Gordon Kaufmann and Spanish Revival

The Spanish Revival style is evident at the La Quinta Spa building. Photo by David Lansing.

I mentioned that La Quinta was designed in the ‘20s by an unknown architect from Pasadena named Gordon Kaufmann. Actually, Kaufmann was relatively unknown when he was hired by Walter H. Morgan to design the resort, but he later went on to fame designing such California icons as the Los Angeles Times building, the Hollywood Palladium, and the infamous Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills where Ned Doheny, the son of Edward Doheny, the oil tycoon, died in his bedroom of a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunket (parts of the movie There Will Be Blood, with Daniel Day-Lewis, were not only based on the Doheny family drama but the finale, where the Daniel Day-Lewis character bludgeons the ersatz preacher, Eli Sunday, to death with a bowling pin was shot in the basement bowling alley of Greystone Mansion).

Anyway, Kaufmann designed the cottages and offices of La Quinta Hotel (as it was called then) in Spanish Revival, though I don’t know that the style was actually called that back then. According to an architectural guide I have, Spanish Revival “refers to the architectural style that was popular from about 1915 to about 1940” and caught hold after the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. It also says that the growth of California and the film industry during the 1920s and 1930s facilitated the dissemination of this style.

“Spanish Revival,” it goes on, “is an extremely eclectic style. Many Mediterranean touches are combined to create an exotic, but harmonious appearance. Tile roofs and stucco exteriors are characteristic with half rounded doors and windows. Elaborate tilework, applied relief ornamentation, and wrought iron grillwork is used to create frames around doorways and windows, and is used widely as decorative accents throughout the house. Front entrances were often highly ornamented and many were balanced by a commanding triple-arched focal window.”

Well, that just about sums up the architectural style of La Quinta. It may, indeed, be a little eclectic looking but I find that, as I walk around, the buildings around the resort, from my little casita to the spa, are all quite pleasing to the eye—and charming. By the way, Kaufmann died in 1949 and while his obituary in the Los Angeles Times goes on and on about his design of an aircraft plant and the grandstand at Santa Anita Park, it makes no mention of one of his earliest and most indelible designs, La Quinta. Pity, that.