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I generally avoid pyromaniacal holidays (how would YOU feel if someone threw an explosive onto the Ventura Freeway?), but Independence Day always holds a special place in my heart —and not only because I survived San Diego’s 2012 display. Our country’s history is so full of revolutions apart from that which founded it, so it only seems fitting that our must-see-home of the holiday was designed by a man who broke glass ceilings: Paul Revere Williams.
Williams was the first Black man inducted into the American Institute of Architects and his Euro-centric style is on full display in the John H. and Olive Straub House. A brilliant melange of Tudor details and Mediterranean bones update the traditional English cottage to something that is distinctly American. The pitched gable roof’s latticed bay windows, the Grecian arches with French windows, and the fantastically Californian jadeite tiles in the bathroom are a holiday parade unto themselves, but it’s Williams’s beamed, vaulted, and decorated ceilings that will have you looking up in awe without disrupting my buddy Pigeon’s flight home.
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