ADMIRABLE ADOBES
Annual fundraising tour on March 26 provides rare looks at historically significant mud-brick homes in Escondido and Poway
Peter and Raydene St. Clair had no intention of moving from their modern Spanish-style Mission Hills home. In early 2020, they were helping their daughter and son-in-law, who were expecting their first child, find a house with enough land to add an additional unit where they could stay while helping care for their new grandchild.
Instead, they found a new home for themselves that they couldn’t resist — a home they’ll share with participants in the North San Diego County Adobe Home Tour on March 26, benefiting the Escondido History Center.
Among the houses their Realtor showed the St. Clairs was a Jack Weirdesigned Escondido hacienda ranchstyle adobe, known as the R.H. Johnson adobe, centered around a courtyard and sited as a family compound on about
4 acres. The home’s original plans permitted subdividing the land into three lots, perfect for their daughter’s family to construct an additional residence, which they completed in January.
The 1969 house, they learned, was built for Roy and Nancy Johnson from sun-dried mud blocks crafted locally in the long-closed Southwest Adobe brick plant, operated by Weir Brothers project
manager Mike Goodbody and located near Escondido’s present-day Kit Carson Park. In contrast to traditional adobe blocks, the more modern versions were stabilized with an asphalt emulsion, rendering them both stronger and more waterproof.
“We fell in love with the adobe. There’s something so calming and peaceful that’s made from the earth,” Raydene explained. “There’s a sense of solidity.”
“There’s a feeling you’re living within the earth,” Peter added.
Among the features they most appreciated was Weir’s focus on locating his designs to capture the site’s best natural views, typical of both Jack and his brother Larry Weir’s work. From the living room’s main arched picture window, there’s an expansive view to the southwest over the San Pasqual Valley. The rear terrace offers northeast views toward the mountains and Cuyamaca Peak.
Even though they loved the house, before buying it, they thoroughly researched adobes, performing their due diligence exploring adobe construction, maintenance quirks and potential own
ership pitfalls. They learned that with their thick driedmud brick walls, usually 16 to 18 inches wide, the structures are extremely sturdy as well as energy efficient, normally cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Extended eaves overhanging the roof provide additional cooling shade while protecting the exterior adobe and directing water away from the foundation.
One concern they had was the growing dearth of contractors and crafts people knowledgeable about and experienced in constructing and maintaining adobes. In the early 1980s, changes to the California building code relating to seismic risk and thermal energy regulatory restrictions effectively curtailed new adobe construction in the state.
But Peter had an ace in the hole: his brother-in-law, Scott Irving, an architect and builder in Santa Fe, N.M., where adobes are still built, had worked on a number of historic and contemporary adobes and was extremely helpful in sharing advice and practical tips on the dos and don’ts of caring for adobes. Unfortunately, because of COVID, he had to offer his advice remotely,
“Anyone who’s ever bought an adobe doesn’t really know what they’re getting into,” Peter explained. “You don’t want to do much to disturb the adobe (bricks). It’s a natural building material.”
The asymmetrical 3,600square foot Johnson house is designed as a modified U-shape with three distinct sections and has four bedrooms and 21⁄2 bathrooms. Noteworthy is the distance between the master suite at the end of one arm of the U and the three bedrooms originally designed for the three Johnson children at the end of the other arm of the U.
Like most Weir Brothers homes, it features numerous arches, although Jack used fewer arches than the more irregular, rounded designs of Larry.
Guests enter the home through a foyer, which branches off to the left to the longer wing containing the dining room, kitchen, family room (with its original kiva fireplace) and three children’s or guest bedrooms. Turning to the right, guests can go immediately right again to the sunken living room with its dramatic view over the valley or continue via a corridor to the master suite. Walking directly across the foyer leads to French doors opening onto the Saltillo-tiled terrace, wide lawn and fountain.
While the house had gone through about eight or nine owners and was in generally good condition, it needed modernizing, Peter explained. The St. Clairs wanted to make a number of upgrades, including updating the electrical panels, essential for installing solar power and a heat pump, which would replace the original concrete-covered electric baseboard heating system.
Other desired changes included bringing in natural gas lines, gutting and remodeling the kitchen, moving a wet bar from the laundry room to the family room and expanding their kitchen storage and master bedroom closets. Structurally, they sought to remove the dining room pony wall (a half-wall topped with a wrought-iron grill that they later repurposed as garden gates) and replace a picture window with French doors.
Outside, the couple wanted to expand the tiled terrace beyond the breezeway and relocate the original fountain from the lawn’s center to its outer edge, to create a playground for their grandchildren.
“We had to know before we closed escrow that we could do what we wanted to do in the house,” Peter explained.
The St. Clairs’ Realtors — one of their grandfathers had been an architect with Weir Brothers — hooked them up with a general contractor experienced with adobes, Robert Coleman of Escondido-based R. Coleman Construction, who in turn brought in a team of subcontractors to examine the house. Fortunately, their team agreed they could undertake the proposed work without damaging the adobe’s structural integrity.
With the contractors’ go-ahead, they completed the adobe’s purchase in July 2020 and set up a temporary kitchen while their new one was constructed.
Adobe homebuilder/ buyers, as the St. Clairs learned from fellow adobe owners and the San Diego Adobe Heritage Association’s community resources page at adobehometour.com, tended to be multigenerational adobe homeowners. Escondido and the surrounding region was a center of adobe homebuilding in the post-World War II years, connected to leading adobe builder Weir Brothers Construction’s presence in the community.
Henry B. Johnson, a prominent Escondido citrus farmer and adobe owner, helped his pharmacist son Roy and his wife, Nancy, first purchase the local Rexall drug store in the late 1950s and, about 1968, buy 4 acres of farm land overlooking San Pasqual Valley to build their dream home to accommodate their family of three sons.
To design and construct their home, the Johnsons chose Jack Weir of Weir Brothers, whose more modernist approach favored straight lines and right angles, rather than the curvilinear lines and often fanciful rounded forms favored by his brother Larry, who left the family business to start his own company in 1964, Raylene explained.
Both Weirs were “green” builders before the concept was popular, using recycled materials wherever possible to complement their natural dirt blocks. Throughout the Johnson home, Weir installed rafters and other supports from heavy timbers reclaimed from the Oceanside Pier and county bridges that were then under reconstruction. Their front door previously served as the outer door to Del Mar’s Stratford Inn bar prior to its 1967 demolition and sale as salvage.
The interior walls when built were the natural light brown of adobe. A later owner whitewashed the walls, giving them their current brighter white color, which subsequent owners retained.
Nancy Johnson was especially partial to colorful Mexican ornamental tile and used it liberally throughout the house. Most survives. In redoing the master bathroom and replacing the tub with a tiled shower, Raylene also selected festive Mexican tile, in bright hues of yellow and blue.
In addition to many arches, the house is known for its “nichos,” small bookshelves housed in adobe niches, and wrought-iron ornamentation, including a wrought-iron-adorned round window in the breezeway.
Like the Johnsons before them, whose home and lifestyle their son Mike documented for the Adobe Heritage Association, the St. Clairs favor an outdoor lifestyle.
“Entertaining was geared to the outdoors in the hacienda/rancho lifestyle,” Raydene explained. “We’re outside most of the time.”
Both St. Clairs have taken with gusto to a less urban lifestyle, enjoying the outdoors and gardening while planting trees, native plants and succulents around their property, embracing the hacienda heritage of their adobe.