Monterey Colonial

Monterey Colonial in the SGV.

California revival style merging Spanish Colonial with New England Colonial elements, characterized by the signature full-width second-floor balcony. Particularly common in San Gabriel and Arcadia.

Origin: a single house in Monterey

The style traces directly to one building. Thomas Oliver Larkin, a Yankee merchant from Massachusetts and the first and only United States consul to California under Mexican rule, began construction on his Monterey residence in April 1835 and completed it in 1837. Larkin wanted a New England house. The local redwood industry could not supply enough framing lumber to build one. He compromised: a hand-hewn redwood timber frame supporting a second story, with walls filled in by adobe brick made on site, the whole structure capped with a low-pitched hipped roof of wood shingle and wrapped on three sides by a two-story veranda. The thinner adobe walls, made possible because the timber frame carried the second-story load rather than the brick, allowed for larger window openings than traditional Spanish Colonial adobe construction. The Larkin House at 464 Calle Principal is generally credited as California’s first two-story residence and as the building that originated the Monterey Colonial style. It was designated a California Historical Landmark in 1933 and a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

The revival period followed roughly a century later. Sources differ on the bracketing dates by about a decade. The most commonly cited range is 1925 through 1955, with peak production from the late 1920s through the late 1940s. In the San Gabriel Valley the concentration runs late 1920s through the war years and into the immediate postwar period. The revival examples were not literal reproductions of the Larkin House. They were a hybrid: the two-story massing and characteristic balcony came from Larkin, while the smooth stucco wall surface, low-pitched tile roof, and restrained classical detailing came from the same Mediterranean-influenced design vocabulary that drove Spanish Colonial Revival, which was peaking at the same moment. Architectural historians sometimes file Monterey Revival as a sub-style of Spanish Colonial Revival for this reason. In practice, the two are distinguishable by silhouette: the cantilevered second-story balcony under the main roof eave is the Monterey signature, and Spanish Colonial Revival does not require it.

How to recognize a Monterey Colonial

Several features run together. The massing is two-story and rectangular, often with a service wing forming an L or a U around a courtyard on larger estate examples. The roof is low-pitched, either side-gabled or hipped, clad in clay tile or wood shingle. The signature element is the second-story balcony that runs full-width or near-full-width across the principal elevation and sits under the same roof plane that covers the main house, so the eave overhangs the balcony rather than a separate balcony roof being added. The balcony is typically cantilevered out from the second-story floor framing, supported by simple turned or squared wood posts at the corners, with an open wood balustrade. Exposed wood beams or rafter tails are common at the eaves.

Walls are smooth stucco. Original applications are sand-float or steel-trowel finish, painted white or in a pale ochre or buff range, with restraint as the operative word. There is no heavy ornamental detail at the cornice line, no elaborate window surrounds, no decorative grilles other than at the entry. Windows are wood-framed double-hung, typically paired, often with simple paneled shutters at the first floor and unshuttered at the second floor. The entry door is paneled or board-and-batten in a simple surround. On San Marino estate examples you sometimes see a covered entry porch with classical columns reading toward Colonial Revival rather than toward Spanish Revival. The interior plan is usually a center-hall arrangement with formal living and dining rooms flanking the entry, principal bedrooms upstairs opening to the balcony, and a service wing extending to one side.

Where you find Monterey Colonials in the San Gabriel Valley

The style concentrates in the older estate blocks of the SGV’s premium architectural cities. San Marino has the highest density and the highest quality of named-architect examples. The neighborhoods immediately south and east of Lacy Park, including the Orlando Road corridor, Winston Avenue, and the streets between Huntington Drive and Roland Way, hold most of the documented architect-attributed examples. Pasadena carries Monterey Colonials in the Oak Knoll district and in Madison Heights at the prewar end of the era, with additional examples on the south side of Orange Grove and in the streets above California Boulevard. La Cañada Flintridge has examples on the older estate-scale lots dating to the 1930s. Arcadia carries the style on the larger lots between Foothill and Huntington in the prewar developments built before the Santa Anita area filled in with ranch and traditional postwar product.

Outside these four cities the style appears intermittently. South Pasadena has a handful of examples on the larger lots in the Marengo and Garfield Heights areas. Sierra Madre and Monrovia have occasional examples but they are not concentrated. The newer postwar SGV communities, including most of West Covina, Hacienda Heights, and the Diamond Bar area, were largely built after Monterey Colonial had been displaced by ranch and traditional production styles and do not carry the style in numbers.

The architects who shaped Monterey Colonial in the SGV

The canonical SGV practitioner is Roland Eli Coate Sr. (1890 to 1958). Coate was born in Richmond, Indiana, completed his architecture degree at Cornell in 1914, served as a 1st Lieutenant with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, and moved to Los Angeles in 1919, where he joined Reginald Johnson and Gordon Kaufmann in the firm Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate. The firm dissolved in 1925 and Coate opened his own office. Architectural historians credit him with designing the first Monterey Colonial Revival home in Southern California, and Monterey Revival is the style for which he is best known across a career that ran until his death in 1958. Coate’s residential practice concentrated in Pasadena, San Marino, and Hancock Park. His client list included Jack Warner, David O. Selznick, Myrna Loy, Frank Capra, Robert Taylor, and Barbara Stanwyck. One well-documented San Marino example is the 1929 C.G. Fitzgerald residence at 708 Winston Avenue, an unusual single-story Monterey Colonial Revival on a flat 29,500-square-foot lot, designated a local historical landmark by the City of San Marino. Coate’s papers are held at the UCSB Architecture and Design Collection.

Myron Hubbard Hunt (1868 to 1952) is the other major SGV name attached to Monterey Period Revival, though it was not his primary style. Hunt was MIT-trained, elected a Fellow of the AIA in 1908, and across a career that produced more than 500 projects he designed the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens main building, the Rose Bowl, the Ambassador Hotel, and a long list of San Marino and Pasadena residential commissions in Mediterranean Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and Beaux-Arts modes. One documented Monterey Period Revival commission is the 1930 residence at 2135 Orlando Road in San Marino, a six-bedroom, roughly 5,200-square-foot home on a 26,000-square-foot lot in the estate area near the Huntington. The house last traded in 2020 at $6,030,000. Hunt is buried in San Gabriel Cemetery.

Other named architects of the era practiced occasionally in Monterey or Monterey-influenced modes in the SGV, often with the style overlapping Spanish Colonial Revival on the same building. Documentation depth for specific commissions varies. Where a home is being marketed with an architect attribution that drives a price premium, the listing should be supported by an architectural inventory citation, a building permit record, or a citation in one of the standing scholarly inventories at UCSB, the Huntington, or the Pasadena Heritage archive.

What Monterey Colonial commands in the 2026 market

Monterey Colonial sits in the middle tier of the SGV’s architecturally attributed pricing structure. Intact examples with architect attribution and original character trade well, but the style does not command the premium that intact Spanish Colonial Revival or Wallace Neff Mediterranean Revival examples command at the equivalent estate scale. The reasons are partly stylistic and partly market-driven. Monterey Colonial reads as more restrained than its Spanish Revival contemporaries, which can be either an asset or a liability depending on the buyer pool. The pool of buyers actively seeking Monterey Colonial specifically is smaller than the pool seeking Spanish Colonial Revival, even in San Marino where the inventory is densest. Architect attribution matters more for Monterey Colonial than for many other revival styles, because the style’s restraint can read as plain in undistinguished examples, whereas a Coate or a Hunt attribution provides the historical and design pedigree that drives premium pricing.

The condition premium runs steep. An intact Monterey Colonial with original balcony framing, original wood windows, an unmodified main mass, and a competent recent mechanical update will trade at a meaningful premium over a contemporaneous example that has been stripped of original character by previous remodels. Period-correct restoration work is recognized in the market. Period-inappropriate work, especially window replacement with aluminum or vinyl on the principal elevations and the loss of original balcony detail, is recognized as well and discounts the price.

What I look at when I walk through a Monterey Colonial

I built houses for twenty years before I came back to selling them, including five years as a developer-builder in Colorado where my specialty was finish carpentry. When I walk a Monterey Colonial I am looking at the construction more than the finishes.

The balcony is the first stop. The cantilevered second-story balcony is the defining feature, and it is also the single most expensive thing on the house to repair if it has gone wrong. I look at how the second-story floor framing extends out to support the balcony, whether the cantilever has any visible sag at the outer edge, whether the original rail and posts are in place or have been replaced with something thinner, and whether the underside of the balcony floor has water staining or efflorescence indicating leaks at the second-story exterior wall flashing. On the earliest revival examples from the late 1920s the balcony floor is typically tongue-and-groove fir laid over the cantilevered framing. Replacement work done badly will show in board widths that do not match, in modern fastener patterns, or in synthetic decking that violates the era.

Stucco is the next stop. Smooth-finish stucco from the 1920s and 1930s was applied over wood lath or expanded metal lath on wood framing, three coats, with lime in the mix. It fails in characteristic ways: hairline cracking at framing changes, delamination at framing offsets, and incompatible patching from later cement-rich repairs that creates accelerated cracking around the patch. I look at the south and west elevations first, because they take the weather, and I look at the wall-balcony junctions, because they are the most common leak source.

The roof gets attention next. Clay tile and wood shingle were the two original choices. Clay tile installed over wood sheathing with a single layer of asphalt-saturated felt as underlayment will eventually fail at the underlayment, which is the actual waterproofing layer. The tiles themselves are good for a century. The underlayment is good for thirty to fifty years. If the underlayment has not been replaced in the last thirty years on a 1930 house, replacement is on the near-term capital plan, and the cost is meaningful because the tiles have to come off and be reset, not just laid over.

Original wood double-hung windows from the era are typically Douglas fir sash with single-strength glazing and weight-and-pulley operation. They restore well. Replacement with new wood sash is appropriate. Replacement with vinyl or aluminum diminishes the architectural integrity and discounts the value, and it complicates any future application for historic designation or Mills Act tax abatement in cities that offer them.

Foundation and lateral systems are era-baseline. Houses built before 1940 in California typically have unreinforced concrete or low-strength concrete foundations with no continuous load path between the foundation and the framing above. Brace and bolt, which is the working term for retrofitting the framing-to-foundation connection and adding plywood shear at the cripple wall, applies to almost every Monterey Colonial in the SGV. On larger estate examples the engineered retrofit scope is bigger because the floor plans are more complex and the perimeter is longer. Plumbing and electrical for the era are galvanized supply piping, failing now if not already replaced, and either knob-and-tube or early conduit wiring, insurance-flagged at this point on most carriers. Baseline budget items on any prewar example.

How this style intersects with the buyer due diligence pillar

A Monterey Colonial purchase touches several sections of the architectural home buyer due diligence framework. Section 4, on era-appropriate condition assessment, applies directly to the items walked above. Section 5, on architect attribution and provenance documentation, applies when a listing is being marketed with a Coate, Hunt, or other named-architect attribution and a price premium attached to it. Section 7, on Mills Act and historic-designation eligibility, applies in San Marino, Pasadena, South Pasadena, and Sierra Madre, all of which administer Mills Act programs and all of which carry inventories that may include the house or class the house qualifies for under the local designation criteria.

Buyers who are screening Monterey Colonials in the SGV market should set expectations on three points before opening offers. First, period-correct condition is a meaningful capital line in the budget, particularly on the roof, the balcony, the original windows, and the lateral system. Second, architect attribution drives premium pricing and should be verified rather than taken from listing copy. Third, the buyer pool for the style is narrower than for Spanish Colonial Revival at the equivalent scale, which can work in a buyer’s favor on price but can also extend time on market when reselling.

Identifying Monterey Colonial.

• Two-story massing with a cantilevered second-floor balcony spanning the front
• Low-pitched gable roofs in red tile
• Whitewashed adobe or stucco walls
• Wood shutters and simple wrought-iron rail at the upper balcony

Notable Monterey Colonial Architects in the SGV.

• H. Roy Kelley — H. Roy Kelley was a Los Angeles-based residential architect with a documented Pasadena, San Marino, South Pasadena, and Rancho Santa Anita catalog from the mid-1930s through 1950. He took his architecture degree from Cornell University in 1915 and was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) in 1940. He specialized in Early California, Monterey Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, English Revival with Cotswold Cottage features, and one-story California ranch designs. The 2004 City of Pasadena Period Revival Architecture report names him among the architects who established the California ranch as a residential type, alongside Wallace Neff, Palmer Sabin, and Donald MacMurray. His papers are preserved at Cornell University (thirteen scrapbooks of designs, articles, and photographs of his residences from 1913 to 1965) and the University of California, Santa Barbara Architecture and Design Collection (6.5 linear feet, including annotated drafts of his memoir 50 Happy Years of Architecture).
• Roland E. Coate — California Monterey Colonial Revival was substantially advanced by Coate's residential practice in the 1920s and 1930s. His SGV inventory is concentrated in San Marino.
• Sylvanus Marston — Pasadena architect credited with creating the bungalow-court typology in 1909. His practice, later Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury and then Marston and Maybury, produced roughly a thousand projects across Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, Alhambra, and the wider SGV, spanning more style periods than any of his flagship contemporaries.