Spanish Revival Kitchens

Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean Revival, and the Monterey Revival that is California’s own variant were built across Northern California in the same decades as the Tudor and Colonial Revivals, and often on the same streets. East Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties has its Spanish houses alongside its Tudors; Saratoga and Los Gatos have Spanish Revival cottages and estates on the slopes below the Santa Cruz Mountains; Sonoma has the oldest references of all, in the adobes around a Plaza that is a National Historic Landmark; and Palo Alto’s Ramona Street Architectural District, one of the four districts the city lists on the National Register, is a small commercial run of the style at its most complete. Santa Barbara is the reference city for the style statewide, and anyone designing a Spanish Revival kitchen ends up looking there.

What the houses share inside is a palette that is not square, not flat, and not painted. Walls are hand-troweled plaster with a visible texture, and corners are often rounded rather than sharp. Openings between rooms are arches, sometimes with a plaster hood over the range alcove. Floors are terracotta or Saltillo tile, counters and backsplashes are decorative glazed tile in strong colours, stair risers carry tile, and ceilings show stained or painted beams. The original kitchen cabinetry was usually painted softwood, plain and inset, with a few open shelves and a tiled counter; the stained-wood, wrought-iron hacienda kitchen is as much a later interpretation as an original one, but it is the interpretation most owners of these houses want, and it can be done with restraint.

The consequence for cabinetry is that every edge of a cabinet meets a material that will not be straight. The scribe to a troweled plaster wall is not a line but a surface; a cabinet end against a plaster arch has to follow a curve; a countertop built up in tile has a thickness and a module that the cabinet height must anticipate. These are the three technical problems of a Spanish Revival kitchen, and the style questions — plank or panel, iron or bronze, alder or walnut — sit on top of them.

Decorative tile — a patterned backsplash, a tiled counter edge, a run of deco tiles above the range — comes in a fixed module, and the kitchen looks finished only when whole tiles land where the eye expects them: at the end of a counter, at the edge of a window, at the top of a backsplash under the uppers. A cabinet run that is half a tile too long forces a cut tile at the most visible place. The sequence that avoids it is to lay out the tile on the plan, including grout joints and trim pieces, and then set the cabinet widths, the counter overhang, and the height of the uppers to that layout. Fillers and end panels absorb the difference, invisibly, rather than the tile.

A tiled countertop is also built up on a substrate and is thicker than a stone slab, so the cabinet height is set so that the finished tile surface lands where it should and the dishwasher still fits beneath; a tiled counter edge projects in front of the face frame and its line must agree with the reveals below. All of it has to be decided before the cabinets are built, which is why the tile selection belongs in the first design meeting and not the last.

Where the house has original tile — a backsplash, a counter, stair risers — it is kept. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation ask that distinctive materials, finishes and examples of craftsmanship be preserved and that deteriorated features be repaired rather than replaced, and original California tile of the 1920s and 1930s is exactly the kind of feature they mean. New cabinetry is fitted to it; it is not removed to make the cabinetry easier.

The hacienda kitchen is a composition of a few strong elements. Open shelves on forged brackets, often set into a plaster niche, carry the everyday dishes and give the plaster room to show. Lower cabinets in stained wood with plank or flat-panel doors carry the weight. A range alcove under a plaster hood, tiled inside, is the focal point, and a tall pantry or larder cabinet with a pair of plank doors on strap hinges is the second. Beams, real or applied, run across the ceiling, and the lighting is iron. Everything else — the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the small appliances — is either panelled to disappear or set behind a door.

The hardware is forged or wrought iron and is doing more visual work than in any other period style: strap hinges, ring pulls, drop pulls, surface latches, decorative clavos on plank doors. The restraint is in quantity. A kitchen where every door has a strap hinge is a theme restaurant; a kitchen where the larder doors have strap hinges and the rest have small dark butt hinges and forged knobs is a house. Polished brass and nickel, correct in a Colonial Revival pantry, are wrong here; a dark oil-rubbed bronze is the modern compromise where true iron is unavailable in a given size.

The Monterey Revival, California’s own hybrid of the adobe and the New England house, pulls the style toward restraint: two storeys, a cantilevered balcony, a simpler interior with painted wood as often as stained, and a kitchen that can take the flat-panel inset door and a lighter hand with the iron. Sonoma’s houses lean this way, and so do the more refined Saratoga and Los Gatos houses; East Sacramento’s Spanish houses are more often the stucco-and-tile cottage that can carry the full hacienda vocabulary. Knowing which of the three the house actually is decides how much of the list above it should get.