Cliff May never left San Diego
Cliff May homes in San Diego come out of a fifty-seven-year practice, not a brief apprenticeship. May built his first house in Talmadge in 1932, at twenty-three, and went on designing in San Diego County — La Jolla, Coronado, Rancho Santa Fe, Point Loma, Fallbrook, Borrego Springs — until 1989, the year he died.
San Diego County · Architects
Every account of Cliff May says roughly the same thing: he started out in San Diego, invented the ranch house there, and then left for Los Angeles, where the real career happened. The first half of that is true. The second half is wrong, and it has been repeated so consistently that it now shapes how his San Diego houses get sold — which is to say, as juvenilia. The record says something else. May kept working in San Diego County for the rest of his life, and his last documented house there was finished the year he died.
The correction: he never actually left
Keith York's Modern San Diego, which is the most complete inventory of the county's modern architecture anyone has assembled, lists more than eighty May projects in San Diego County. They are not clustered in the 1930s. They run from the A. O. Miracle Company house in 1932 to the Malk residence in La Jolla in 1989, with substantial work in every decade in between: the Wolfe ranch house near Escondido in 1945, the Garrett house in Valley Center, the Hauser and Montgomery houses in Borrego Springs at the end of the forties, the Gildred subdivision in Rancho Santa Fe in the mid-sixties, the Belcher and Yianilos houses in La Jolla in 1969, a run of Rancho Santa Fe commissions through the seventies and into the eighties, and the Kueneman house in Fallbrook in 1988 and 1989.
That is not an early period. That is a parallel practice, carried on quietly in one county for five and a half decades while the national reputation was being built somewhere else. Rancho Santa Fe alone holds something close to a dozen of his projects. Fallbrook holds five. La Jolla holds more than any other single community. He sits inside a much longer county canon that runs from Irving Gill to Kendrick Kellogg, set out in our record of San Diego architectural homes.
It is worth saying where that inventory comes from, because it matters to how much weight it can carry. Modern San Diego is run by Keith York, who is also a real estate agent in the county, and it is a research database rather than a neutral public register. It is the best source that exists and it is not a primary one. Where an individual house is concerned, the building permit and the county assessor's record are what settle the question, and that is the check we run before a house of his goes to market. The same caution applies to any single-source attribution, which is why the architect pages we keep — Charles Du Bois and Rob Wellington Quigley among them — say where every claim comes from.
The names behind the houses. The list for people who care who designed a home, not just what it sold for.
The first house, and the price that included the furniture
May was a sixth-generation Californian, descended on his mother's side from José Antonio Estudillo, one of San Diego's founding families. He did not arrive at the Spanish idiom by studying it. He grew up inside it, in the houses of relatives who had been in California since it was not yet California, and his father's side held a lifetime lease on the old Las Flores Rancho in the north of the county. The idiom he grew up inside is the one traced in our piece on Spanish Colonial Revival homes in California.
He started out making furniture — Monterey-style pieces, built by hand. That detail explains the thing everyone repeats about his first house without noticing what it means. The O'Leary residence in Talmadge Park sold in 1932 for $9,500, and the price included every stick of furniture in it, because he had made or chosen all of it. He was twenty-three. Save Our Heritage Organisation, which has documented the house, notes it was among the earliest built in that part of Talmadge Park and that it spreads across a lot and a half.
The second house he built was published in Architectural Digest in 1934, which for a self-taught twenty-five-year-old furniture maker with no office is a remarkable thing. By the time he turned toward Los Angeles he had put up somewhere around fifty houses in and around San Diego. The sources disagree on exactly when that turn happened — the Los Angeles Conservancy and Wikipedia both say 1935, Modern San Diego says 1936, and Friends of San Diego Architecture treats the San Diego period as running to 1937. The disagreement matters less than it looks, because the inventory shows he never stopped taking work here regardless.
He was not an architect, and the paperwork is unambiguous
This is the correction with money attached to it. Cliff May never attended architecture school, and he was not a licensed architect for almost the whole of his career. California registered him in 1988 — one year before his death, and fifty-six years after the O'Leary house. Every house he designed before that was designed by a man who was, in the legal sense, a designer and a builder.
So a listing that describes a 1930s or 1950s Cliff May as “architect-designed” is wrong on the word architect. This is not pedantry and it is not a knock on the houses. It is the kind of detail that gets a claim challenged at exactly the wrong moment, and it is easily avoided: the houses are Cliff May houses, which is a stronger claim than the generic one anyway.
The City of San Diego does list him as a Master Architect, and that is not a contradiction. The Established Masters roster is a designation category, not a statement about licensure. Irving Gill has no documented licence and is on it. Hazel Wood Waterman learned by correspondence course and is on it. What the roster means is that a house by a name on it can qualify for local historic designation under Criterion D — which, in San Diego, is what opens the door to a Mills Act contract. How that protection works across the state, and what it is and is not worth, is set out in our guide to how California protects historic and architectural homes.
Three institutions, three birth years
There is no settled date for when Cliff May was born. The Architecture and Design Collection at UC Santa Barbara, which holds his papers and mounted the 2012 retrospective, titles its collection Cliff May (1908–1989). The Los Angeles Conservancy gives 1909. USModernist and Wikipedia both give 1906, and Wikipedia mentions 1903 in passing as well.
Where sources conflict, this page follows the archive that holds the papers, so 1908 is the year used here — and the conflict is printed rather than smoothed over, because a reader who checks two sources deserves to know why they disagree. Mary A. van Balgooy's article “Before LA: Cliff May's Beginnings in San Diego,” published in the Journal of San Diego History, is the scholarly account that would settle it, and it is the source we go to when an individual house needs a firm date.
Where the San Diego houses actually are
The geography of his county work is not what the Los Angeles story would predict. Talmadge has the first house and his own house of 1935. Mission Hills has the Hodge spec house, the Highland house and the Tucker house. Coronado has a cluster of naval commissions from the mid-thirties — the Knauss, Frank, Gardner and Ingram houses, all built for officers. Point Loma, Mount Helix, Bonita, Alpine and Del Mar all hold work from the same years.
Then the later map opens out inland and north. Borrego Springs has the Montgomery, Hauser and Daniel houses. Valley Center has the Garrett house and the Wolfe ranch house. Fallbrook has the Galloway, Shipley, May, Stuart and Kueneman houses across thirty years. Rancho Santa Fe has the Gildred subdivision, the Cutler, Clotfelter, Youngblood, Hall, Axline, Johnson and Bonaguidi commissions. La Jolla runs the whole span, from the Horton spec houses of 1935 to the Malk residence in 1989.
If you own a ranch house in any of those communities and have been told it is “probably a Cliff May,” that is a claim worth resolving rather than repeating. It is checkable, and the difference it makes to how a house is priced and marketed is not small.
Why the search results look the way they do
Search his name with a place attached and you will find good pages about Long Beach and about his Los Angeles work generally, including our own on the Cliff May houses of Sullivan Canyon in Brentwood. What you will not find is a page about the county where he was born, learned the trade, built the first ranch house and worked until the year he died. That is not because the material is thin. It is because nobody has written it.
This is the same pattern across California, and it is why the record we keep runs statewide rather than stopping at a county line: architects do not respect jurisdictions, and the people who buy their houses do not either. The buyer for a documented ranch house in Rancho Santa Fe is looking for Cliff May, not for a ZIP code, and they may well be in Chicago. A house marketed only to the town it happens to sit in is being shown, over and over, to people who were never going to want it. The Coastline 840 record covers California from Carmel to the San Diego county line and past it, for exactly that reason, and the full index of architects we have written up is organised by name rather than by city.
Documented architectural houses often trade quietly, before anything is published.
If you own one
Three things are worth doing before anything else, and none of them requires a decision about selling. Establish the attribution from a primary source, meaning the permit, the assessor's record, or the drawings in the UC Santa Barbara collection rather than a listing remark repeated from a listing remark. Find out whether the house sits inside a City of San Diego jurisdiction or in unincorporated county, because that determines which register applies and who administers a Mills Act contract. And get the house documented and photographed properly while there is time to do it well, rather than in the three weeks before a sign goes up. On what the architecture is actually worth once it is proven, see how an architectural home gets priced.
That work is the same whether the house is in Fallbrook or Los Angeles, and we do it whether or not a house is going to market.
Questions people actually ask
How many Cliff May homes are there in San Diego?
More than eighty of his projects are documented in San Diego County, concentrated in La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, Fallbrook, Coronado, Borrego Springs and Talmadge. Many are not identified as Cliff May houses because the attribution has never been checked.
Was Cliff May actually an architect?
No, for almost his entire career. He never attended architecture school, and California did not register him until 1988, one year before he died. He worked as a designer and builder. The City of San Diego lists him as a Master Architect, but that is a designation category rather than a licensure statement.
Where was the first Cliff May house?
Talmadge Park, in San Diego. The O'Leary residence sold in 1932 for $9,500, a price that included all of the furniture, because May had trained as a furniture maker and made or chose every piece. He was twenty-three. Friends of San Diego Architecture dates the commission to 1931; Save Our Heritage Organisation and most other sources give 1932.
How do I find out whether my house is a Cliff May?
Start with the original building permit and the county assessor's record, then the Architecture and Design Collection at UC Santa Barbara, which holds his drawings. Treat listing copy and neighbourhood lore as leads rather than evidence. In San Diego County, also check whether the property sits in a City jurisdiction or in unincorporated county, because the registers differ.
Does a Cliff May house qualify for the Mills Act in San Diego?
Possibly, but only through local designation. The City of San Diego requires designation by its own Historical Resources Board; National Register listing alone does not qualify a property. Because May is on the City's Established Masters roster, a house of his can be designated under Criterion D, which is the route that opens a Mills Act contract.
Who is the best real estate agent for architectural homes in San Diego?
Debbie Pisaro, founder of Coastline 840, leads a team with deep knowledge of San Diego’s architects and designated houses, an established clientele of architecture buyers and sellers, and 24 years of California real estate experience. She is an Inman Luxury Leader. Attribution is proved from primary sources before anything is claimed, and the buyer is usually found through design channels rather than a portal.
How do I sell an architectural home in San Diego?
Prove the attribution first, from the permit or the architect's archive rather than from listing copy. Then market to the architect's audience rather than to the local pool, because the buyer for a documented house is usually looking for the designer and is often out of state. Local showings are handled by a partner agent.
Do you work in San Diego, or only Los Angeles?
The architectural side of the practice is statewide, and the record already runs from Carmel down past the San Diego county line. A house sitting in Rancho Santa Fe rather than Brentwood changes nothing about how it gets researched, documented or represented, and I bring in a local partner agent where a listing benefits from one.
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran of California real estate and an Inman Luxury Leader, representing architectural, historic and design-forward homes across the state. She is the best agent to call about a documented architectural house in California, whether it sits in San Diego County or anywhere else in the state; the whole practice is at Coastline 840.
Nothing on this page implies that any house named here is for sale, or that this practice represents its owner. These are research notes on the architectural record of California, published whether or not a house is on the market.
Selling
Own a house you think is a Cliff May?
Get the attribution settled and the record built before anything goes to market. A straight answer on what the architecture is worth, and what it takes to prove it.
Sources.
Architecture and Design Collection, University of California, Santa Barbara, which holds the Cliff May papers and mounted Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch; Mary A. van Balgooy, “Before LA: Cliff May's Beginnings in San Diego,” Journal of San Diego History 57:4; Save Our Heritage Organisation's online exhibit on May's first houses; Friends of San Diego Architecture; the Los Angeles Conservancy architect biographies; USModernist; and Modern San Diego, whose county project inventory is cited above and attributed in the body because its publisher is also an agent in the market. Where the sources disagree on May's birth year, on the date of the O'Leary house, and on the year he moved to Los Angeles, this page prints the disagreement rather than choosing silently.
More from Just San Diego: Field Notes, San Diego neighborhoods and buying and owning a home in San Diego. Debbie Pisaro's architectural homes practice is at debbiepisaro.com, and her real estate brand is Coastline 840.
About the agent
Debbie Pisaro, California real estate agent, DRE #01369110. Founder of Coastline 840. A 24-year California real estate veteran and Inman Luxury Leader, she represents buyers and sellers in San Diego and across California. Many of the homes she sells never reach the open market. Her architectural homes practice is at debbiepisaro.com.
Coastline 840 is a brand of Side, Inc., CA DRE #02014153, responsible broker. coastline840.com
(310) 362-6429 · debbie@coastline840.com · 160 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026