Spanish Colonial Style: Santa Barbara and the Architecture of James Osborne Craig and Mary McLaughlin Craig by Pamela Skewes-Cox

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In all their chaste simplicity and luminous grace, Mary Craig homes have, for most of my life, sheltered an unknowing soul.

My own.

For until recently, I had never known the name Mary Craig. I now thank her for her vision and the atmosphere of her creations, the airs surrounding the spaces wherein her dreams settled. Spaces resonant with the qualities of the creations themselves.

Exterior spaces are reflections of inner worlds. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, that self-proclaimed philosopher of adjectives, recognizes the truth that the hollows within our homes form our first and most intimate nests. We hallow these hollows because of the qualities of our lives they make possible.

Often Mary Craig homes are embosked within glades of oaks. Oaks abide. Nested within the hollow of a three-hundred-year-ancient oak, forest-bathing within its eternal current of shoreless ultra-low-freuency electromagnetic waves, we discover that oaks are prayers, their dark heartwood leafing outward into light as surely as human hearts flower inward, following the grain of an even fuller illumination.

Bachelard says our homes shelter daydreaming. Our homes protect the dreamer. Our homes allow us to dream in peace. The nooks and crannies of our homes become our centers of simplicity in dwelling, wherein we may more easily luxuriate within the primitiveness of refuge and bathe within the shoreless purity of Being.

The first Mary Craig design to nourish my inner life was a beach house. When I was a kid, any truly respectable stretch of coast in Santa Barbara, any reputable expanse of sand with a good name and a suitably high opinion of itself began to attract its own elite coterie of surf bums. Suddenly the waters off points such as Miramar, reefs such as Hammond’s, coves such as Campus, and river mouths such as Rincon, found themselves a-bob with blond-haired boys astride surfboards, awaiting waves. At one secluded beach, where vast lawns and orchards aflutter with butterflies basked beside the sea, where the waves swelled and peeled translucently over the summer sandbars, a metaphysically inclined cult of surf bums emerged. The core members of our tribe were, besides myself: Whooper, The Goose, Modoc, Chaddy, The Hog, The Ace, Stein, and The Ravin’ Baby Ese Animal Gargantua Cabron. We were brought together by a couple of simple facts. First, my big brother, The Ace, owned a woodie that ran well enough to get us all to the beach. But what was more important was the fact that as we sat eating lunch at La Colina Junior High, we shared one deep secret—isolated by steep cliffs, miles of sand, and a guarded gate that opened only to members lay one of the most lyrical beach-breaks on the entire coast—Hope Ranch Beach.

On most days the surf was flat: as contour-free as the chests of each year’s new covey of nymphs as they lay thin and thoroughbred atop their beach towels on a summer’s morn at Hope Ranch Beach, absorbed in their solar devotions, transistors tinkling with Percy Faith’s “There’s a Summer Place,” lifeguard slouched atop his white wooden tower, four or five long surfboards top-down on the wet sand, their owners stretched out on the warm dunes, lulled by the lapping of little wavelets, swarms of flies buzzing lazily above heaps of beached seaweed, seagulls screeching and pecking at the remains of a watermelon rind, Campus Point hazy off to the north, Woff Woff Point dimly to the south, and, shining silver in the haze—indolent, indifferent, and self-contained—the great Pacific, the majestic Pacific, the wide-stretching, everflowing, endlessly rolling Pacific.

The surf was not always flat. On mornings of wind swells, the haze usually loafing over the summer shoreline would ghost away, the sky would blue, and above the roaring surf, the warm air would tingle with salt spray. The covey of nymphs would come to life, plunging through the waves while struggling to keep bikinis in place; the lifeguard would awaken; and a few of us surfers would be out in the waves, spread along a mile or so of sun-drenched beach. From time to time one of us would take off on a surging swell of blue water, drop to the bottom, lean into a turn, and then squat on the board as a bellowing, hollow vortex of Pacific curled over.

A day later the beach would be dead again, the nymphs, surfers, lifeguard, and kelp flies somnolent, and the Pacific—now once again slumbering behind ever-shifting veils of mist—would resume its long silvery daydream.

On flat days, to dispel boredom, we would meander up the beach to what we did not know was a Mary Craig beach house. We would hang out there for a while, discoursing on waves, and then climb up a steep set of stairs that led to the top of a high cliff. There awaited the Bryce estate. Whenever Mrs. Bryce would see us on her property, she was always hospitable. She liked us.

I was fascinated with her little playhouse. It was nestled under some pines overlooking the dreamily enchanting waves, their eternal motion ceaselessly sounding their soft thunder.

Inside the little playhouse awaited one of Mrs. Bryce's collections of books. Imagine my delight when I discovered one of her favorites was also one of mine: Pearl Lagoon, written by Charles Nordhoff. After revisiting a chaper or so, I would drift outside and recline on a soft bed of pine needles, yielding all thought to the soft murmurations of the waves, far below, lullabying me to sleep as I imagined a little Japanese teahouse on a nearby estate, the words of a poem floating through my drowsiness:

In my ten-foot bamboo hut this spring
I have nothing
I have everything

The second Mary Craig retreat I fell into unknowingly was also surf related, though under harsher conditions, for it sheltered us during large, cold, powerful winter surf. This beach house still sits on Devereux Beach, near the point. Though it was in a state of disrepair, after a long, freezing surf session, it nevertheless provided much-needed shelter from the sun and rain and cold.
And it was a place where surfers could build a fire to gather around and shoot the bull.

The third Mary Craig abode was one I felt extremely thankful to have fallen into. I remained there for many years, aside a creek in Montecito. The oldtimers in the neighborhood would inform me that the creek had formerly flowed through the hollow wherein the building had been erected, beside the present meandering curve of creek, the hollow meandered its ancient way down the hill, tellingly lined on either side with old-growth, water-loving sycamores: creeks loyal sentinals.

The space was holy. Its former occupant, just before myself, on her way to nunhood. When we would sit, quietly, her face would begin to glow, her breathing still. I well understood her calling. She was my partner of eight years. We'd met on a meditation retreat during which I was considering monkhood. We both clipped our hair, "Francis" and "Claire". She, the wise one, joined a clan of contemplative women. They glow from head to toe.



I ended up embosked, thankfully, but unknowingly, within the Mary Craig "ten-foot bamboo hut" wherein she'd dwelled.


~

A mossy doorway opens to the hills
where summer sun will linger for a spell
where through the bedroom window steals the dawn
beside a whispering stream, an oak robed dell

Beneath those oaks embosked in pollened tones,
with moon white lips she'd chant a sullen rune,
leaf shadows aflutter a dappled trance . . .
before she'd curl into her dark cocoon

Beside our table, blessed with acorn bread
we'd kneel, our, tongues of pink, curled 'round sweet figs,
sage-curried pancake, tea and apricot:
suggestive of sweet pleasures we had shared
suggestive of sweet pleasures we'd known not

There o'er the tub curls Hokusai's towering wave,
in candleglow, Neruda's lines afloat
erode our forms of daylight into night,
kiss our unknowing into sweet delight

Within her dreams, a tiny sesame seed cottage
coyotes howl beneath a sesame seed moon,
entrancement holds our breaths a willing hostage
within the silence of the world's honeyed womb.

The earth is seed, our hearts but sesame seed stars,
each aswim in sable sesame seed night
each dissolving into rosey forms
of rosey rounded psalms of sesame seed light.


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