Overlooked No More: Lilian Rice, Architect Who Lifted a Style in California

In one of America’s wealthiest enclaves, an area of sprawling mansions near San Diego that sell for upward of $10 million, bragging rights still go to those who live in homes designed nearly a century ago by architect Lilian J. Rice.

Rice was in her early 30s when she planned the civic center of Rancho Santa Fe, California, 20 miles northeast of the city, and designed many of the homes tucked into the surrounding rolling hills and eucalyptus groves.

While Rancho Santa Fe is a small community — its population hovers around 3,000 — Rice’s impact on architecture in California is great. In less than 20 years of professional work, she designed more than 100 homes in San Diego County and planted Spanish Colonial Revival as a state architectural style.

She insisted on three things in her designs: restraint in decoration, high-quality craftsmanship and harmony between a home and its site.

“She would not grade the land; if there was a boulder, she worked around it,” Diane Y. Welch, author of “The Life and Times of Lilian J. Rice Master Architect” (2015), said in a telephone interview. “Had she lived, she would have been on the forefront of modernism.”

Rice made clear her design philosophy in a 1928 article in an architectural journal.

“With the thought early implanted in my mind that true beauty lies in simplicity rather than ornateness, I found real joy at Rancho Santa Fe,” she wrote. “Every environment there calls for simplicity and beauty — the gorgeous natural landscapes, the gently broken topography, the nearby mountains. No one with a sense of fitness, it seems to me, could violate these natural factors by creating anything that lacked simplicity in line and form and color.”

Eleven of her buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lilian Jeannette Rice was born on June 12, 1889, to Julius Augusta Rice and Laura (Steele) Rice in National City, California, south of San Diego. Her father was an educator, and her mother was an artist.

In 1910, Rice became one of the first women to graduate from the architecture program at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, she encountered the work of Bernard Maybeck, who designed the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, as well as the Hillside Club, which was part of a movement to build homes that respected the existing landscape.

Rice was only the 10th woman in the state to receive a license to practice, according to the California State Board of Architectural Examiners. Julia Morgan, who designed Hearst Castle in San Simeon, was the first.

In 1922, Rice was working at the firm of the San Diego architects Richard Requa and Herbert Jackson when they were commissioned to create a development plan for more than 8,000 acres that once belonged to the Santa Fe Railway Co. Requa called on Rice to take over the job, and she was given complete freedom to supervise a large team of workers at the site, which became Rancho Santa Fe.

“She was superior,” Vonn Marie May, a California-based historian, said in a telephone interview. “Everyone thinks he gave this young girl a chance, when in fact she just blew everyone out of the water.”

A Los Angeles Times article said she was “ahead of her time,” adding that “she did a masterful job laying out the village of Rancho Santa Fe.”

Even today a homeowners association there, when making rulings on home design, considers the question: “What would Lilian do?”

But Rice, who by all accounts appeared to be bright, cheerful and easy to work with, was also modest about her achievements, May said.

“She was quiet, almost egoless,” she said. “She never married, like Julia Morgan — they had too much to do.”

Rice lived and worked in the village she designed from its inception until she died of ovarian cancer on Dec. 22, 1938. She was 49. And while she did branch out — going “full-on English Tudor” in La Jolla, California, according to May, and designing an award-winning clubhouse for the women’s rowing club, of which she was a member and onetime president — her legacy is inextricably tied to “the Ranch,” as it is called by its residents. This year, Rice was included in Pioneering Women of American Architecture, a website featuring 50 women, born before 1940, who made important contributions to architecture. While Spanish Colonial Revival was not uncommon at the time, Rice was significant in making it a widespread style in California, said Mary McLeod, a professor of architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and an editor of the website project.

“She was designing and working as an independent architect and was so productive,” McLeod said in an interview. “I have wondered if California offered women more options, if there was more freedom there.”

Rice designed at least 60 homes in Rancho Santa Fe, according to Welch. And while many have been greatly remodeled since they were built, Rice’s name still carries weight. “People cherish and value a Lilian Rice home,” she said. “She was a quality nut.”

The community has always attracted the rich and the famous. In Rice’s era, Bing Crosby hired her to remodel a stable in his expanding horse-racing venture. Fifty years later, former President Richard M. Nixon could be found strolling the grounds of The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe, which, of course, Rice designed.