspaper stories at the time reported long lines of people outside the sales offices and waiting
times as long as ten hours. Several hundred people camped on-site before parcels opened for
sale.
230
(Figure 5-34) Before the ninth unit of La Paz houses became available in November
1967, some prospective buyers set up their tents one week in advance. Fifty-three homes were
sold in the first two hours on that parcel’s opening day.
231
By November 1967, there were 4,485
residents in Mission Viejo, exceeding San Juan Capistrano’s population by two-fold.
232

229
John Martin, “Creative Imitation is Born: The La Paz Homes Story,” Martin & Associates, no date. Martin
reproduces a chart showing consolidated building permit data from Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego,
Orange and Los Angeles counties, for the years 1946 to 1995.
230
“Couples Wait 49 Hours to Buy New Houses,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155860037?accountid=14749; “Deane Tract Sells 55 Homes in Two Hours,” Los
Angeles Times, February 13, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155404738?accountid=14749; and Tom Cameron, “Nailing It Down: Care and
…Feeding of Buyers,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1966, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-
proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155544152?accountid=14749
231
“Fastest Growing Town Marks Anniversary,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1967,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155785619?accountid=14749
232
Ibid., and for comparison with San Juan Capistrano’s population, Mission Viejo Company Planning Department,
“Mission Viejo Company: Population and Employment, Mission Viejo and Vicinity,” March 10, 1969, 2.

124

Figure 5-34 “I’m a Squatter at Mission Viejo, 1968.” Photograph by Smetona Photo, March 1968.
Mission Viejo Library Collection.

125
Conclusion

The La Paz Homes architects, Dale Naegle and Ed Malone, would have been aware of Cliff May
when they were at USC in the mid-1950s when May’s work in Los Angeles was being published
widely. Even by the late 1960s, May’s work was still circulating in the popular press. In 1967,
the national shelter magazine, House and Garden featured his home known as Mandalay or Cliff
May House no. 5 in Los Angeles, and he completed a few high profile commissions such as the
Robert Mondavi Winery in Rutherford, California in 1966.
233
An image published in his 1961
brochure of an interior of one of his custom homes shows how May had fully integrated the post-
and-beam aesthetic of California Modernism into his later rancho “deluxe” designs.
234
(Figure C-
1) The high glass-filled gable, glass curtain walls and exposed rusticated wood beams can be
found in Naegle and Malone’s unbuilt design for the Mission Viejo Stable Club. (Figure 5-22)

In spite of the intertwining family history on the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, there’s no
evidence that Cliff May had a direct influence on the architects, builders or O’Neill founders of
early Mission Viejo.
235
The ranch house was an obvious precedent in Mission Viejo, and both
the Mission Viejo Company and Cliff May employed the nostalgic appeal of Early California to
sell houses, but the comparison is limited. In his custom homes, May was in a different league
artistically and commercially. Whereas the Mission Viejo homes were tract houses designed and
built for expediency, the materials and craftsmanship in a Cliff May home were of the highest
quality. May also adapted historic vernacular prototypes to his houses. For example, he may not
have used adobe bricks and limewash but he continued to simulate the texture of adobe in his
buildings, and the livable outdoor spaces found in the courtyards and corridors of the adobes of
the nineteenth century remained central to May’s plans into the 1960s.
236
In contrast, the

233
Daniel P. Gregory, Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 180; and Jocelyn Gibbs,
“Custom Homes by Cliff May” in Carefree California, 231.
234
David Bricker said that May’s embrace of Modernist features was directly influenced by former USC students
who worked for him such as William Cody. David Bricker, “Cliff May,” in Toward a Simpler Way of Life
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 290.
235
The La Paz Homes sales brochure was found in the Cliff May archive at UCSB. Fourth generation O’Neill and
current CEO of the Rancho Mission Viejo, Tony Moiso, said that he never knew Cliff May but his mother, Alice
O’Neill Avery, knew him on the ranch and in Brentwood, where they both had homes.
236
See the Robert Mondavi Winery, in Daniel Gregory, Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House, 210-219.

126

architecture in the first phase of Mission Viejo was an example of a free adaptation of some
elements of the Spanish Colonial Revival, and was not a serious study of the type. Naegle and
Malone were working within the contraints of a developer’s economic model. The Mission Viejo
Company sold the idea of Early California as a way of legitimizing their new and untested
commercial enterprise, and buyers accepted that. Eventually the hills and grassland were filled
with more houses and the promise of Early California evaporated, but the original vision to build
a city was achieved. In 1988, the City of Mission Viejo was incorporated and became the twenty-
seventh city in Orange County.

Figure C-1 A Cliff May interior, location unknown. Cliff May Homes, “California Ranch House Originals”
brochure, 2, 1961. Photograph by Maynard Parker. Cliff May papers, Architecture and Design Collection.
Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara.
http://www.adc-images.museum.ucsb.edu/index.php

127
Questions about authenticity have always followed the Spanish revivals. More important than
architectural fidelity though has been the charge that the style conceals a history of racial
discrimination and cultural appropriation. Scholars such as William Deverell have documented
how the narrative of the region’s Mexican origins was replaced by white and English speaking
community leaders who appropriated Mexican material and intangible culture and recast the
region’s ethnic history as their own.
237
The multi-ethnic and multi-racial history of Southern
California was excised, like the mural in Fullerton, even as Mexicans became naturalized US
citizens and their language and religion were protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in
1848, following the Mexican American War. The regional style built by ethnic Mexicans as the
primary tradesmen and craftsmen of the Spanish Colonial Revival was not available to them.
238

In the early twentieth century, people of color were formally excluded from the new
communities being built in the Spanish Revival such as San Clemente in Orange County and
Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County.
239
Economic and social barriers, if not legal or
bureaucratic, continued to prevail in the new towns of the 1960s.

Cultural appropriation as well as the assimilation of their language and culture to the dominant
Anglophone culture were among the grievances given voice by the Latino community in the
Chicano Movement that began in the 1960s in California. Journalist Ruben Salazar (1928-1970)
described the basis for the movement to the mainstream readership of the Los Angeles Times in a
series of six articles in 1963. Salazar became a reporter and foreign correspondent for the
newspaper in 1959, and was the first Latino to occupy these roles.
240
The articles, which received
widespread attention, addressed Mexican American history as well as the challenges and
achievements of the community in Los Angeles at the time.
241
Salazar asked why Spanish

237
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe.
238
Schutten, Myth and Mirage, 111-131.
239
Rancho Santa Fe: A California Village 5
th
Ed. (Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society, Rancho Santa Fe, CA, 2004),
150.
240
“About this Collection,” Ruben Salazar papers, USC Digital Library, University of Southern California,
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll78
241
Felix F. Gutierrez, “More Than 200 Years of Latino Media in the United States,” American Latino Theme Study:
Media (National Park Service), https://www.nps.gov/articles/latinothemestudymedia.htm; “Times Series Takes
Honors at State Fair,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1963, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-
proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168382272?accountid=14749; and “Times, Writer to Get Award for
Articles,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1963, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168332272?accountid=14749

128
heritage was celebrated when the city’s original settlers were mostly Mexican and indigenous,
adding that many ancestors were in California before Spain’s colonization.
242
He wrote about the
connection between historical inequities and the lower incomes, higher school drop-out rates and
poorer health outcomes Latinos experienced.
243
He pointed out the irony of the Spanish fantasy
past supported by the white majority and quoted a Latino physician who was active in Mexican
American affairs in East Los Angeles, who asked, “Why is it all right to continue to call many of
our cities and streets by Spanish names, encourage Mexican-Spanish architecture, praise and eat
Mexican food and still expect Mexican Americans to become wholly Anglicized?”
244

In Mission Viejo in 1970, the first year a census was taken, the schools recorded that 3.9% of
students had “Spanish surnames.”
245
Typical for the new and old communities of southern
Orange County at the time, Mission Viejo had a very small minority of non-white residents who
owned a house in 1970. Out of 3,061 owner-occupied homes, just twenty-eight were occupied by
non-white property owners. In the same year, in the much older city of Laguna Beach, just over
10% of owner-residents were non-white. Housing discrimination was illegal in California by the
late 1960s, and while it is believed to be unlikely, it’s not known for certain if the Mission Viejo
Company property deeds contained racial restrictions when it began to sell houses in 1965.
246
At
least as of October 1968, there were no formal restrictions based on race.
247
The company was
obviously conscious of the disparity. In an internal document in 1971, the company predicted
that “with future economic expansion of Mission Viejo and southern Orange County and its

242
Ruben Salazar, “Heritage of El Pueblo: Spanish-Speaking Angelenos: A Culture in Search of a Name,” Los
Angeles Times, February 24, 1963, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168282486?accountid=14749

243
Ruben Salazar, “Little Mexico: Serape Belt Occupies City’s Heart,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1963,
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168286587?accountid=14749
244
Ruben Salazar, “Heritage of El Pueblo: Leader Calls Effort to Aid Mexican Americans Failure, Approach to
Problems Held Wrong,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1963, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-
proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168193899?accountid=14749
245
Environmental Systems Division, Mission Viejo Company, “VII: Social Elements,” April 1971, 65-66, Mission
Viejo Library Collection.
246
California’s Proposition 14 which reversed the Rumsford Fair Housing Act of 1963 was overturned by the
Supreme Court in 1967. But the Rumsford Fair Housing Act did not outlaw all forms of housing discrimination
according to historian, Ryan Reft, “How Prop 14 Shaped California’s Racial Covenants,” September 20, 2017
https://www.kcet.org/shows/city-rising/how-prop-14-shaped-californias-racial-covenants
247
Mission Viejo Company, “Tract Number 6642: Declaration of Establishments of Restrictions, Easements,
Conditions, Covenants and Reservations,” December 13, 1968, 65-66, Mission Viejo Library Collection.

129
attendant employment opportunities and with increased availability of low and moderate income
housing, the racial and ethnic composition of Mission Viejo should more closely reflect that of
the Orange County region in the years ahead.”
248

While the Spanish Colonial Revival was adopted for Mission Viejo, reuse of historical motifs
from different eras and different cultural traditions were widely embraced by Americans in the
new suburbs in the same period throughout the US. It became popular for builders, for example,
to simulate a Tudor style in new homes by adding leaded glass windows to the main elevation
and applying a pattern of wood trim to the gable apex. It is possible that challenges to the
established order in this era initiated by social movements, on the one hand, and the expansion of
the middle class, on the other hand, prompted a retreat to traditional, recognizable motifs in
architecture. But understanding the link between these phenomena is the subject for another
thesis. The subject is more complex when one considers that the suburban historical revival was
international in scope and has continued in suburbs throughout North America to the present
day.
249

Builders and builder’s architects in this time responded to shifts in demand and consumer taste.
The La Paz and Deane houses in Mission Viejo were a mix of modern and popular floor plans
with a pastiche on the façade of familiar historical elements. This eclectic combination was
represented in plan books and magazines of the period.
250
The minimalist aesthetic seen in
professional journals and elite magazines such as Progressive Architecture or Art and
Architecture was rejected by popular tastemakers such as Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House
Beautiful until 1964, and by other high circulation magazines such as Good Housekeeping,
Better Homes and Garden, and Sunset.
251

From a purely stylistic point of view, Mission Viejo’s romantic rancho revival is the beginning
of a deeper reaction to Modernism that culminates in Irvine and elsewhere in Southern California

248
Environmental Systems Division, Mission Viejo Company.
249
Richard Harris and Nadine Dostrovsky, “The Suburban Culture of Building and the Reassuring Revival of
Historicist Architecture Since 1970,” in Home Cultures 5, no. 2(2008), 168, DOI: 10.2752/174063108X333173
250
McAlester, 695.
251
Penick, Tastemaker, 25-26.

130
in the 1980s. The late 1960s are seen as a “minor revival” by some architectural historians
because the historic overlay was light and houses were still influenced by the clean lines of
Modernism.
252
A subsequent wave in the 1980s saw those clean lines disappear and a riot of
Spanish ornamentation and Spanish-like forms took hold in architect-designed and commonplace
houses and commercial buildings throughout Southern California and the Southwest.
253
In
Orange County, the renaissance may have been prompted by Donald Bren, who in 1983 took
control of the Irvine Company and the tens of thousands of undeveloped acreage of the Irvine
Ranch that still existed at the time, and by 1997 became the company’s sole shareholder. It was
Bren’s vision to make the transition from contemporary and Shed style to Spanish and
Mediterranean styles in the Irvine subdivisions and shopping plazas from the mid-1980s
onward.
254
The architecture of the Irvine Spectrum Center was informed by Bren’s travels to the
Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

Beyond the study period and into the 1970s, residential design in Mission Viejo kept to the
simple lines but moved away from split-level plans and sweeping roofs. The massing of both the
one- and two-story homes became larger and roof proportions also seemed to get bigger. Stucco
continued to be a primary material both on its own and in combination with other rustic finishes.
Red clay tile on the roof became increasingly popular suggesting that the Mission Viejo
Company redoubled its commitment to the Spanish Colonial Revival in its new developments in
the 1970s and 1980s.(Figure C-2) Spanish symbols continued to appear in sales brochures, and
the Spanish naming convention for subdivisions persisted at least into the 1980s, however,
references to Early California or the historic ranch in the company’s ad copy all but disappeared
sometime in the 1970s.
255
(Figure C-3)

Unfolding at the same time as the historicist revival in the suburban tract house but on a much
more limited scale, was the architectural style known as Postmodernism. The Vanna Venturi
House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania was completed in 1964 by Robert Venturi and is

252
Andrew Hope et al., “Tract Housing in California, 1945-1973,” 90.
253
Lawrence Cheek, “Taco Deco: Spanish Revival Revisited,” in Journal of the Southwest 32, no. 4 (Winter 1990),
491-498, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40169771
254
Reem, “Donald Bren,” 40.
255
Names of later subdivisions included Castille, Mallorca and Barcelona.

131

considered to be the first Postmodern house.
256
The exaggerated open gable and flat plane of the
façade is suggestive of the most traditional, child-like and anti-Modern image of a house.
Challenging the tenets of Modernism at the time was architect and thinker Charles Moore (1925-
1993) who taught and practiced in California and wrote widely about the state’s architecture

256
Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), p.
189.
Figure C-2 Model home in the Casta del Sol subdivision, Mission Viejo Company, 1972. Mission Viejo
Library Collection.

132

throughout his career. Moore believed that as a society we’d moved too far in our built
environment toward a global style that didn’t do enough to distinguish between private and
public spaces, and in which architecture was neither rooted in local identities nor sensitive to
local geography. In 1965 his influential article “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” wherein
Figure C-3 Sales brochure cover for the subdivision, Casta del Sol, Mission Viejo
Company, 1974. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

133
he famously championed Disneyland for offering more to civic life than had most major public
projects in the postwar period, Moore said of California cities that “they urgently need attention,
before the characteristics that distinguish them at all are obliterated.”
257

The lack of intellectual cohesion between the interior and exterior of a Mission Viejo house and
the absence of an authentic town square at least in the Mission Viejo of the late 1960s would
have disqualified it as a properly Postmodern place. But Charles Moore might have appreciated
efforts of early Mission Viejo to build community and create a sense of place that related to the
local landscape and history. In one of Moore’s later lectures on the architectural history of the
Spanish Revival in the Southwest, he encouraged the appreciation of the “innocent vernacular
Hispanicism” of the commercial landscape precisely because places like Taco Bell- with its
Mission style parapet and mid-century Southern California origins- had meaning for the general
public.
258

Moore himself was a practitioner of the historicist revival in the 1980s, most notably with the
renovation of the Beverly Hills Civic Center, from 1981 to 1990, which has been called a
“Postmodern, Spanish-Art Deco hybrid in its plan of courtyards, colonnades, promenades, and
buildings.”
259
He also directly influenced the trend, at least in San Juan Capistrano. In 1979, the
city commissioned Moore and his Los Angeles firm, Moore Ruble Yudell to develop
architectural guidelines for building in the historic mission district and on the “sensitive hillside
areas” in the expanding city.
260
For the historic district, the guidelines stated that the “various
strains of Historic Spanish styles are available to draw on for this area. The qualities and
elements we would most like to encourage are: intimacy, small courts or arcaded spaces, play of
light (shade and shadow), layering of views and spaces, vegetation close to or on the buildings,

257
Charles Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” in You Have to Pay for the Public Life (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2001), 139.
258
Charles Moore, “Hispanic Lecture,” in You Have to Pay for the Public Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 364.
259
Los Angeles Conservancy, “Beverly Hills Civic Center,” https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/beverly-hills-
civic-center
260
Thomas Merrell (Director of Community Planning and Development, City of San Juan Capistrano), letter
addressed to Charles Moore, Moore, Ruble, Yudell in Santa Monica, May 3, 1979, City of San Juan Capistrano
records. The letter formally engages the firm to provide “Architectural Design Guidelines and Standards for Grading
in Sensitive Hillside Areas.”

134
richness of surface.”
261
The guidelines were given to Michael Graves to interpret after he was
awarded the commission to design the city’s new library.
262
Graves followed the guidelines
closely, drawing on a variety of classical and historical styles including Spanish Colonial, and
created a successful avant garde complement to the historic mission that opened in 1983.

In 1989, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Leon Whiteson wrote about the Spanish Colonial
Revival and its revived appeal in the 1980s. Citing Irvine and Calabasas, Whiteson wrote that it
“has attracted a wide spectrum of designers, from architects who work within the mass market
residential subdivision industry to those who plan large private villas.” Seeking answers for why
the style persisted in the region, Whiteson quoted Charles Moore, who explained that “it is a
Southland archetype. It is the image of our transformed semi-desert, climatically Mediterranean
landscape, the architecture of our innocence. It is our primal idea of home.”
263
At some level the
leaders and designers who were re-creating their idea of Early California in Mission Viejo in the
late 1960s tapped into this primal image of home, once again bringing to the surface the tension
in the origin story of Southern California’s Spanish past and re-establishing its central role in
regional iconography for decades to come.

261
Moore, Ruble, Yudell, “Guidelines for the Architectural Style of the City of San Juan Capistrano,” n.d., 2, the
Charles Moore Collection, University of Texas Libraries, Austin.
262
Graves referenced “Moore’s manual” in an interview in Designers West magazine in 1984. Moore as well as
Robert A.M. Stern were shortlisted with Graves in the San Juan Capistrano library competition. “Master Architects
on Interiors: Michael Graves, FAIA, Discusses the San Juan Capistrano Public Library,” Designers West, April
1984, 77, San Juan Capistrano Library Collection; and John Pastier, “Missionary Graves,” The Architectural Review
Vol 176, No 1052 (London: October 1984): 55.
263
Leon Whiteson, “’20s Spanish Style Needs No Revival: Red Tile Roofs, White Walls Endure as Southland
Favorites,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1989, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/280712413?accountid=14749

135
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Newspapers and Magazines

Ainsworth, Ed. “Beloved Rancher Bill Magee Dies.” Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, April 11,
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Boettner, Jack. “2 Huge Preserves Approved in Split Vote by Supervisors.” Los Angeles Times,
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Brennan, Pat. “Along with ranching scion O’Neill, O.C. history passes away.” Orange County
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Cameron, Tom. “Mission Viejo Sells 700 Homes in Year of Building Slowdown.” Los Angeles
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Cameron, Tom. “Nailing It Down: Care and …Feeding of Buyers.” Los Angeles Times,
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Cameron, Tom. “Nailing It Down: Research Big Planning Aid.” Los Angeles Times, September
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Cameron, Tom. “Tract Embodies Ideas from Nationwide Survey.” Los Angeles Times, June 21,
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Cruz, Mimi Ko. “The Renaissance of a Fullerton Mural.” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1997.
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Huxtable, Ada Louise. “America: Land of the Disposable Environment.” New York Times,
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/117074807?accountid=14749

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Architecture: Tall Housing Rises in Europe.” New York Times,
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Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Dutch Planning: Cities in a Box.” New York Times, December 12, 1965.
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Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Fully Planned Town Opens in Virginia.” New York Times, December 5,
1965. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/116765871?accountid=14749

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Old Town Blues.” New York Times, November 14, 1965.
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Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Sweden Avoids U.S. Suburban Sprawl by Close Control of Housing.”
New York Times, November 28, 1965. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/117066162?accountid=14749

Huxtable, Ada Louise. “Western Europe Is Found to Lead U.S. in Community Planning.” New
York Times, November 22, 1965. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/117056772?accountid=14749.

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Lenox, Barbara. “Decorating in the Developments.” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1967.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155792448?accountid=14749;

Lenox, Barbara. “Distinctive Design for a Development House.” Los Angeles Times, June 5,
1966. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155461887?accountid=14749

McArthur, Mildred Yorba. “Early Mission Vieja Charm Still Remains.” Los Angeles Times,
November 24, 1957. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/167225673?accountid=14749

McLellan, Dennis. “Ben C. Deane, 92; Developer’s ‘Artistic Eye’ Helped Define the California
Style in Residences.” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 2005.
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/2184580508?accountid=14749.

Moss, Andrea. “Hidden Valley Ranch Subdivision Approved.” San Diego Union-Tribune,
November 19, 2003. https://www.courant.com/sdut-hidden-valley-ranch-subdivision-approved-
2003nov19-story.html

Pollack, Andrew. “Earle Jorgensen, Reagan Adviser, Dies at 101.” New York Times, August 13,
1999. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
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Salazar, Ruben. “Heritage of El Pueblo: Leader Calls Effort to Aid Mexican Americans Failure,
Approach to Problems Held Wrong.” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1963.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168193899?accountid=14749

Salazar, Ruben. “Heritage of El Pueblo: Spanish-Speaking Angelenos: A Culture in Search of a
Name.” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1963. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-
proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168282486?accountid=14749

Salazar, Ruben. “Little Mexico: Serape Belt Occupies City’s Heart.” Los Angeles Times,
February 26, 1963. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168286587?accountid=14749

Salazar, Ruben. “Mexican-Americans Have Culture Protected by 1848 U.S. Treaty.” Los Angeles
Times, March 1, 1963. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/168339733?accountid=14749.

Salazar, Ruben. “Mexican-Americans Lack Political Power: They Often Agree on Anglo
Politician, but Rarely on Supporting One of Their Own.” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1963.
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/168265387?accountid=14749.

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Salazar, Ruben. “Mexican-Americans Succeeding: Members of Ethnic Group Make Good in
Many Fields.” Los Angeles Times, February 28,
1963. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/168286805?accountid=14749

Smith, Don. “’Bootleg’ Subdivisions Outlawed By New Ordinance.” Los Angeles Times, August
23, 1959, http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167481722?accountid=14749

Smith, Don. “Most Planned County Lacks Own Guidelines.” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1968.
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155878464?accountid=14749

Smith, Don. “South County Awaits Boom: Freeway Opens Rural Area for Development.” Los
Angeles Times, November 26, 1961. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168007570?accountid=14749

Smith, Don. “Vast County Strides Seen—2.5 Million 1980 Population.” Los Angeles Times, July
16, 1959. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167486111?accountid=14749

Townsend, Dorothy. “A Model’s Touch Makes Club ‘Home.’” Los Angeles Times, August 22,
1963. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168374598?accountid=1474

Whiteson, Leon. “’20s Spanish Style Needs No Revival: Red Tile Roofs, White Walls Endure as
Southland Favorites.” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1989.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/280712413?accountid=14749

“$1.2 Million Apartments Completed at Newport.” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1961.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/167898214?accountid=1474

“Board Chairman Buys 80% Interest in Mission Viejo.” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1967.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155654434?accountid=14749

“Bridge Opens Mission Viejo Main Entrance.” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1965.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155265557?accountid=14749

“Couples Wait 49 Hours to Buy New Houses.” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1967.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155860037?accountid=14749

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“Deane Tract Sells 55 Homes in Two Hours.” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1966.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155404738?accountid=14749

“Development’s Cabana Club Proves Popular.” Los Angeles Times, December 30, 1962.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168239360?accountid=14749

“Diamond Point Sells 332 Homes in Year.” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155244817?accountid=14749

“Even the Grass May be Greener.” Coronado Journal, June 4, 1970.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=CJ19700604.2.6&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

“Fastest Growing Town Marks Anniversary.” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1967.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155785619?accountid=14749

“High School Mural Doomed; Paint It Out, Trustees Order.” Fullerton News Tribune, August 30,
1939. Fullerton Public Library Collection.

“Historic Ranch Master Plan to be Prepared.” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1962.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168110625?accountid=1474

“Irvine Park Improvement Work Will Be Planned.” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1976.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/158029133?accountid=14749

“Kassler to Paint Federal Murals.” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1935.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/163273005?accountid=14749

“The Land: the Man with the Plan.” TIME Magazine 82, no. 10 (September 6, 1963).
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,870487-1,00.html

“Long Beach Berth: Firm Plans Setting for the Queen Mary.” Los Angeles Times, November 19,
1967. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155728782?accountid=14749

“Marguerite O’Neill School First Elementary in Mission.” Tustin News, December 7, 1967.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=TN19671207.1.9&srpos=1&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-
Marguerite+O%27Neill+school+first+elementary+in+mission-------1

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“Mission Viejo: a brand new 200-year old idea.” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1966.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155459024?accountid=14749

“Mission Viejo Captures Mood of Old California.” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1965.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155285871?accountid=14749

“Mrs. Virginia Douglas, Head of Firm, Dies.” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1971.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/156807690?accountid=14749.

“Proponents Drop Plan to Join City.” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1964.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/154998281?accountid=14749

“Replicas of Title to be Presented.” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1967.
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/155749597?accountid=14749

“Tight Space is a Challenge in Pool Designing.” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1966.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/155610703?accountid=14749

“Times, Writer to Get Award for Articles.” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1963.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168332272?accountid=14749

“Tract to Get Own Cabana Club.” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1962.
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com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/168140176?accountid=14749

“Varied Home Styles Offered at Project.” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 1959.
http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/docview/167480090?accountid=14749;

“Water, Sewer Bonds for Ranch Land OKd.” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1964.
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/154957534?accountid=14749

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Other Media

“America’s Forgotten History of Mexican-American ‘Repatriation’.” Interview with Francisco
Balderrama,” by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, September 10, 2015.
https://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-
repatriation

Progressive Architecture (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1958-1965), collection
of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library, School of Architecture, University of Southern
California.

Unpublished Material

Arthur D. Little, Inc., “Mission Viejo Company: A Financial Diversification Opportunity,”
report for Philip Morris, Inc., August 1969. Mission Viejo Library Collection.

Mission Viejo Company Environmental Systems, Report, April 1971, Mission Viejo Library
Collection.

Mission Viejo Company, “General Plan of Development for the Northwesterly Eleven Thousand
Acres of the Mission Viejo Ranch,” June 9, 1964.

Mission Viejo Company Planning Department, “Mission Viejo, California: A New Town,”
December 1969, Mission Viejo Library Collection.

Orange County Planning Department, “General Plan for Mission Viejo Ranch- Westerly
Portion,” November 1965, Orange County Archives.

Richey, Debora, et al. “Pastoral California.” Primary record prepared for the State of California,
Department of Parks and Recreation (draft, dated January 2020).

Sleeper, Jim. “Rancho Mission Viejo: Where History is Still Happening” (unpublished
manuscript, no date). Jim Sleeper papers. MS-R173. Special Collections and Archives, The UC
Irvine Librairies, Irvine, CA.

Van Wormer, Stephen R. and Susan D. Walter. “Historical Artifact Analysis from CA-ORA-
1301H, Mission Viejo, South Orange County, California, April 1993, Mission Viejo Library
Collection.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Spanish Colonial Revival was famously adopted by architects and builders in Southern California in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Second World War, white stucco walls and red tile roofs had become commonplace throughout the region. However, in the race to satisfy the housing demand in the post-war period, neither the materials nor the motifs of the Spanish Colonial Revival were employed in any visible way in the mass building that took place. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Spanish Colonial Revival influences in residential and commercial development began to reappear. The new master planned community of Mission Viejo was among the first to reflect a Spanish and Early California theme, implemented by the Mission Viejo Company and Deane Brothers between 1964 and 1967. ❧ Mission Viejo was made possible by the intersection of comprehensive regional development, widely promoted ideas about master planning and the construction technology to carry them out, and the availability of a large tract of land. The relative isolation of the new community in the undeveloped countryside of southern Orange County in 1964 required a special presentation to woo home buyers. Located on ranch land associated with Spanish mission, Mexican-California and Anglo-American agrarian culture, the Mission Viejo Company successfully drew on this rancho history to shape its residential, commercial and institutional building product. ❧ The historicist revival that began in the late 1960s has not faded. Today, Spanish style architecture remains popular in Southern California but it is also taken for granted or disparaged for its homogeneity and association with a romanticized past. Yet its central role in regional iconography makes it a worthy subject of architectural history and this thesis attempts to provide a context for understanding it. Further study in the field is needed to identify other 1960s era subdivisions and communities in order to understand the scope of the mid-century revival in Southern California and the possibilities for heritage conservation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Nicholds, Krista (author)

Core Title The enduring romance of the Rancho: Mission Viejo, 1964 to 1967

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Heritage Conservation

Degree Program Heritage Conservation

Publication Date 08/05/2020

Defense Date 07/01/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,American period,Andres Pico,Anthony Moiso,Barbara Lenox,Benjamin Cady Deane,board and batten,built environment,Camp Pendleton,cattle ranching,Charles Kassler,Charles Moore,Chris Choate,Cliff May,Cliff May Homes,community builders,Comstock Load,Courtland Paul,cultural appropriation,Dale Naegle,Deane Brothers,Deane Homes,Donald Bren,Early California,Edward C. Malone,Estudillo family,garden kitchen,Guadalupe Avila Forster,Harry Bergh,historic architecture,historicist revival,Irvine Company,James C. Flood,James L. Flood,James Toepfer,Jane Magee,Jerome O'Neill,Joseph Linesch,Juan Forster,Julius Shulman,La Paz Homes,La Paz Plaza,La Paz Road entrance,Las Flores adobe,lima bean farming,Magee family,Marcos Forster,Marguerite “Daisy” Moore O'Neill,master planned community,Mexican California,Mission Revival,Mission San Juan Capistrano,Mission San Luis Rey,Mission Viejo,Mission Viejo Company,modernism,Monterey Revival style,Naegle,Norman Bloom,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orange County,Pastoral California,Philip J. Reilly,Pio Pico,planned community,ranch,Ranch house style,rancho,Rancho Mission Viejo y La Paz,Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores,Rancho Trabuco,Raymond Watson,red clay tile roof,Richard J. O'Neill,Richard O'Neill Sr.,rustic materials,San Juan Capistrano,Santa Margarita ranch house,Spanish California,Spanish Colonial Revival,Spanish fantasy past,split level plans,stucco walls,Styled Ranch,suburban development,suburban tract house,sweeping roof,Vernacular architecture,vernacular landscape,Virginia Douglas,Williamson Act

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Breisch, Kenneth Alan (committee chair), Bricker, Lauren Weiss (committee member), Horak, Kathryn Elizabeth (committee member)

Creator Email krista_nicholds@me.com,nicholds@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-359247

Unique identifier UC11666383

Identifier etd-NicholdsKr-8889.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-359247 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-NicholdsKr-8889.pdf

Dmrecord 359247

Document Type Thesis

Rights Nicholds, Krista

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA